Analysis Of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

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Cognitive evolution is the study of juvenile nervous system and emotional growth (Mayer SJ. 2005). Cognitive advancement is measure founded on the platform of formation, cognizance, data handling, and semantic as a gauge of mind improvement. It is normally predictable that intellectual growth improves with phase, as human alertness and appreciation of the surrounding grows from primary stages to juvenile, and then yet again into youth. The progression of intellectual evolution was initially defined by Jean Piaget, in his Theory of Cognitive Development, (Kendra Cherry, 2018). It is with kids that we have the best chance of studying the change of rational data, mathematical data and corporal awareness.

Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development advocates that kids will move over four different phases of conceptual growth. The emphases is on knowing how youngsters obtain information, including the consideration of flora of astuteness. Piaget’s categorized the phases into four distinguish areas. It is as follows:

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  • Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years
  • Preoperational stage: ages 2 to 7
  • Tangible functioning stage: ages 7 to 11
  • Prescribed functioning stage: ages 12 and up

Piaget assumed that kids takes an active role in the learning process. They act like little experts when they perform experiments. They make observations and learn about the surrounding with continually adding new consideration and build upon current awareness and acclimatize formerly held thoughts to quarter innovative data. Cognitive growth comprises variations in perceptive methods and capabilities. Piaget’s view is that early mental growth involves procedures founded upon activities and later develops to modifications in rational methods.

He established a phased concept of rational growth that included four diverse stages:

1) The Sensorimotor Phase of Mental Expansion (from birth to 2 Years).

  • The baby knows the environments through their movements and intelligences.
  • Kids learn through elementary activities such as slurping, watching, and listening.
  • Babies acquire that things remain to exist but not familiar with.
  • Kids are detached beings from the persons and items nearby them.
  • Kids recognize their actions can cause things to occur around them.

During the early phase of rational progress, kids gain awareness over sensory familiarities and manipulating objects. A child’s total familiarity at the earliest period of this phase arises through basic reactions, minds, and mechanical responses. It is during the sensorimotor phase that kids go over a time of intense growth and education. When kids relate with their surroundings, they continually make new discoveries about how the surrounding works. The emotional growth during this phase occurs, for a fairly short span of time and involves a great deal of growth. Kids attain an excessive deal about verbal language from the surrounding persons they intermingle with, including actions such as crawling and walking. This is further broken down into sub phases by Piaget. According to him early depictive ideas matures during the last part of sensorimotor. He alleged that emerging purpose of constancy and the accepting of matters continue to occur even when it is not seen at this stage of a child’s growth. By learning the existence that objects are distinct and dissimilar, kids are able to comprehend their distinct insights and they begin to attach names and words to object.

2) Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Growth in Young Kids (Ages: 2 to 7 Years)

  • Children start to deliberate figuratively and learn to use verses and images to denote objects.
  • Children inclined to be egoistic and scuffle to realize things from the perspective of others.
  • While improving with verbal message and thoughtfulness, children views matters in very tangible terms.

The fundamentals of language development have been laid during the earlier stage, but it is the advent of language that is one of the key assurances of the preoperational phase of progress.

Kids capabilities becomes apparent in a imaginary play during this stage of development. They think very concretely about the outer surroundings. This is the phase where children study through pretend performance but still brawl with logic and taking the viewpoint of new persons. The kids also regularly struggle with accepting the impression of constancy.

For instance, when we take a lump of soil and divide it into two equivalent parts, and then give a child the choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a solid ball while the supplementary is smashed into a flat pancake shape. To a child the flat shape would look larger, the preoperational kid will likely choose this portion even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.

3) The Tangible Operational Phase in Mental Growth (Ages: 7 to 11 Years)

  • Children start to think rationally about real events and appreciate the awareness of preservation;
  • Their rational becomes more balanced and structured, but solid.
  • They start to use perceptive from definite data to a common value.

