Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development Essay

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Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget based his cognitive development stage theory on the knowledge a child constructs through physical experience with the environment. It was very clear to him that pupils in middle childhood think differently to adolescents (Phillips, 1969). In this assignment I will discuss why I agree that every stage has an increased level of systematic mental activity (Piaget, 1952). Piaget's cognitive development stage theory. Concrete stage According to Piaget, a child between seven to eleven years of age, finds themselves in the concrete operational period. This third stage of cognitive development, marks the beginning of logical thought (Phillips, 1969). This can be strengthened by the act of children now understanding the concept of numbers and applying cardinal numbers to fruits, stones, animals, etcetera (Simatwa, 2010). The terms centration and decentration are two key Piagetian terms. The former, is a limitation to the previous stage. The latter can be defined as the child being able to see beyond one aspect, but rather thinking in two or more dimensions of a subject or object (Woolfolk, 2004). Due to this new capability, experiments examine how the child no longer makes the error to think that a tall, thin glass contains more substance than a short, wide glass (Ntshangase, 2011), but they understand that the …show more content…

Convergent thinking on the other hand can be defined as the person being competent at formulating one correct response (Dacey & Travers, 2002) By investigation a open-ended test, such as the “Uses of Objects”, the divergent thinking was made clear to me. Divergent thinking and convergent thinking are two important processes in creativity (Hommel, Colzato, Fischer & Christoffels, 2011). In formal operational stage , the person starts challenging and questioning aspects of their life and this facilitates creative thinking (Shefer,

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