STAGE THEORY

Stage theory

Stage theory

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980) initially had no interest in child development he was a fervent biologist, studying molluscs. However, after observing his own children's actions, he became interested in his own children's behaviour seeing cognitive behaviour as progressive and developmental(Piaget, 2003). As the child develops they become more competent in their environments and progressively and constantly build mental representations of the world that they live in.

His view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously influential, particularly in educational theory. His observations in the role of maturation (growing up) were particularly compelling and how the child has the capacity to understand the environment they live in. Moreover, the restriction placed on tasks that they are not psychologically mature to do so. Piaget's rationale was that a child's development is incremental and doesn't follow a smooth route. The staged elements are of interest to us, as the child develops they become more capable as they move through the following stages.

Even though Piaget also approached the genesis of knowledge from the perspectives of phylogeny and the history of science, the major portion of his work addressed this issue by studying the development of knowledge in children. In this way, Piaget addressed fundamental epistemological questions about the origin, development, and validity of knowledge in general. He concluded that the development of knowledge is a constructive process, and he emphasized the child's active role in the construction of knowledge: Knowledge is constructed through a process of active exchange between the individual and his or her environment. Piaget's constructivist theory is essentially a theory of dynamic self-organization, which is rooted in biological functioning, with cognitive development representing the extension and continuation of this process of biological self-organization to a new level of functioning. This process of cognitive development results in the construction of increasingly advanced forms of thinking that Piaget described as progressing through a series of stages(Piaget, 2003).

Piaget's Constructivist View of Knowledge and Development

Theories of development are based on views of the nature of knowledge, and therefore, Piaget argued that it is essential to examine foundational assumptions about the nature of knowledge. He argued against “copy theories” of knowledge, according to which knowledge consists of acquiring images, pictures, or representations that match reality. A flaw in these theories is that it is not possible to check the accuracy of such copies except by comparing them to reality itself. But such comparisons are not possible according to copy theories, because the point of the copy was to provide knowledge of reality; if we could directly access reality in order to compare our representations against it, we would not need such representations in the first place. Therefore, this view does not explain the development of knowledge about the world; instead, ...