Describe and evaluate Piaget's theory of cognitive development

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Describe and evaluate Piaget's theory of cognitive development

Piaget believed that through interaction, children have to build their own mental framework for understanding and interacting with their own environment. They do this through the use of schemas. A schema is an internal representation of a specific physical or mental action. An infant is born with certain innate schemas, such as a sucking schema. However these schemas continue to develop and increase in their complexity and ability to let their owners function well in this world. When a child is in a state of equilibrium, they are believed to have understood everything that they have learnt. If they come across information that they are not familiar with, then they use schemas to accommodate/assimilate the information to get back into a state of equilibrium. Assimilation is the process where new ideas are understood in terms of the schema that the child already possesses, whereas accommodation is the process whereby the existing schema has to be modified to fit new ideas.

Piaget defined four stages of cognitive development. The first stage, the Sensori-motor stage, occurs when the child is between 0-2 years. Very young children deal with the environment by manipulating objects. This is intelligence through action. The key achievement of this stage is object permeance. This involves being aware that the notion “out of sight, out of mind” is not true, and that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer in view. This way of thinking develops as the child actively explores their environment, and towards the end of the first year, they display what is known as perseverative search. This involves the infant searching for a concealed object in the place in which it was found earlier, rather than in the place in which it was last seen. Piaget believed that this occurred as the infant does not regard the object as existing independently of the infant’s own behaviour. Towards the end of this stage, infants show evidence of deferred imitation, which is the ability to imitate behaviour that was seen before. The pre-operational stage occurs during the ages of 2-7. This stage is further categorised into two further substages – preconceptual and intuitive. The preconceptual stage occurs between 2-4 years, and children at this stage find seriation tasks such as placing objects in height order very difficult. Children at the later stage, the intuitive stage, can usually do such tasks but after trial and error. Preconceptual children find it difficult to perform tasks involving syncretic thought. Piaget presented children with tow glasses of the same size and shape containing the same amount of liquid. He then poured the liquid from one glass into a taller and thinner container. The child was then asked whether the two containers contained the same amount of liquid or different amounts. Preoperational children failed to show conservation (the understanding that certain aspects of a visual display do not vary in spite of perceptual changes) They argued that there was more liquid in the taller container “because it’s higher” or in the original container “because it’s wider.” Piaget also identified that preoperational children’s thinking is hugely influenced by egocentrism. This is the tendency to assume that one’s way of thinking is the only possible way. Piaget used the three-mountain task to show this. Children looked at a model of mountains, and then decided which picture showed the view that would be seen from a different angle. Most children at the pre-operational stage selected the picture of the scene as they themselves saw it. This, according to Piaget, occurred because they could not escape from an egocentric perspective.

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The concrete operations stage is the third stage, and occurs between the ages of 7-11. Thinking becomes more logical, however can only be applied to objects that are real or can be seen.  The most important cognitive operation is reversibility, which involves the cancelling out of effects of a perceptual change by imagining the opposite change. One task that can be performed in this stage and onwards is the notion of transitivity. This allows three elements to be placed in the correct order, however they an not solve abstract problems, such as “if A> B> C, then is A ...

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