While kids are still very solid and precise in their rational at this point in development, they become much more proficient at using rational thought. The egoistic nature of the previous stage begins to fade as children become better at thinking about how other people might view a situation. Their rationalization becomes much more logical and firm. Children academic growth improves as they tend to scuffle with intangible and assumed perceptions. Throughout this phase children become less selfish and start to think about how other people might contemplate and feel. They start to comprehend that their opinions are exclusive to them.

4) Prescribed Operative Phase of Cognitive Progress (Ages: 12 and Up)

  • He the young grown-up begins to reflect hypothetically and purpose about conjectural difficulties.
  • Here the intellectual thought emerges on each adolescent
  • Teens start to think more about ethical, rational, moral values, and radical matters that require theoretic and intangible reasoning.
  • Teens start to use inferential perceptive from a common belief to explicit evidence.

The concluding stage of Piaget’s theory comprises with an increase in rationality with the capability to use inferential reasoning plus the appreciativeness of notional ideas. At this juncture, teens develop capability of seeing several probable answers to complications and reflect more analytically about the atmosphere around them. The key to a prescribed functioning phase of cognitive growth is the ability to think about rational ideas and situations. The capability to methodically plan for the forthcoming and reason about imaginary situations are also critical abilities that materialize during this phase. Piaget at this stage did not assess children’s rational progress as a quantitative process, but rather adding more evidence and information to their existing knowledge as they get older. He recommended that there is a qualitative transformation in how children think as they gradually grow and process over these four stages. Taking an example of a child at age 7 who has more evidence about the surrounding than he did at age 2. There is a fundamental change in how he thinks about the world. There are few vital ideas to better understand some of the things that occur during cognitive development as introduced by Piaget. The following are some of the factors that affect how kids learn and grow. They are schematic, integration, accommodation and equilibration.

Schemas

A schema defines equally the rational and corporeal activities involved in accepting and knowing. Schemas are categories of information that aid us to construe and appreciate the world. In Piaget’s view, a schema contains both a category of information and the course of finding that data.

As familiarities happen, this new data is used to alter, add to, or change previously existing schemas. Hollen and Garber (1988) noted that when an individual is provided to schema-discrepant evidence, one of two things generally occurs. The data can be transformed to fit into the current schema. Taking an instance, a kid may have an idea about a form of a puppy. If the child’s only involvement has been with a puppy, a child may trust that all puppies are small, furry, and have four legs. What idea will cross a kid when he encounters a dog? The kid now takes in this fresh data to modify the previous known schema to include these new observations.

Assimilation

The method of taking in innovative data into our already current schemas is known as assimilation. The route is somewhat independent since we tend to transform understandings and information slightly to fit in with our earlier philosophies. The example above, sighted a dog and labeling it ‘dog’ is a case of embracing the animal into the child’s dog schema.

Accommodation

This part involves varying or modifying our current schemas incorporating new evidence, a method known as accommodation. Accommodation contains amending existing schemas as a outcome of new data or practices. New schemas may also be established during this course. The role of accommodation in how we learn the new data.

Equilibration

Piaget alleged that all children will try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is realized through a tool called equilibration. When kids grow through the phases of cognitive progress, it is vital to preserve an equilibrium between the application previous information (assimilation) and shifting conduct to account for new facts (accommodation). Equilibration helps in the explanation of how kids can move from one phase of thought to the next.

Relating Piaget’s Theory with Sand Play Activity

Kids have always been fascinated by sand play. They dig into sand, sift it, build with it, pour it, enjoy the feel and smell of it, imagine with it, and discover how it moves. There is no right way to use sand. It promotes participation, it allows children to make and test assumptions and it stretches their imagination. It also provides a potentially comforting sensory experience and it is an excellent avenue for children to learn physical, cognitive, and social skills.

Sand play is open-ended and the children determines the direction and path of their own play. This liberty then clears the way for the child to build progressive concepts. Piaget indicated that children have an inner drive to build an understanding of their world as they discover and interact with materials. Perceptions about how the world works are built progressively and become gradually complex as children enters a rich learning environment and exercises his or her freedom to play.

