Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained
Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of learning. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence. Piaget's stages are:
Sensorimotor stage: Birth to 2 years
Preoperational stage: Ages 2 to 7
Concrete operational stage: Ages 7 to 11
Formal operational stage: Ages 12 and up
Piaget believed that children take an active role in the learning process, acting much like little scientists as they perform experiments, make observations, and learn about the world. As kids interact with the world around them, they continually add new knowledge, build upon existing knowledge, and adapt previously held ideas to accommodate new information.
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History of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development
Piaget was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s and was a precocious student, publishing his first scientific paper when he was just 11 years old. His early exposure to the intellectual development of children came when he wor
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The Sensorimotor Stage
Ages: Birth to 2 Years
During the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2) infants develop basic motor skills and learn to perceive and interact with their environment through physical sensations and body coordination.
Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:
The infant learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring their environment).
During the sensorimotor stage, a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; self-recognition (the child realizes that other people are separate from them); deferred imitation; and representational play.
Cognitive abilities relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally.
At about 8 months, the infant will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they can’t see them, and the infant will search for them when they disappear.
At the beginning of this stage, the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory, so it does not have a sense of object permanence.
If the child cannot see something, then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy from an infant, while it watch
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