COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT BY PIAGET
How to develop human knowledge? That is the question which the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget devoted his entire life. Work, spread over nearly sixty years, have laid the foundation of the vast field of research of genetic epistemology which seeks to understand how changing our thinking throughout our lives.
Trained in biology and philosophy, Piaget draws on concepts of these two disciplines to study the development of young children, ideal terrain for observing a thought form. It happens so early to conclude that cognitive development is the result of complex interactions between the nervous system maturation and language, and that maturation depends on social and physical interactions with the world around us.
For Piaget, it is acting on its environment that the child constructs his first reasoning. These cognitive structures (Piaget also speaks of thought patterns), initially entirely different from those of the adult, internalize gradually become more and more abstract.
Piaget's theory of cognitive development are four primary structures that correspond to stages of development, which are further divided into distinct periods where specific cognitive abilities emerge.
The first stage, which extends from birth to about 2 years, is the sensorimotor stage. During this period, the contact between the child and the world that surrounds it depends entirely on the movements and sensations that he experiences. Each new object is brewed, launched, in the mouth in order to understand the characteristics gradually by trial and error. In the middle of the stage towards the end of his first year, the child grasps the concept of object permanence, that is to say that objects continue to exist when they leave his field of vision.
The second stage is the pre-operative period which begins at 2 years and ends around 6 to 7 years. During this period, which is characterized among other things by the advent of language, the child becomes able to think in symbolic terms, to represent things from words or symbols. The child also captures the concepts of quantity, space, and that the distinction between past and future. But there remains much oriented towards the present and concrete physical situations, having difficulty handling abstract concepts. His thinking is also very self-centered in that it often assumes that others see situations from his point of view to him.
Between 6-7 years and 11-12 years, this is the stage of concrete operations. With the experience of the world that accumulates in it, the child becomes able to consider events that occur outside of his own life. He also began to conceptualize and create logical reasoning which, however, still require a direct connection to the concrete. A certain degree of abstraction also allows to address subjects like mathematics where it is possible for the child to solve problems with numbers, coordinate operations in the sense of reversibility, but always about observable phenomena . Solve problems by dissecting several variables consistently remains outstanding at this stage.
Finally, from 11-12 years to develop what Piaget called formal operations. The new capabilities of this stage as to the hypothetico-deductive reasoning and establish abstract relations are usually controlled around the age of 15. At the end of this stage, the adolescent can, like adults, use formal logic and abstract. It can also start thinking about probabilities and moral issues such as justice.
Learning is an adaptation of our thinking to new data from the real. For Piaget, this adaptation can be done in two ways: through assimilation or accommodation.
Assimilation is to interpret new events in the light of existing thought patterns. For example, a toddler knows how to grab his favorite rattle with the fingers of one hand and throw it to make noise. When it falls on a new object, as the fragile watch his father, he transferred this problem without motor pattern known to the new object and sends it bouncing on the floor.
The accommodation is the reverse process, that is to say, change their cognitive structure to integrate a new object or a new phenomenon. If the same child is now a beach ball, it will try to grab it as it does for its rattle with one hand. But soon, he will realize that it does not work and eventually discover how to hold the ball in his hands.
For Piaget, we move constantly assimilation and accommodation during the process of understanding the world around us. During certain periods of development, one of the two, however, can be temporarily used more than the other.