Child developmental stages by Jean Piaget

Child developmental stages by Jean Piaget

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  Suhail Jamali Roll no:2k16/EngE/120 Institute of English Language & Literature, University of Sindh Jamshoro. Introduction: Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist, he was born in 1896. He is best known for his child development theory. Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. He declared in 1993 that, ‘Only Education saves over societies from collapse, whether violent or gradual’. Piaget himself created the international centre for genetic epistemology in Geneva in 1955, while directed a faculty in university of Geneva until his death in 1980. Piaget’s theoryof child development and it’s stages: Piaget's (1936) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environmen. Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required
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  logical thinking. Hebelieved that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice and so on emerged. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based. What this theoryis about? It is concerned with children, rather than all learners. It focuses on development, rather than learning, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors. It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc. Components: There’re three basic components of Piaget’s theory: Schemas (building blocks of knowledge). Adaptation processes that enable the transition from one stage to another (equilibriam, assimilation, and accommodation). Assimilation and Accommodation Jean Piaget viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:  Assimilation
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  – Which isusing an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.  Accommodation – This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.  Equilibration – This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation). Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it. Stages of the theory of child development: Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment. Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages. Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development which are as follows: 1. Sensorimotor stage 2. Pre-operational stage 3. Concrete operational stage 4. Formal operational stage Let’s describe these stages below
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  1) Sensorimotor Stage(Birth-2 yrs): The main achievement during this stage is object permanence means knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object. 2) Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself. Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others. 3) Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years): Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. This means the child can work things out internally in their head Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. 4) Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over): The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into adulthood. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.