What are Piaget Cognitive Development Stages? Piaget (1896-1980) formulated a theory that described how children and adolescents think and acquire knowledge, that is, the genesis (birth) and the evolution of human knowledge.
The term cognitive refers to everything that is related to knowledge. Knowledge, on the other hand, refers to the amount of information that is available as a product of the learning or of the acquired experience.This term relates to psychology, and one obtains the techniques employed to analyze the procedures of the mind that acquires knowledge. This set of techniques are known as cognitive psychology.
Theory of Piaget Cognitive Development Stages
According to Piaget, it is important to let the child explore for himself so that he can learn . This Swiss psychologist believed that children , at every age, are capable of solving various situations and problems. He came to this conclusion by assessing the errors of the little ones, which revealed that children of the same age made the same mistakes.
Finally, it is essential that parents pay attention to the stages of child cognitive development according to Piaget, so that they can ensure that their children develop healthy development through adulthood ; which will facilitate the correct development of their daily activities.
1 Sensorimotor stage (from birth to age 2).
Infants experience the world through their senses and motor activities—by looking, hearing, smelling, sucking, and kicking. For example, a baby leams to hold a ball, tries sucking on it, and later learns the word ball.
Preoperational Stage (from 2 to 6).
Children can use language, drawings, and mental images to represent objects, and they can think about things that cannot be seen or touched. For example, a young child can pretend that a ball is really a pumpkin or draw a picture of a person throwing a ball.
Concrete operational stage (from 7 to 11).
Mental images or representations of the world become more flexible and complex. The child can use logic and reasoning to solve problems and can learn arithmetical operations. A fourth-grader can estimate the number of balls in a toy box and can figure out how many basketballs are needed for each person on a team to have three balls.
Formal operational stage (from 12 on).
The child is capable of abstract, scientific thinking. The child can generate hypotheses, consider alternative solutions to a problem, and imagine abstract possibilities. A child in this stage can learn to use geometry to calculate the volume of a sphere or to determine how many balls of a given diameter will fit in a box that is 2 feet long by 3 feet wide by 2 feet high.
