Jean Piaget's Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget was a successful and inspirational man. He is known all over the world and has contributed to the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and education. Jean was born in Switzerland in 1896 to Arthur Piaget, a professor of literature at the University. He developed an interest in psychoanalysis at the University of Zurich. He was employed at the Binet Institute where he realized through his studies that there are differences in the way children and adults think. Piaget developed four stages of cognitive development. He was very interested in the way children think and so he did many case studies. Jean Piaget formed a theory of cognitive development that deals with “the process of coming to know and the stages we move through

He believed that these stages were universal and happened all over no matter the culture or society.

The four stages are: Sensorimotor Stage, Preoperational Stage, Concrete Operational Stage, and then Formal Operational Stage. Piaget states we are born with a “very basic mental structure” (simplypsychology.org). From there are learning and inquiry of knowledge is based of that. We are born with reflexes that control our behavior, for infants it helps them adapt. The Sensorimotor Stage is the earliest stage; it starts at birth and generally ends around the age of two years old. In this initial phase, kids are growing and changing rapidly. They experience the world and gain knowledge through their senses motor movements. They learn from interacting with their environment and can only focus on the present rather than past or future. Object permanence is the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it’s not in view. Infants at this stage lack object permanence, they also lack deferred imitation, which is the ability to form mental representations of behavior performed by others. Once they develop object permanence they can move on to the next stage. He did a Blanket and Ball study. Through their own experiments infants develop the concept of separate selves, they realize the world isn’t an extension of

He brought about many educational programs and instructional strategies. Many are built of the belief that children should be taught at the level they are mentally prepared for. Some of the effective strategies are having a supportive environment, social interactions, and peer teaching. Another helpful tool is showing kids fallacies and inconsistencies when it comes to there thinking. On the flip side, there are some criticisms of his theory. Some believe that his three children, whom he used a lot, is an unrepresentative sample. Also some believe the theory has some culturally bias methods. These are some of the ethics issues. However research also shows that kids do not automatically move to the next stage as they mature, environmental factors play a role in growth, and people can posses many abilities at an earlier age than previously expected. Other issues noticed were the fact that children are way less egocentric than he believed and infants may already have object