The Theory of Jean Piaget
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget established the Cognitive development theory that illustrates how children and youth gradually develop the capability of thinking logically and scientifically. He believed that one’s childhood plays a significant role in a person’s growth. The theory illustrates the nature of knowledge transition from acquiring to usage. The long-term changes in thinking and memory processes are called cognitive development. During Piaget observation of children, he realized that there are distinct stages of cognition growth in a child from infancy to adolescence. Therefore, Piaget focused on two stages in his field of education and illustrated different stages of childhood growth.
The Assimilation and Accommodation Processes
During Piaget research, the assimilation process integrated external elements into life structures. Assimilation is the process of how human adapts to new information and fitting it into existing cognitive schemas. The assimilation of new and old ideas occurs when humanity is faced with new or unfamiliar information. Conversely, accommodation is the process of altering pre-existing schemas and replace them with new details. This happens when current knowledge does not function, and a change is required to deal with a new object or situation. Besides, accommodation is essential because it facilitates the interpretation of new ideologies and frameworks. Piaget believed that the human brain through evolution was programmed to bring equilibrium that influences structures by the internal and external operations. Piaget did not believe in coexistence of assimilation and accommodation without the dependency of each other. Piaget noted reality as a dynamic system of continuous change that involves alteration and state. He argued that human intelligence should have transformative and static feature of reality to be adaptive. Therefore, he proposed that figurative intelligence is accountable for the depiction of the static feature of reality while operative intelligence is responsible for dynamic and transformational manipulation of aspect reality.
The sensorimotor stage
The sensorimotor stage occurs at birth when infant uses their senses and motor action to think. When infants are born to the age of two, they wander around touching objects, eating anything find, and looking around. The activities they involve in helps then to be familiar with the environment and explore more on the world. The child is able to construct concepts simple concept that they can understand. For example, when infants are given an animal toy, they are shocked to see something new and through feeling, and looking they are able to internalize the object with repeated manipulation. They later organize their sensations and actions and recognize the object. The representation helps the child believe and understand that the animal exist event though it is temporarily not available in the sight. The sense of stability create a belief of existence of an object when actually not physically present. Piugeon refers the phenomenon as object permanence. The stage of development marks a qualitative transformation of two year infants compared to a six month. When a child is born, sensorimotor development happens without language support because a child can barely communicate. The inability to speak makes it difficult to know what a child is thinking. Therefore, Piaget devised an effecrtive strategy to show that infants are capable of representing objects without talking. For example, hiding a toy animal under a blanket will subject infant who are almost two years to search for the object unlike younger children who are less than six months. Therefore, permanent concept motivates the older infant to search for the missing object.
The Preoperational stage
The preoperational stage occurs at age 2 to 7 for infant with the new ability to diversify objects in broader perspective. The child is able to speak even when they cannot manipulate information. The child involves in game but has trouble in viewing things from a perspective angle. The stage is logically inadequate in regard to mental functioning. The activities executed are much than in the sensorimotor stage but are not organized or fully logical. Dramatic play is one of the cognitions executed in the preoperational stage. Children at this age are immersed in make-believe seem activities that make them look insane but in reality, they are normal. For example, you can witness a child using plastic banana as to call their parents, requesting for their favorite snacks and subsequently hang up. The child knows that the banana is not a telephone but a representation of communication tool. The child is thinking on both realistic and imaginative level. The dramatic play experience is an example of metacognition or reflection of thinking. When children are in school, teachers always encourage metacognition skill since it is important for a child success. Young children perform dramatic plays in school that help them to further develop the significant skills. Besides, the preoperational stage is dived into two substages, which include the symbolic function and intuitive substage.
Symbolic Function Substage
During this substage, children between two to four years are able to remember images and symbol but cannot manipulate handle and mutate information in a rational way. Children develop imaginary friends and start role playing with each other. They engage in symbolic play that create a connection with others and their level of creativity. For example, young children who engage in violent symbolic play tend to display antisocial behaviors in future. Egocentrism and precausal thinking are one of the limitations experienced in the symbolic function substage. When youngsters are unable to determine their own perspective from that of another individual, we consider they are experiencing egocentrism. The three mountain-problem is an experiment conducted by Piaget and Barbel Inhelder to describe egocentrism. A child is shown three views of a mountain and told to describe what a travelling doll would see at several angles. The term “precausal thinking” describes the way infants use their own ideas to identify a cause and effect relationship. Preoperational stage describes animism, artificialism, and transductive reasoning as the main notion of causality. Animism is the belief that lifeless objects are capable of displaying lively qualities. An example could be a child believing that stars twinkle in the sky when they become happy. The belief that environmental factors can be attributed to human interventions is a phenomenon called Artificialism. For example, a child may argue that the clouds are white because someone painted them. Besides, we have transdusive reasoning where a child is unable to differentiate the relationship between cause and effect.
