Through his research on how children come to understand the world that they live in collected by observing children in their natural environment, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was able to develop a theory on how children develop cognitively, a process he split into four distinct stages of cognitive development. In this essay I intend to outline the core concepts of Piaget’s theory on the cognitive development of children, then critique those concepts through the theories of subsequent psychologists to reach a conclusion as to whether Piaget’s stage theory does or does not account for children’s cognitive development.
Jean Piaget’s theory addresses the idea of cognitive development by creating, as a mental model of the world to make sense of …show more content…
Although the age at which these stages happened is less sure, Piaget (1952) believed that the stages of development were the same for children around the world regardless of culture or language, controlled by biological factors not social ones. Piaget’s four stages are as …show more content…
The best description of the world of a newborn is by William James (1890) who said that the world of the neonate is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion" governed entirely by proximal sense stimulation. Part of the sensori-motor stage is also the Kantian idea of object permanence which Piaget (reference?) showed with infants not realising their mother still existed when they couldn’t see her until about 9 months. This was in part supported by Bowed (1982) through his “multiple mothers” study in which he presented an infant with more then one mother using mirrors, before 5 months infants were unphased but after 5 months they were upset suggesting that their schema for mother had developed to include the premise that they were only supposed to have one mother.
The Pre-operational stage, usually from the age of two to seven, in which language and communication become more prominent, children become able to understand the classification of objects as well as focusing on one aspect of a task and problem solving more intuitively. By the end of the stage children can take the perspective of others and can understand the conservation of number (Smith et al,
Jean Piaget’s theory addresses the idea of cognitive development by creating, as a mental model of the world to make sense of …show more content…
Although the age at which these stages happened is less sure, Piaget (1952) believed that the stages of development were the same for children around the world regardless of culture or language, controlled by biological factors not social ones. Piaget’s four stages are as …show more content…
The best description of the world of a newborn is by William James (1890) who said that the world of the neonate is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion" governed entirely by proximal sense stimulation. Part of the sensori-motor stage is also the Kantian idea of object permanence which Piaget (reference?) showed with infants not realising their mother still existed when they couldn’t see her until about 9 months. This was in part supported by Bowed (1982) through his “multiple mothers” study in which he presented an infant with more then one mother using mirrors, before 5 months infants were unphased but after 5 months they were upset suggesting that their schema for mother had developed to include the premise that they were only supposed to have one mother.
The Pre-operational stage, usually from the age of two to seven, in which language and communication become more prominent, children become able to understand the classification of objects as well as focusing on one aspect of a task and problem solving more intuitively. By the end of the stage children can take the perspective of others and can understand the conservation of number (Smith et al,