Cognitive Development: Piaget's Theory and Educational Implications

Running Head: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 1
Cognitive Development
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2
Introduction
Cognitive development theory pays attention to development and learning theories.
Cognitive development pays attention to the ability of the learner while learning pays attention to
the realization of those abilities and the education within the approach is external. In cognitive
theory, the behavior shows the emerging of different psychological patterns of thinking that
influences on how children interpret data (Nelson, 2017).
Also, the cognitive development theory explains the reasoning aligned adjustments of
the child getting new methods of discerning their surroundings. Piaget’s theory of implication
presupposes that all children pass through the exact developmental process but their rates differ.
According to his observations, Piaget had an understanding that children create their own ideas.
Teachers must create an effort to give classroom activities for people and smaller groups.
Assessments should be done based on the progress of a person individually since people
construct their knowledge in their environment.
Jean Piaget identified four stages of development which include sensorimotor,
preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. He believed that all children go
through all these stages to improve to the following cognitive development level. In every step,
children show new cognitive capabilities and sophisticated discernment of the world. It is

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 3
impossible to skip a stage; cognitive development always follows that order. The maturity at
which children advance through stages varies with the surrounding and the background of
individual children. The child might also reveal behaviors attributes of more than one stage
(Dadvand et al., 2015).
Stages of development
The first stage is the sensorimotor stage which starts at birth and goes up to 18 months to
two years of age. At this stage, there is a use of motor activity without using symbols. The
knowledge at this point is limited because it is focused on situations and physical cooperation. It
is difficult for the infants to predict reaction hence must continuously experiment and learn
through trial and error (Smith, 2017). Such inspections might encompass putting objects in their
mouths. The infants’ capability develops cognitively increases as they become more mobile than
in any other stage. Furthermore, they start developing language during this stage and object
permanence happen at 7-9 months, showing that there is memory development. The infants often
understand that an object is in existence after it is no longer identified.
The following stage is a preoperational stage that usually happens during the toddlerhood
period which is 18-24 months and early childhood that is seven years (Gray& MacBlain, 2015).
At this stage, children start to use language and the development of memory and imagination
starts to occur. During the preoperational stage, children involve themselves in understanding
and expressing between the past and the future. Also, more complicated concepts like cause and
consequence relationships have not been learned. Intelligence is egocentric and intuitive. The
vocabulary and the sentence structure improves gradually (Zhou & Brown, 2015).