Intuitive thought substage
The substage occurs when a child is between four and seven years. At this age, a child is very inquisitive and tends to ask many questions as they start to use primitive reasoning. According to Piaget, the intuitive substage is when children are curious to know about the occurrence of things because they realize to have vast knowledge without knowing its origin. Besides, there are characteristics of preoperative thoughts that are essential in a child’s development. Centration as one the features focuses on all attention and conservation alerts that alteration of a substance does not affect it basic properties. Conversely, when children are unable to mentally reverse a sequence of events, the term is referred to as Irreversibility. Finally, the class inclusion characteristic is when children are unable to focus on two facets of a situation at once. They are inhibited from the understanding of one category to several. For example, a four-year boy is unable to differentiate a dog being an animal in a picture. The difficulty of focusing on the two subclasses brings the concept of class inclusion.
The Concrete Operational Stage
The stage is exhibited by children of age seven to eleven. During elementary school studies, young students are able to represent ideas and events effectively and logically. Their thinking capabilities are less compared to adults’ standards since they operate unconsciously but enable them to perform systematically in their academic works. For example, arithmetic tasks of addition and subtraction are understood by children at this stage. Children are able to handle concrete objects and events but have challenges in systematic representation of the same objects and events. Children recalling of object in order is one of the differences that separate the concrete operational reasoning from the preoperational thinking. The skill of order arrangement is significant in learning. The ability to decenter is another feature of thinking in the concrete stage. It involves the ability of a child to tackle two subtasks concurrently. During classroom lessons, the reversibility and decentration features happen together.
The Formal Operational Stage
The last Piaget stages occurs to children who are above eleven years where the stage of adolescent into adulthood prevails. During this stage, intelligent is demonstrated as individuals develop the ability to use to reason about abstract ideas. A person is not only able to reason on tangible objects and events but also able to abstract them. Individual can be able to function on forms or representations. Hypothetical questions can be posed to students at this stage. Hypothetical thinking is needed in return to answer such questions that vary in concepts. Piaget study in formal operational thinking targeted middle or high school teachers. Students with the ability to think hypothetically require few props to handle tasks in class. They are self-directed compared to pupils that only dwell on concrete operations. Piaget’s stages involve a kind of formal thinking needed to decode scientific issues and devise scientific examinations.
Practical Applications of Piaget Theory
The Piaget’s theory can be used by parents when making decision on what to purchase in order to support their child’s development. Besides, teachers can also use the theory in class. For example, a tutor can choose on the syllabus subjects that is suitable for students. A recent study show that children of the same class and age perform differently on course work that involves addition and subtraction fluency. Furthermore, children in the preoperational and concrete stages of cognitive growth performed with similar accuracy in combined arithmetic operations. Children in concrete operational level have a greater capability to perform in subtraction and addition tasks. Moreover, the application of the Piagetian theory in different communities had varying results that lead to speculations. The theory illustrated that growth might cease at concrete operational levels to some to those without specific cultural experience. A method developed in Geneva did a procedure where participant had same beakers with same amount of water. The water from one beaker was transferred to another with taller and smaller circumference. Then children and young adults from non-literate communities thought that the taller and thinner beaker held more water. Piaget performed several tasks to attest hypothesis arising from his theory. He found that the correlations between psychometric intelligence test were consistently positive and moderate in magnitude.
Challenges to Piagetian Stage Theory
The Piagetian narratives of developments have been challenged on various grounds. Besides, Piaget knew the growth progressed in a smooth manner according to his theory’s prediction. The progressive forms of cognitive growth progression recommended that the stage model was at peak. Studies found that children could learn ideas and capabilities displayed in advanced stages with ease. The domain general of Piaget theory predicts that cognitive maturity occurs concurrently across different domains of intelligence. During the 1980s and 1990s, the neo-nativist and evolutionary psychology concepts influenced the cognitive developmentalists. The ideas emphasized modularity of mind and de-emphasized domain general theories. According to modularity, cognitive faculties are independent to each other and develop according to different timetables. Some students are equipped with specific domain theories that allow them to break into studying with the domain they possess. Piaget theory is said to have underrated the culture influence on cognitive growth. His demonstration of a child growth through several stages to of cognitive growth to their own reality is challenged by the claim that a child social culture plays the significant role in cognitive development. Besides, core knowledge and revised concept of domain generality has been strongly challenged from a newer dynamic system approach. As children develop and integrate knowledge, the domain specific is established. Therefore, the domain is able to improve the accuracy of apprehension as the institution of memories. Overall, the Piaget theory remains to be studied as more research is conducted by his critics.