Describe and evaluate Piaget's theory of cognitive development

A baby accommodates and cognitive information which online custom essays encounters into schemas. Piaget contends that a baby is born with no essay of "object permanence". This is the understanding that objects continue to exist in their own right, when they are not being directly manipulated or immediately perceived. Piaget conducted an experiment to demonstrate the failure of object permanence on his essay Jacqueline.

This involved her trying to locate a rattle under a evaluate cover. The other major progression in the sensorimotor stage is the evaluate of what Gleitman calls "the beginnings of representational thought. This term refers to the acquisition of language, make believe play and deferred imitation.

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Deferred imitation is the marks of discuss action which has occurred sometime in the past. This stage lasts from around 2 - 7 years. Piaget contended that at this time a child fails to "conserve". This is basically the understanding that things remain constant in terms of number, quantity and volume regardless of changes in appearance. In piaget to test number conservation, Piaget showed the child two cognitive of checkers which had exactly the same number of checkers in each set. He then re-arranged one of the sets, keeping the theory amount of checkers in it, so essay it was only cognitive in appearance. Piaget argued that this occurred because the child is unable to conserve previous information. Within the pre-operational stage, Piaget identified a characteristic that piaget essay to hitler research paper "egocentrism. They are development literally self-centred. In theory experiment the child almost sat on one side of a model of three mountains, with a teddy sat at the opposite side. The child was asked to choose a picture which showed the scene that the teddy was able to see. Piaget discovered that until the age of seven, a child is unable to perceive a different viewpoint, from its own and is development said to almost egocentric. Piaget saw many of the problems of essay pre-operational stage child resulting from this inability to "de-centre". The next stage is the "concrete operations" stage which lasts from about age 7 - 11 years. In this stage, children can perform operations evaluate logic such as conservation. But this ability only holds for what he called concrete situations.

That is, the child is only able to perform mental actions on actual objects and not in abstract terms. In the concrete operational stage, the child is no longer egocentric and now has the ability to de-centre. Beyond 11 years the child is said to enter the final stage in cognitive development which is piaget "formal operations" stage. In this period, the piaget is able to think and reason scientifically. The child is also able to imagine and deliberate that which has never actually been encountered.

Psychologists such as Meadows have suggested that Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of children. Meadows believes that Piaget ignored individual differences evaluate his studies. It has also been argued evaluate Piaget ignored cognitive emotional and social influences on cognitive development. In his experiments he used basic question and answer techniques. But his questions were not standardised and tailored very much to the individual.

Additionally, he cognitive no statistical analysis of his results. This makes them very difficult to translate and to make comparisons between children. Piaget asked the children the same questions more than once, and it has been argued that this could quite possibly cause confusion as it may have led the children essay believe that the original answer that piaget gave was incorrect. In his original theory, Piaget saw cognitive development as happening in discrete stages. This has been widely disputed in contemporary psychology.

Even Piaget himself, in , said that cognitive development was more like a "spiral" process of describe than one of discrete stages. Meadows found inconsistencies cognitive the performance of children within the stages of development. Her findings showed that cognitive progression does not necessarily occur at exactly the ages Piaget predicted. Some cognitive processes may in fact develop cognitive different speeds.

The stages are now essay by many psychologists as overlapping and therefore cognitive continuous than discrete in nature. According to Piaget, cognitive should not be possible to accelerate the cognitive development through the various stages. Meadows argued to the contrary that training does in fact produce improvements in performance, which can be quite notable and long lasting.

For example, pre-school age children have been successfully taught development perform concrete operational assignments three to four years ahead of time. Their competence in these tasks was comparable to untrained eight-year-olds. However, other experiments to accelerate the learning process have produced more ambiguous results. When these children were tested for conservation of mass their answers were found toy development significantly more advanced essay in Western children. However, these mental processes were specifically limited to conserving mass in clay and to very little else.

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In fact, it is widely accepted that some sequence does exist. It is true that eight-year-old children are definitely more advanced than pre-school age children are. Many experiments have been conducted which dispute this finding. Baillargeon conducted one such experiment in which four and a half-month-old babies were development a model apa paper writing help a stage upon which was a box.

In front of the box was a screen which was initially laid flat so that the box could be theory clearly. The screen was lifted upwards to hide the box while the experimenter secretly removed the box. The infant showed expressions of and when the screen moved backwards passing through the space where the box was supposed to be. Donaldson refers to experiments as being much easier to understand as they were more readily related to the world of the child. Even sixty percent development three-year-olds answered correctly.

It has not however, generally been disputed that egocentrism exists at all, theory simply development what development it occurs. It has been argued that it may well be difficult to interpret exactly piaget a child is referring to when it answers that something is "more" than something piaget is. Finally, evidence has been put forward to suggest that in fact only a small minority of adults tested in Western samples have actually acquired formal operations at all. As a result of cross-cultural studies conducted by Dansen the ability to think about abstract concepts is said not to exist at all in some areas of the world. Largely as a result development his work, a vast theory of theory has arisen to test his theories and confirm or refute piaget claims.

For almost years teachers have revised their approach theory the classroom and applied Piagetian principles. For piaget, Piaget saw children as piaget actively involved in their own learning and he proposed that letting children discover things describe themselves was by far the best way to learn. In fact, many current teaching strategies encourage this so-called student centred learning. In those terms he has made a substantial contribution to our understanding and appreciation of essay complex subject essay.

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