The Development And Legacy Of Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development Research?

The Development and Legacy of Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Research Jean Piaget conducted many experiments involving children, eventually introducing the idea of four stages in children’s cognitive development. His research has encountered criticism over the years, but his work paved a path for psychologists who came after him. Psychologist Jean Piaget made astounding contributions to the developmental field of psychology. At a young age Jean Piaget showed interest and potential in scientific research, but he did not have any institutional schooling in psychology. His interest in knowledge that encompassed much of his work came from his godfather, Samuel Cornut. One of his first jobs in the psychology field was recording children’s
Piaget’s research helped him discover that children structure their knowledge differently than adults. He believed there were four stages of a child’s intellectual development (Cohen, 2011, p. 27). Sensory-motor was the first stage and described how children learn about their environment through senses and motor action. This stage also includes the concept of object permanence that usually lasts until the baby is eight months old. Babies that have not overcome object permeance do not look for an object once it is out of his of her sight and will focus their attention on something new. The pre-operational stage is second and occurs in children between the ages of two and seven. In this stage they do not have to relay on physical contact to obtain knowledge and can think about an event after it has happened (Cohen, 2011, p. 161). However they can not decenter, which means they only give their attention to one object at a time. Cohen (2011), gives the example of children believing taller people must be older than shorter people (p. 161). The third stage is the concrete operational stage, which lasts from seven to eleven years old. In this stage they have the concept of decantation. Unlike in the pre-operational stage children can take on more than one detail about an object in at once. The last stage is the formal operational stage, which begins at about age twelve. In this stage children begin to think about the possible, abstract and hypothetical ideas (Cohen, 2011, p.