USING PIAGET’S THEORY, OUTLINE AND EVALUATES HOW CHILDREN DEVELOP INTELLECTUALLY.
Piaget was one of the psychologists who did enormous study on child development. He believed that child psychology can be explained from the biological point of view.
Jean Piaget developed a theory of how children learn about things. He believed that it is more useful to study the way children take in and use information, rather than how much knowledge they have.
Piaget researched into how logical thinking develops in children and suggested a way of understanding how children acquire/use information from their environment.(Flanagan,1999 P.60)
Piaget’s basic idea is that our senses take information about things in our environment, our brains process and store this information, and our behaviour changes as a result of it. This process is known as cognition.
Piaget, coming from a biological background, applied the biological principle of adaptation to human development. He believed there were biological structures in our brain which represent our knowledge. The first structure represents the reflexes which humans have at birth such as breathing, crying and sucking. These reflexes help the baby to survive the first few months of life. A reflex is any action which is triggered by some particular stimulus. Reflexes, even those in adults, all seems to have something in common, in some way they help us to protect ourselves.( Davenport,1988)
According to Piaget, human beings have the ability to think, as part bog our genetic inheritance. Human thinking develop in a fixed sequence of stages. It may start off in babies as a simple mental structure known as schemas.
Piaget argued that, we develop cognition from our experience, and everyone has different experience, therefore everyone will have different level of cognition. Each person’s cognition is as a result of several ideas or mental structure in our heads, and hence must be vary. There are two of these variant mental structures,...