Sunday, October 23, 2016

Children’s cognitive development by Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget is Swiss psychologist conducting a lifelong study of children’s cognitive development in the past half-century (Piaget, 1954, 1964, 1969). Piaget’s theory focused on schema and assimilation and accommodation. According to Piaget, children are naturally curious explorers who are constantly trying to make sense of the world by interacting with their environment and with others (Loewenstein, 1994). In this process, they construct schema or mental process to organize information. Furthermore, assimilation involves trying to relate something new to something that we are really know whereas accommodation takes place when an individual changes an existing schema so that it can explain the new experiences. The processes of assimilation are motivated by need to find equilibrium, the natural tendency to find consistency in one’s thinking. To understand about Children’s cognitive development, Piaget believed that it happens in a structured sequence of four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Firstly, sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old) shows that infants are able to coordinate their sensory and motor abilities to create a set of behavioral schema. In this stage infant only shows his reflective form to adapt with world. The main process of cognitive development in the stage is object permanent—understanding that object and phenomenon continually exist when the object and phenomenon cannot be seen, heard, and touched. It means that infant can distinguish his own self and environment.
Furthermore, preoperational stage (2-7 years old) have four characteristics. Firstly, the children have not yet developed the ability to think logically and they use their perception and intuition to know something and solve problem. Secondly, the children use symbols (e.g. words, numbers, languages) to represent actual object and event around them. The third characteristic in this stage is the use of pretend play. It means the children use object available in environment. The last characteristic is egocentrism. Children in this stage display that they are not able to consider the world from their own perspective.
Moreover, concrete operational stage (7-9 years old) is characterized by children ability to think logically about concrete object (Flavell, Miller, & Miller 2002). There are three kinds of the development; classification—the ability to group objects on the basis of common characteristic, seriation—the ability to order objects on the basis of increasing, decreasing, length, volume, and weight, transitivity—the ability to infer a relationship between two objects based on the known relationship of one of the object with  third object.  
In addition, formal operational stage (11++ years old) is the same as the stage of concrete operations. It includes both logical and systematic thinking. There are five mental characteristics in this stage. First, the children can use propositional logic, ability to judge argument when the argument is opposite with reality. Second, the children can use hypothetical deductive reasoning, the ability to generate and test hypothesis or predictions by separating and controlling variables. Third, the children can use analogical reasoning, the ability to understand how something unfamiliar works based on an understanding of how something more familiar works. Fourth, the children can use combinatorial reasoning, the ability to conceptualize how several elements might be combined. Fifth, the children will also be able to solve problems involving probability and proportional reasoning.
However, why should teachers understand about children’s cognitive development? Because teachers should know appropriate approach, method, or technique to teach their student. Education should know be suitable with this development. It means teaching is based on their level, not easy or difficult, in order to not feel scare or boring, so the teachers must teach the students based on their needs.
For Furthermore information, reading these books                                        
John W. Santrock. (2001). Educational psychology (5th ed). US: Mc Graw Hill
Moreno, R. (2010). Educational psychology. US: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Flavell, Miller, & Miller (2002). Cognitive Development (4th ed) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
           Hall.
Loewenstein, 1994. The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychology Bulletin, 117,75-98.