Piagets Stages Of Cognitive Devlopment Flashcards
Name the 4 stages in order
Sensorimotor = birth - 2
Pre-operational = 2 - 7
Concrete e operational = 7- 11
Formal operational = adolescence - adulthood
Describe the sensorimotor stage
0 - 2
Baby’s focus is on physical sensations and development of motor skills. They start to relate what they can see to what they can do.
Object permanence develops – the child understands that something continues to exist even when out of sight
Describe the pre- operational stage
2 - 7
Infants cant think in a consistently logical way. The toddler is mobile and is using language but there are still some errors in reasoning. In other words children are thinking differently from adults and so making mistakes in some of their tasks.
Egocentric (view the world from their own perspective) and lack conservation (do not understand that quantity remains constant even
though it may look different)
Describe the concrete operational stage
7 - 11
Children have better reasoning abilities. They can conserve and perform much better on tasks of egocentrism. This shows they have better reasoning abilities.
Logical thinking applied to physical objects in the child’s presence only. No abstract thought. Class inclusion learnt (the ability to classify objects as
belonging to 2 or more categories simultaneously).
Describe the formal operational stage
11+
Children are capable of formal reasoning. They are able to start reasoning about things that are outside their experience and not get distracted by the content of arguments.
Children become capable of scientific reasoning and appreciate abstract ideas.
State one strength of Piaget stages of cognitive development
One strength of this theory is that the evidence still supports the view that children go through stages of cognitive development as
they get older.
Piaget may have been mistaken about what young children can do, but from the research it appears there are changes in the way children think as they get older.
It seems that Piaget’s overall concepts of stages in cognitive development were correct.
State a weaknesses of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
One weakness of Piaget’s stage theory is that he underestimates what young children are capable of.
Other research that looked at cognitive understanding of children has found that children younger than Piaget believed, could understand tasks when they made more sense to them. It appears Piaget was testing children’s ability to understand tasks rather than their ability to reason.
This suggest some aspects of children’s thinking develops much earlier than Piaget suggested.
