Discuss Piaget's theory of cognitive development (24 marks)

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Megan O’Brien 13B                26th September 2012

Discuss Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development (24 marks)

Piaget believes that there were a number of mechanisms involved in cognitive development, with development due to a combination of maturation and experience. During development, the child develops mental structures known as schema. Schema can be either behaviour or cognitive, with cognitive schema helping children to solve problems and classify objects. Some schema are innate (e.g. sucking), whereas others develop through interaction with the environment children are born with very few schema, but these develop gradually through the processes of assimilation and accommodation, which together help the child adapt to his or her environment. Assimilation is the mechanism used when a child tries to understand new information in terms of existing schema. In some situations, a child must change an existing schema to understand new information. Piaget called this mechanism accommodation. A child’s cognitive development is driven by equilibration; when existing schemas and new information are imbalanced this creates disequilibrium. The child is motivated to reduce this by developing new schemas or adapting old ones until equilibrium is restored.

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In the first stage of cognitive development, the sensori-motor stage, sensory input is co-ordinated with motor actions through circular reactions, where children repeat the same action over and over to test sensori-motor relationships. One development of this stage is object permanence, the recognition that objects continue to exist even when out of sight. In stage 2, the pre-operational stage, which develops between 2 and 7 years, thought, becomes increasingly symbolic as they begin to represent their world in words and images. The child is not yet capable of reversibility of thought, which results in the child’s tendency towards egocentrism, ...

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