Childhood Development: Exploring Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory

This essay provides an overview of Piaget's cognitive development model, a cornerstone in understanding childhood development. It details the four stages: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational, explaining how children's cognitive abilities evolve. The essay highlights the benefits of this model, such as enhanced teaching approaches and customized learning strategies, while also acknowledging its limitations, including potential biases in research methods and underestimation of children's abilities. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of understanding these developmental stages for promoting children's physical, social, educational, and mental growth. The essay concludes by asserting the model's effectiveness in providing insights into how children acquire knowledge and interact with the world, supported by relevant references.

CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

Childhood Development
Childhood development concentrate on how they can easily grow and increase their
mental ability in childhood. There are different types of models that help to increase the mental
ability and also help in social, emotional and cognitive growth. Models of childhood
development help to increase the physical and social development in the child. Children were
often viewed simply as small versions of adults and less attention was paid to the different
advances in a cognitive ability, language usage and physical growth. There are different and
effective theories and models of childhood development that help to increase a level of physical
and mental development. This give more enhancement to a child development. Understanding is
more important in childhood development because it allows us to fully appreciate the physical,
mental, physical, social and educational growth that children go through after birth and into early
adulthood. Some of the models of a childhood development includes various stages that describe
every aspect of a development (Alejandro-Wright, 2013).
Piaget's cognitive development model is concerned with a development of a person
through processes. It also focuses on how these thoughts processes influence, how they will
understand and interact with the world. Jean Piaget's developed this kind of model that helped to
increase the development of physical, social, education and mental . It gives more enhancement
to the childhood development. This model helps to increase the level of intellectual development.
Various steps of Piaget's model as follows:
The sensorimotor level: It includes At this level a child cannot understand the concept of
understanding and not share the feeling to other peoples. In this stage of this model the behaviour
is limited to simple motor responses that is particularly caused by the sensory stimuli (Beilin and
Pufall, 2013).
The pre-operational level: . During the age between 2 to 7 children do not understand the
logics and point of view of other people. They also cannot mentally manipulate information and
they are not able To give their opinion to others. They do not have appropriate knowledge about
how to express their feeling and information to other people.
The concrete operational level: It includes children between age of 8 and 11 Years. At
this level of childhood, they can easily understand the concepts and also understand mental
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operations in the world. Children can easily think about the concrete events, they have more
difficulty to understand the abstract or hypothetical (Ültanir, 2012).
The formal operational level: This level, include 13 to adulthood group, where teenagers
develop the ability to think and understand the appropriate concepts. They plan to include
different skills such as logical thoughts, deductive reasoning and the systematic planning. At this
stage, they have the ability to understand and take others point of view to manipulate appropriate
information. They also have planned to develop different and effective skills (Bickhard, 2013).
There are different and effective benefits of the Piaget's cognitive model. This model
considers the views about the HI and cognitive development. It helps to develop the childhood in
different areas such as physical, social, educational and mental (Jean piaget and child
development, 2014). With the help of natural environment, the cognitive development will
continue to develop and create a person assess what they already knows and what is actually
observed in a reality. There are different advantages of this model such as enhanced teaching
approach for a child, customized learning strategy, it helps to support to enhancement the
environment for the school child etc. These all are the benefits of this model. In this customized
learning strategy, they customized the task according to the person's ability and learning capacity
(Schlesinger and McMurray, 2012). Depends on the learning capacity of the particular people
they will provide appropriate task to them. It also helps to increase their efficiency and mental
ability. In the enhancement of the environment for school children, school coordinators provide
different and attractive activities that help to the child to interact with each other and also help to
increase their knowledge in the social area (Gopnik and Wellman, 2012).
There are some bad effects of this model of childhood development. Piaget's research
methods is not reliable and effective as that was formed from a blessed samples such as
researched on the children and only they consider the child from the high SES. There are one
more disadvantage such as Piaget's underestimated children's abilities. It includes most children
posses abilities an in the earlier age then he or she believed. Some of the children has the ability
to manipulate the information and take other point of view. They can also have the ability to
share their feelings to others. This model help to increase the level of development in different
fields such as educational, logical, physical and mental etc. These all are the fields that help for
the childhood development (Morra and et.al., 2012).
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From the above essay, it can be concluded the Piaget's model is more effective and
appropriate for the childhood development. Childhood models concentrate on how child can
develop his knowledge in different areas. These models help to increase the mental ability and
also help to increase the level of physical and mental development. They provide appropriate and
effective methods for the childhood development. These consists of different stages or levels
for the childhood development. Piaget's model mainly concentrates on the development of
person's thought processes. It also focusses on how these thought processes influence how they
understand and interact with the world. It includes for levels such as sensorimotor, the pre
operational, concrete operational and formal operational level. These levels help in
understanding childhood development in an effective manner. It has advantages and
disadvantages during the development. This model provides appropriate explanations regarding
the development of the child in different areas such as education, social and physical.
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REFERENCES
Books and journals
Alejandro-Wright, M. N., 2013. The child’s conception of racial classification: A socio-cognitive
developmental model. Beginnings: The art and science of planning psychotherapy.
pp.185-200.
Beilin, H. and Pufall, P. B. eds., 2013. Piaget's theory: Prospects and possibilities. Psychology
Press.
Bickhard, M. H., 2013. Scaffolding and self-scaffolding: Central aspects of development. LT
Winegar, Sc]. Valsiner (Eds), Chz'ldreri’sd U. 610. pp.33-52.
Gopnik, A. and Wellman, H. M., 2012. Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian
learning mechanisms, and the theory. Psychological bulletin. 138(6). p.1085.
Morra, S. and et.al., 2012. Cognitive development: neo-Piagetian perspectives. Psychology
Press.
Schlesinger, M. and McMurray, B., 2012. The past, present, and future of computational models
of cognitive development. Cognitive Development. 27(4). pp.326-348.
Ültanir, E., 2012. An Epistemologic Glance at the Constructivist Approach: Constructivist
Learning in Dewey, Piaget, and Montessori.
Online
Jean piaget and child development. 2014. [Online]. Available through
<http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=7929&cn=28> [Accessed
on 3 November 2017]
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