When a child first encounters a new play setting, he or she will behave in a manner described as the exploration-play-application sequence (Vandenberg, 1984). A child will carefully explore the material such as sand before the child plays with it. It has been proposed that this tentative exploration is a child’s way of determining whether it is safe to begin play (Weisler & McCall, 1976). A child who was not exposed to an occasion to play in sand will need time to discover their new environment before beginning focused play. We as preschool teachers would allocate additional time for children to become engaged with sand and other materials.

The play arrangement is vital as children starts to discover and understand in their own way. They tend to change skills which they apply to new situations (Sylva, Bruner, & Genova, 1976). This is the time where play becomes practice time during which the child matures with useful physical, cognitive, and social skills in an environment where faults and mistakes are insignificant. These skills can become resourceful for the child’s future use.

The Teacher’s Role in the Sand Play Activity

It is important that this play be made flexible. Children should feel happy asking and replying their own questions. The teacher’s role at preschool is to structure a rich atmosphere, observe what children are doing and thinking, and relate in a no ordering manner. Teachers should ‘encourage problem solving, perspective taking, and/or consideration of feelings’ (Chaille & Britain, 1997, 65).

A flexible play can be nurtured by using key phrases like the following:

  • How could you fix that?
  • What else could you do?
  • What would happen if you…?
  • What do you think/feel about…?
  • How did you do that?
  • Is there another way to…?

By asking open-ended questions, the teacher provides a framework that enables children to learn more than they could on their own. The teacher initially need to offer support for learning, then progressively withdraws that provision as children become able to do more on their own. The teacher first carefully prepares a challenging, intriguing environment. The teacher needs to ask purposeful questions which can help build a connection for children to close the gap between what they can do and what could be accomplish.

The learning benefits for children playing with sand.

There is a promotion of physical development in sand play for children in preschool. Muscle skills develop as children dig, pour, sift, scoop, and clean up spills with brush and dustpan. The hand and eye coordination is synchronized and small muscle control is enhanced as children learn to handle sand equipment. Sand play promotes social skills. When children apply teamwork at the sand table, they are confronted with real difficulties that require involvement, negotiating, and assigning. As an example, a group of children are given a dramatic play by the playground where they are required to build castle and another to create a zoo for rubber animals. When they take their roles in this dramatic play, they learn significant social skills such as compassion and outlook.

Teachers encourage cognitive development by formulating an interesting, stimulating sand play atmosphere. This atmosphere can be appreciated by altering and adding exciting accessories to the sand play area. Mathematical perceptions can be established during sand play by providing children with spoons and cups, containers of various sizes and shapes including balance scales. When a teacher observes the children’s sand play, the use of mathematical terms like more or less; empty or full; heavy or light can be heard. Teachers can challenge children to count how many scoops it takes to fill a container.

The sand play develops science concepts in children. They can suspend a funnel above the sand table. The funnel can be used to place sand and drop it as a trail. Ropes can be used to move small buckets of sand. The teacher needs to prepare punched holes plastic bottle where children are required to fill it with sand and observe. The same can be tried with different sizes and placement of holes. Ask children what they could do with the sand. Then add water to the sand. Ask them what happen and how does it change? This will encourage children to make shapes for use in sand play and find out what how they develop language skills. Teachers can invite children to write their names in the sand or tell a story about their play.

Teachers can incorporate the arts into sand play by encouraging children to draw and trace words on the sand; make castings and moldings, and pictures to express their feelings. Another activity is where children are introduced with background music to carry out the act using sand combs and describe pattern and design. Teachers can think of many more accessories to change the sand play area to keep it renewed and attractive.

Conclusion

Children in preschool have a natural attraction for sand play activity. Teachers can construct on that interest by providing children with tempting props, enquiring suitable questions, and planning sufficient time for children to work through their play concepts. Teachers may also provide the motivating atmosphere to enrich the concept development and talent building. It is important that the sand play area remain free and child-centered so that children may produce their own play patterns ingeniously.

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