Piaget’s Theory

Question 1

Jean Piaget the renowned psychologist maintained that children pass through a sequence of four primary cognitive development stages. Every one of the stages is differentiated by how kids comprehend the world. Piaget asserted that scientists resemble young scientists who actively seek to explore as well as make sense of the world.

The four distinct stages of development include; firstly, the Sensorimotor Stage: this stage of development involves children within the age of 0-2 years. Within this stage toddlers along with infants acquire knowledge via sensory experiences along with manipulating objects. At this stage development a kid’s intelligence is comprises of their world basic motor as well as sensory explorations. Piaget named this development as object permanence; which means the comprehension that objects exist even when they are invisible (Fleming, 2004). The second stage of development is known as the Preoperational Stage; within this stage children learn via pretend play however they continue to struggle with logic along with taking other people’s viewpoints. Kids at this stage are aged between 2 and 7 years.     The third stage is referred to as The Concrete Operational Stage; children within this development stage start to think more logically, nevertheless their thinking could also be somewhat rigid. Children within this stage are aged 7 to 11 years. Kids’ egocentric nature reduces significantly and begins thinking more about other people. Piaget named the fourth stage as The Formal Operational Stage, it comprises of kids who are aged 11 years and above. This final stage entails a rise in logic, the capacity to utilize deductive reasoning as well as comprehending abstract ideas (Siegler & Alibali, 2005).

Question 2

In Piagetian model children go through three main processes through which they move from level/stage to another. Jean Piaget viewed intellectual growth to being an adaptation/adjustment process to the universe. The three primary processes are assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. To begin with assimilation refers to using an existing representation face a new situation or object. Secondly, accommodation takes place when the prevailing knowledge fails to work and requires to be changed in order to cope with a new situation or object. The third process is equilibration; this points to the force that steers development along. Jean Piaget maintained that cognitive development never progress at a steady rate. Equilibrium takes place when a kid’s schemas are able to cope with new information via assimilation (Fleming, 2004).  

Question 3

The main weakness of the first stage is that most of the things that toddlers perceive to exist are things they have visualized, thus most certainly these are things that exist.  The second stage of development has a weakness in that kids actually highly embrace other individual’s viewpoints. The weakness within the third stage is concerns its assertion that children are usually very rigid in their thinking however kids at this stage are usually eager to learn to easily accept new information (Siegler & Alibali, 2005).

Question 4

Gelman states that considering the “three mountains” experiment of egocentrism within which a kid is not able to view a scene/object from a hypothetical other individual’s perspective, however when a researcher uses familiar objects as well as explain the task more precisely then kids at a much younger age is able to see things/objects from another individual’s perspective. Gelman additionally states that considering the fact that it is difficult to edify kids on conservation tasks when they are at concrete operational level, Piaget’s training was extremely intensive and not every child could have learnt all the tasks within that period (Siegler & Alibali, 2005).  

References

Fleming, J. (2004). Piaget and Cognitive Developmen. Retrieved from http://swppr.org/Textbook/Ch%204%20Piaget.pdf

Siegler, R.S., and Alibali, M.W.  (2005).  Children’s thinking 4th ed.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.