TOPIC 1

Topic 1

Topic 1

Introduction

According to the stage model that he defines in his book “Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood", there are four levels of cognitive growth: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. While a substantial amount of psychologists presently choose to adhere to the constructs of the information processing approach, Piaget's ground breaking cognitive development view is still a valuable asset to the branch of developmental psychology. Whether or not Piaget uncovered any answers to the mysteries of human knowledge is disputable, but one belief that few dispute is that Jean Piaget did indeed lay a strong foundation for future developmental psychologists.

Piaget's major turning point came when the co-worker of the late Alfred Binet, Dr. Simon, requested that he standardize an intelligence test. Piaget flourished in the role of answering complex philosophical questions. Yet, Piaget did not go along with the traditional epistemologists who simply laid back and tried to conjure up answers. Piaget opted for the more biological-type of experiments with epistemology topics. This method of biological experimentation with epistemology gave Piaget the motivation to begin testing children and to do what he felt he was destined to do, determine how the mid grows. His result was the cognitive development theory.

Theoretical Constructs

The cognitive development theory is Jean Piaget's attempt to explain how the human mind develops. A common description of Piaget's view of the mind is that it is and active biological system that uses environmental information to fit with or adjust to its own existing mental structures. ((Henson, Kenneth T., 2003, pp 17-18)) Now, to describe how this biological system develops, Piaget breaks the development process down into three main components: schemes, assimilation and accommodation, and the stage model of cognitive growth. Schemes are the structure or organizations of actions as they are transferred by repetition in similar or analogous circumstances. In simple terms, schemes guide thoughts based on prior experiences, thus, serving as the building blocks of cognitive growth.

Except, with simple schemes, which are the first schemes to develop in a child's life, the child has very little, if any, past experiences to guide his or her thoughts. Therefore, early thoughts depend almost entirely on the new born child's reflexes to senses. These basic schemes later combine with each other in order to develop more complex schemes that are more capable of guiding the child than reflexes. However, the complexity of the schemes depend upon how well and how much an individual either assimilates or accommodates information that is new to the mind. If schemes are considered building blocks, then the assimilation and accommodation processes can best be describes as the construction crews.

These two processes aid in cognitive growth by arranging the new information with schemes that are already present in the individual's mind. The more new information the child assimilates or accommodates, the less his or her schemes will have to rely on physical objects to create cognitive operations. Of course, according to Piaget's stage model, this reliance on ...