Jean Piaget

What is Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory?

A theory that explains how children develop thinking and reasoning skills through four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

What are the four stages of Piaget's Cognitive Development?

1. Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years): Learning through senses and actions.

2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): Development of language and symbolic play.

3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years): Logical thinking about concrete objects and experiences.

4. Formal Operational Stage (12+ years): Abstract and hypothetical thinking.

What is schema in Piaget's theory?

A schema is a mental framework or concept used to organize and interpret information.

What does assimilation mean in Piaget's theory?

Assimilation is when new information is added to an existing schema without changing it.

What does accommodation mean in Piaget's theory?

Accommodation is when a new experience changes an existing schema or creates a new one.

How is Piaget's theory used in practice in classrooms?

Teachers design age-appropriate learning activities based on the child's developmental stage to match their cognitive abilities.

How would a teacher apply the preoperational stage in practice?

Use activities like imaginative play, storytelling, and hands-on learning to support symbolic thinking and language development.

How would a teacher apply the concrete operational stage in practice?

Use logical reasoning tasks like sorting, classification, and hands-on experiments to support logical thinking about concrete concepts.

How would a teacher apply the formal operational stage in practice?

Encourage critical thinking and abstract reasoning through activities like problem-solving, debates, and hypothesis testing.

What is the main idea of Piaget's cognitive development theory?

Children actively construct knowledge by interacting with their environment and moving through stages of development as they grow.

Piaget's egocentrism test

Piaget's experiment showed that young children in the preoperational stage (ages 2-7) are egocentric, meaning they struggle to see things from others' perspectives. In his three-mountains task, children were shown a model of three mountains. When asked to describe the view from another person's perspective, they usually described it from their own viewpoint instead, showing their difficulty in considering other perspectives.

egocentric

children struggle to see things from others' perspectives.

Animism

the preoperational child's belief that inanimate objects are alive (telling a table off when a child walks into it or giving a teddy a voice)