Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

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Garrett Heffernan ENS 301 MW 1:00-1:50pm Prof Voigt. 2/15/15 Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Jean Piaget was a French psychologist who in 1936 set out to determine the ways in which children learn. His research was the first of it’s kind in that he was the first to conduct a study specifically on how children learn as opposed to people in general. The basis of Piaget’s finding where that there is four stages of cognitive development that children progress through as they approach maturity. Piaget believed that before entering one of these stages a child would be unable to understand certain concepts that fit within each specific learning window. The basis of Piaget’s study was and is still used today to determine at what age we begin to teach children certain concepts. Piaget’s research is built primarily upon the idea of these distinctive stages of a child’s development as well as the concept of schema’s. Piaget defined schema’s as the “building block’s of knowledge.” He suggested that children categorize everything there exposed to into schema’s to try to understand them. If something doesn’t fit within an existing schema then the concept would be placed into it’s own separate schema. The first stage in a child’s development according his theory was the sensorimotor stage which takes place from approximately zero to two years of age. The sensorimotor stage is characterized by the concept of object permanence. In simpler terms object permanence refers to a child’s ability to understand that an object continues to exist even when it is out of there range of sight. Piaget believed the second stage of learning was the preoperational stage, which occurred from approximately two to seven years of age. He characterized this stage as an egocentric stage; it is marked primarily by language development. He believed that children at this stage could
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