Chapter 1. Cognitive Development

Short Description

The fields of psychology and education credit Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget for pioneering the study of cognitive development.

Long Description

The fields of psychology and education credit Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget for pioneering the study of cognitive development. Piaget believed that children think and reason differently in various stages of life and that cognitive growth is the result of our need to make sense of our experiences. This program explores the concepts of schemas, assimilation, accommodation, conservation, and concrete and abstract thinking, while taking the viewer through Piaget's four-stage model of cognitive development.

Schemas, according to Piaget, are mental structures that help us categorize and interpret our experiences. As experiences happen and new information is presented, we create new schemas and change or modify the old ones using the processes of assimilation and accommodation.

Piaget may be best known for his four stages of cognitive development. During the sensorimotor stage from birth to age 2, children are mainly concerned with the mastery of concrete objects. An infant considers an object that is no longer in sight to be gone completely. Children then occupy the preoperational stage from about age 2 to age 7 and begin mastering symbols, but only when the object's properties don't change shape. In this stage, egocentrism persists but the child becomes more aware of others' feelings and perspectives. Children are in the concrete stage from ages 7 to 11, and in that stage, children become capable of logical thought and reasoning. Finally, children enter the formal operational stage at around age 12 and begin thinking abstractly, solving hypothetical problems, and deducing consequences.

When asked where Piaget's work stands today, David Uttal states that "there's a tremendous respect for Piaget for founding the field and knowing why knowledge has to be built up.

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