Child Development

Essay question: Jean Piaget proposed a step-wise sequence of mental development during childhood. Provide an overview of Piaget’s core ideas, discussing evidence for and against these ideas. Jean Piaget (1869-1980) started to investigate children’s development after two years of working with children in Binet’s lab (Eddy, 2010). He found that children of younger aged gave different answers than those of alder age not because they have less knowledge but because they thought differently.He describes development as sequence of stages and each of these stages represents different type of thinking occurs in variable ages in different background (Vidal, 2000) Focal point – children have all the cognitive mechanisms to learn by constantly react with their environment.

Experiences also play an very important formative role in children’s development. Piaget (1985) says that experience engenders disequilibrium and eventually a higher state of equilibrium. Some underlying principle behind Piaget’s theory: Schema: cognitive structures or frameworks that represent certain aspect of the world and to help individuals understand the world they inhibit.

* Adaptation: the process that builds and adapts our schemes through interaction with environment. * Assimilation: a process that takes in substances and stimulations or incorporates/ fits new information into pre-existing schema (Read, 1997). * Accommodation: this happens when the existing schema does not work and changes are needed to adapt better to the assimilated reality (Read, 1997).The four stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development: 1. The sensorimotor stage (0-2 years): Develop the ability to make sense of the world by using their senses ad motor abilities.

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2. Preoperational stage (2-7 years): begin to develop motor skills but still lacks of understanding of conservation of physical properties. Wellman and Gelman (1992) claim that young children by age 3 or 4, they see people as processing beliefs, desires, thoughts and images as well as emotional reactions. 3. Concrete operational stage (7-11 years): child able to think logically 4.Formal operational stage (11 years – ): able to manage higher order reasoning. (Read, 1997) * Describe each of the stages with more details. * Critically discuss the stages of Piaget’s theory. Strength of Piaget’s theory This theory changes the way that people thinks the child’s mind and his work increases interest in child development and it is very useful as practical application to the real world such as education and development psychology(Cherry, 2013). Further the understanding of cognitive development and children.Weakness Some have said that children are more precocious than what Piaget’s proposed. Piaget underestimated children’s abilities (Cherry, 2013). Some claim that Piaget’s did not include intervention into account. He did not consider about the importance of social influence of an adult. The aspects in Piaget’s step-wise model are strict and rigid. Besides, Cherry (2013) states that research show that all children will automatically move to next stage of development but not through environmental factors.