Piaget
...has been studying the development of children's thinking for more than fifty years. Only in the last decade, however, has American psychology and education come to recognize that Piaget is in fact one of the giants of developing psychology." This idea, as well as others throughout my readings, has given me a better understanding of the way children develop psychologically through education and Piaget's stages of cognitive development.
Piaget proposed four different developmental stages of cognitive development. According to our text book, Educational Psychology Developing Learners, by Jeanne Ellis Ormrod, "Piaget hypothesized that major physiological changes take place when children are about 2 years old, again when they are 6 or 7, and again around puberty, and that these changes allow the development of increasing complex thought." Piaget's four stages of cognitive development are sensorimotor stage (birth until 2 years) where schemes are based on behaviors and perceptions; schemes don't yet represent objects beyond a child's immediate view. The second stage is the preoperational stage (2 years until 6 or 7 years), where schemes now represent objects beyond a child's immediate view, but the child does not yet reason in logical adult like ways. The third stage is concrete operations stage (6 or 7 years until 11 or 12 years), where adult like logic appears but is limited to reasoning about concrete reality. Lastly, the fourth stage of Piaget's cognitive development is formal operations stage (11 or 12 years though adulthood), where logical reasoning processes are applied to abstract ideas as well as to concrete objects.
I chose to do my experiments on more than just a child and an adolescent. I thought it would be more interesting to test a few children in different stages along with an adolescent to see what results I came up with. I chose a boy who is a...
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