COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND PLAY SIGNIFICANCE

Cognitive Development and Play Significance

Cognitive Development and Play Significance

Introduction

Education has been influenced by many people, especially Jean Piaget. He proposed a theory of cognitive development of children. He caused a new revolution in thinking about how thinking develops. Piaget observed that children understand concepts and reason differently at different stages, he stated that children's cognitive strategies which are used to solve problems reflect an interaction between the child's current developmental stage and experience in the world. This response assignment will focus on what extent my education was influenced by Piaget's theories and whether or not his ideas are beneficial to education and to knowledge itself. His theories shaped today's education by creating different levels of schooling, creating challenging lessons for classes, and by creating richer learning environments.

Analysis

Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist in the early half of the nineteenth century. He was famous because of his work with children and figuring out how their brains worked. He believed that a child's brain is different from an adult's brain, and that there are stages that the brain has to go through developmentally to be considered totally matured. One of the reasons that our brain needs to go through developmental stages because humans are driven to understand and make sense of our life experiences. Piaget developed the four stages of cognitive development, which outline the general ages at which these changes occur and how they occur (Sheridan, 1977).

The first stage that all humans have to pass through is the Sensorimotor stage that lasts from birth until the age of two. At this stage children are experiencing their world through their senses. They use sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound to figure their surroundings out. A baby will stick almost anything in their mouth because it is a strong sense. From their mouth alone they can get a feel for the texture, the taste, the size, and the general fun factor of an object from putting it in their mouth's. Another development that occurs in this stage is that by one year a child can mimic basic gestures that you make at them (Piaget, 1963). Young infant's dos not posses object permanence, which is the awareness that objects continue to exist when not perceived. So if you gave a baby a big green block, then took it away from them, they wouldn't notice that there ...