Piaget’s Stage Theory Of cognitive Development
1. Basic Theoretical assumptions
Piaget believed that children move between 4 stages which are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operation. During these periods the probing behaviors of children change into the abstract, logical intelligence of adolescents and adulthood. It was once believed that infants were deficient in the ability to think or shape complex ideas and remained without cognition until they learned language. It is now known that babies are aware of their surroundings and interested in exploration from the time they are born. From birth, babies begin to actively learn. They gather, sort, and process information from around them, using the data to develop perception and thinking skills. Piaget believed that the environmental factors affected the speed with which children move through the stages.
2. Development Processes: Adaptation and Organization
Adaptation involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment. It has to go through assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process of using or transforming the environment so that it can be placed in preexisting cognitive structures. An example of assimilation would be when an infant uses a sucking schema that was developed by sucking on a small bottle when attempting to suck on a larger bottle. Accommodation is when children make new schemes or alter the old ones after noticing that their current way of thinking does not detain the environment completely. Just like the kid that drops the object in different ways is adjust his dropping scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects. Both processes are used simultaneously and alternately throughout life. When Children are not shifting much they assimilate more than they accommodate. So according to Piaget the balance between assimilation and accommodation varies over time. He called this a state of cognitive equilibrium and...