Jean Piaget Essay

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Jean Piaget Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist who has a theory on Children’s Cognitive (mental) development. Cognitive development is about the child developing and constructing a mental view of the world. Piaget has developed a theory that has been widely known and has changed how people view a child’s world and their thinking process. The focal point of his theory is that children need to be frequently interacting with their environment, this way they make mistakes and are able to learn from them, this is the bases of his theory. The theory is based on different levels on thinking, and no level has the same form of thinking as the others. The child is not able to continue on the path of cognitive development until it has been able to successfully reason with each of these stages. There are two main modules of Jean Piaget’s theory; the underlying principals and terms of the theory, and the stages of development for the child. Schemas: Schemas are sets of knowledge and ideas stored in the mind to help understand and explain the environment around the individual. Schemas represent the child’s certain aspect of their world. For example for one child Easter may mean egg hunting, and chocolate, and hot cross buns, whereas for another child it will mean a religious event, and church, and giving thanks. In Piaget’s theory, schemas are mental symbols of the environment to help the child respond to certain situations. Piaget said that infants were born with a structure of schemas in their mind for example their reflexes to help them survive, when an object is put near an infant’s mouth they automatically suck on it expecting a form of food. Assimilation Assimilation is the method of new information being able to be stored with another schema to deal with a new situation that the child has not yet come across. For example, Samuel Eddy, a child who has been
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