Piaget's Theory of Development

Piaget's Theory of Development

Introduction

Every child is born unique in terms of capabilities, development, and interpersonal characteristics. During a lifetime, an individual goes through many stages of cognitive development. Many theories have been developed to demonstrate the psychological reasoning behind the development of cognition in children. One such theory is presented by a French psychologist, Piaget. Piaget used to translate English intelligence tests into French. He maneuvered the reasons given by children for their incorrect answers, particularly over questions that stimulated logical thinking. He examined that the responses revealed the difference between thinking patterns of adults & children (Cherry, 2012). Piaget's theory is a systematic study of cognitive development in humans. The theory assists in understanding educational needs for children. The write up explores four stages of development as presented by Piaget's theory. An overview of the theory is presented to set the stage for understanding, how this theory helps an educator teach a child. Also, the theory helps in developing behaviors in order to support abilities of a child. According to Slavin, “an intentional teacher articulates instructional decisions in his practices” (Slavin, 2011).

Discussion

Piaget's Theory

Earlier, it was believed that adults are more competent thinkers than the children of the population. Piaget articulated that children think in a very amazing way and that their thinking capacity is different from adults. A child is born with a basic mental structure that he inherits from his bloodline. The theory explains the mechanism by which a child grows into an individual who adopts reasoning to underatnd hypotheses. According to Piaget, “Cognitive development is a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experiences”. A child is sensitive to the surrounding environment (Garcia, 2007). Besides the biological development, children's thinking is inspired from their existing experiences of the world. Slavin emphasize on the “principles of simulations”. He suggests that children must have hand-ons experience to objects in order to trigger their learning process (Slavin, 2011).

Components of Theory

Schemas

Enabling processes for transition from one stage of development to another

Stages of Development

Schemas are nothing but the building blocks of organizing knowledge (Slavin, 2011). A schema can be described as “units” of knowledge that assist in understanding the process. Schemas can be simple or complex. Babies' schemas are simple ones. For instance, they have a sucking reflex for anything that touches their lips. Schemas are the knowledge chunks in our memory that assist in understanding a new concept. Slavin emphasize on the use of multi-media for educating children (Slavin, 2011). This way they develop new schemas easily.

Transition Process

As a child grows the number of schemas increases. Also, they become complex with the passage of time. For instance, a child learns words which later connect to become sentences. These changes happen as a result of process describing the transition from one stage to another. Changes occur through two different process; assimilation & accommodation (Cherry, 2012). When a child is introduced to a new concept, he compares it to his previous ...