Jean Piaget is one of the great references in the study of the cognitive development of the child, has dedicated his life to the study of children, including the study of his own children to unravel the secret of development. He is also known, along with Lev Vygotsky, as one of the fathers of constructivism.
One of Jean Piaget’s most famous theories is his division of children’s cognitive development into four different stages, in this, Piaget sought a theory that explains the general development of the child, however, today we know that he ignores many aspects so that we can consider it. as a theory of general development; However, this classification is a useful guide to understanding how we develop our logical-arithmetic capacity in childhood.
- Many psychologists believed that development was given by a cumulative phenomenon.
- Where new cognitive behaviors and processes are generated; however.
- Piaget.
- After his studies.
- Formulated a developmental theory based on qualitative leaps.
- Where the child would accumulate skills.
- But sooner or later.
- This accumulation would change his way of thinking qualitatively.
Piaget divided this child’s cognitive development into three stages with a series of substeps, and then extended to four, these four steps are: (a) the sensory-motor stage, (b) the preoperative stage, (c) the stage of concrete operations and (d) the stage of formal operations.
This stage predes the beginning of language and extends from birth to approximately two years; this period is characterized by a child’s ability to think; his life in this period is based on the relationship between his perceptual and motor capacity; there are only practical concepts in your mind, such as knowing what to do to eat or get your mother’s attention.
Gradually, throughout this period, the child generalizes the events that surround him and creates patterns of the functioning of the world, due to the intersection of patterns, the baby develops the permanence of the object, understands that objects exist as entities outside it. Before implementing this idea in their diagrams, if the child can’t see, hear, and touch an object, he or she would think it doesn’t exist.
The end of this stage is marked by the appearance of the language. Language means a profound change in a child’s cognitive abilities. It usually comes with semiotic function: the ability to represent concepts through thought. The child would no longer have a purely practical mind to have a mind that also acts on a representative level.
This stage can be between two and seven years. We are here in a transitional period where the child begins to work with his semiotic capacity. Although he has already reached a level of representation, his mind is still very different from that of an adult. We ended up here with an “egocentric” thought.
Is the child self-centered?, because her thinking is totally self-centered, she is unable to distinguish the physical from the psychic and the objective of the subjective, for her her subjective experience is the objective reality that exists in the same way for all individuals; shows us a lack of mind theory. From the age of four, the child would begin to abandon this egocentrism to develop the theory of the mind.
At this point, we also see problems in children to understand that the universe is changing. He is able to understand the states, but not the transformation of matter. An example is when we teach a child at this point that we have a glass full of water and change the water into a narrower but larger glass. The child will think there is more water than before: he is unable to understand that transforming something does not change the amount of existing material.
This period varies from 7 to 11 or 12 years. At this stage, the child has already managed to renounce the full confidence he had in his senses, here we can see the development of a series of concepts, since shape transformations do not change the amount of matter.
The child begins to build a logic of classes and relationships outside of perceptual data, understands transformations, and understands that they can occur in the opposite direction (add rather than delete, for example), and an important aspect is that the child will be able to perform these operations by representing them in his mind, without having to perform them with the objects present.
While she controls operations and logic, children of this age can only perform them with specific objects that know how they behave, she is unable to theorize what she does not know or arise from her perceptual knowledge, this ability will reach her in the next stage.
This is the last stage of development in which the child will become a cognitive adult, this stage is characterized by the acquisition of scientific thinking, the child, in addition to being able to reason about reality, can also reason about what is possible.
This period is characterized by the ability to analyze hypotheses and examine the possible consequences of these hypothetical possibilities. The child has greatly improved his or her testing procedures and does not accept opinions without examining them.
From this moment on, the child will begin to acquire new knowledge and intellectual instruments that will allow him to develop as a competent adult in society, however, from that moment on he will not suffer any more qualitative leaps: he can be faster. or more accurate in her mental operations, but she’ll think the same way.
Now that we know Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development, do you think children develop through these stages or do you think this theory is insufficient to fully explain human development?