PIAGET'S THEORY OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Piaget's theory of child development

Piaget's Theory Of Child Development

Introduction

Over the course of 60 years, Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss biologist and philosopher, formulated a theory of the development of intellectual competence that continues to influence contemporary theories in that field. Piaget maintained that logical thought depended on learning, social cooperation, biological maturation, and development, by which he meant a series of fundamental changes such that the later ways of thinking are dependent upon, yet qualitatively distinct from, the earlier ones, always moving in the direction of greater logical consistency. He formulated subsidiary theories of the development of moral judgment and reasoning, perception, images, and memory, always from the perspective of how each was constrained by the various levels of intellectual competence (Romine, 2005, 190).

The Stages of Intellectual Development

Piaget claimed only that he had developed a general outline or skeleton of a theory, with gaps to be filled in by others. Even the number of stages of intellectual development varied in his work from time to time, but most accounts set forth four main stages: the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), with six substages; the preoperational stage (2-7 years), with two substages; the concrete operational stage (7-12 years), with two substages; and the formal operational stage (12 years and up).

Within each stage and substage, Piaget frequently distinguished three levels: failure, partial success, and success. In the final versions of the theory, development was viewed not as linear progression through the stages, but as an open-ended spiral in which the differentiated forms and content at one level are reworked, restructured, integrated, or synthesized at the higher levels of the spiral.

Sensorimotor Stage

The six substages of this stage show the following developments: The infant exhibits (1) innate reflexes and an inability to think, have purpose, or distinguish him/herself from the surroundings; (2) reflexes extended to repetitive actions; (3) the ability to reproduce fortuitous, pleasant, and interesting events; (4) increased coordination of ways to make the interesting things last; (5) discovery of new ways to produce interesting results; and (6) an ability to represent absent events symbolically. The principal accomplishments are the construction of coordinated movements, which have a group like mathematical structure; the construction of representation; and the idea of permanent objects and intentionality (Iaccino, 2004, 52).

Preoperational Stage

This stage has often been characterized primarily by what the child cannot do. Thought seems rigidly captured by one aspect of a situation, often the child's own point of view (egocentrism), to the exclusion of other perspectives. Thought, besides being cantered on a single salient feature of an event, seems to flow in sequences of simple juxtaposition rather than sequences of logical implication or physical causality. Children's reasons for their responses are often preposterous fabrications, or justifications at any price.

Concrete Operational Stage

The errors the child makes during the preoperational stage are corrected in the subsequent stage, but not uniformly or all at once. The solution to problems is worked out separately in various domains. For example, the notion of invariance (conservation) is ...