Jean piaget is a swiss biologist devise the concept of cognitive development. According to piaget every child born in this world acquires a knowledge of their own environment, being terms of exploring, discovering and constructing the stimulus through his or her own activities.he called children as little scientist He also found that thinking systematically change from one point of development to the other. According to piaget the development of thinking and construction of knowledge is made possible through four concepts they are
Schema
Adaptation through assimilation and accommodation
Equiliberation
Organisation
Schemas: It is a cognitive framework or mental structure or psychological structure or learning pattern which helps to organise and interpret information or knowledge. schema is refers to as the building blocks of thinking process. Piaget believed that children are constantly adapting to the environment as they take in new information and learn new things. As experiences happens and new information is presented new schema are developed and old schemas are changed or modified
Eg: when a young child see the picture of a dog, he may first develops a schema of the dog and child knows that the dog has two ears ,four legs and a tail.
Assimilation: it is a cognitive process of adding new concepts or facts to the already existing schema. It is the process of incorporation of new information in to the existing knowledge. In the above example when the child is seeing a barking dog with furry nature child learn two concepts that the barking and fury nature of dog and the child incorporate these information in to his existing schema thus the schema becomes enlarge.
Accommodation: it is the another part of adaptation which involves changing or altering the existing schema in the light of new information as a result a new schema or new experience or new information may developed. for eg: when the same child encounters a cat for the first time he assumed it as a dog but getting more information about the cat ,child starts to develop new schema of cat
Equiliberation: it is a concept developed by piaget that describes the cognitive balancing of new information with old knowledge. when a child develops a cognitive conflict or discomfortable learning it is called disequilibrium .through assimilation and accommodation equilibrium of learning is balanced thus equilibrium is the comfortable state of learning.
Organisation: It is the process of combining different schemas in to complex system.
Jean piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of cognitive development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquires knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence, different stages of cognitive development are...
Sensory motor stage (0- 2 yrs)
Major characteristics and developmental changes in this stage are
The infant knows the world around him through his senses and movements.
Children learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking and listening.
Children learn to perform physical actions such as crawling sitting walking etc
During this stage children starts to interact with people through simple languages
Children develops ability to copying or imitating behaviours of others
They realise that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them
At the end of this stage children learn that things are exist even though they cannot be seen. This ability is called object permanence
Pre operational stage (2 – 7 yrs)
This stage has two sub stages pre conceptual period(2-4yrs) and intuitive period (4 - 7 yrs) important characteristics of this stage are
Child begins to think by symbolic representations
Child begins to understand symbols and signs and he externalize this thoughts through symbol and signs
Child thinking is not logical but based on intuitions
Child is egocentric that means children cannot think from others point of view
Child thinks that dolls and toys are similar to humans, he believes that these objects have same emotions and feelings like humans and this is called animism.
Children at this stage can focus only in one way direction that means the tendency to focus on one salient aspects of a situation at a time and neglect other possible relevant aspects and it is called centration
Children at this stage are interest in pretend play that is act out on day to day activities.
Concrete operational stage (7 – 11yrs)
During this stage children begins to think logically about concrete events
The child has reason well and his thinking becomes more logical and systematic
Inductive thinking or reasoning is developed from specific information to general principles
Egocentrism in the previous stage begins to disappear child starts thinking about how other people might view a situation, he learns to appreciate others views
During this stage child can arrange objects in to classes and subclasses he can tackle concrete problems
Child begin to understand the concept of conservation that thequantity of matter remains same even though it looks different.
During this stage children develops the concept of reversibility. That every action has reversed
During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel.
Children learn to arrange objects in to order on the basis of size number etc this is called seriation
Formal operational stage(11 – 15 yrs)
At this stage child begins to think abstractly and reason out hypothetical problems
Children begin to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social, and political issues that requires theoretical and abstract reasoning
Child show interest in dealing with things that do not exist in reality
He can generalise and arrive at abstract rules in specific situations.
Deductive thinking or reasoning established at this stage.
During this stage formal operations are carried out on ideas
Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions.
Critical evaluation of the theory:
His findings are more subjective and lacks sufficient evidences
Cognitive development is not so uniform and universal as he claimed
Egocentrism is disapproved by modern psychologists
Contribution to education:
Regular pattern of cognitive development in his theory helps to predict the child’s intellectual level and range of comprehension and power of thinking during the course of development
Piaget s theory gives us valuable information as regards planning and framing school curriculum. It advises which subject is to be introduced at a particular level and which is to be excluded.
This theory helps the educators to plan his lesson and method of teaching. The teacher should know the technique of linking new experiences of the child with the old knowledge so they can be easily assimilated by the leaner
This theory emphasis importance of motivation in learning.
This theory thrown light on significance of moral development. This theory putforwad the concept of constuctivism and Teacher as scaffolder.
