Does Knowledge Understanding and Competence Progress Through a Succession of Stages?
The question of how we develop has been one of much argument over the past decades. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) has done ground breaking research when it comes to understanding how we develop. As import he radically changed our perception of children. The tendency was to overlook them as if they were incapable of thinking and performing any logical tasks. Piaget found that children were not incapable of thinking as such, they merely think and reason differently and at a lower level.
His view is that we develop in stages, and he identified four stages every child goes through, all of them with their individual characteristics limits and new abilities. He found that children either had certain abilities or not and that this showed in their level of reasoning. He also found that the age-group and type of task which a child could perform were related.
The other theory is that development is continuous and that children don 't gain abilities all at once they develop them over time, possibly well into their adulthood. This understanding is presented in mechanistic theories, this is mostly supported by challenging earlier finding, going over old experiments to see how sound they actually are and challenging the conclusions drawn from those data.
I will be comparing the different theories concerning how knowledge, competence and understanding develop. I will look at various research that has been conducted by i.e. Piaget et al, Mitchell, Wimmer and Hartl, and I will look at how these experiments set ups have been challenged and changed to see if they would obtain new results.
I will contrast both theories in an attempt to find out how development progresses.
Piaget presented a theory which explained how development actually proceeded. He was a constructivist who believed that children through experience gained new skills which allowed them to deal with more complex tasks but also to build upon that. When we talk about discontinuous development the general
His view is that we develop in stages, and he identified four stages every child goes through, all of them with their individual characteristics limits and new abilities. He found that children either had certain abilities or not and that this showed in their level of reasoning. He also found that the age-group and type of task which a child could perform were related.
The other theory is that development is continuous and that children don 't gain abilities all at once they develop them over time, possibly well into their adulthood. This understanding is presented in mechanistic theories, this is mostly supported by challenging earlier finding, going over old experiments to see how sound they actually are and challenging the conclusions drawn from those data.
I will be comparing the different theories concerning how knowledge, competence and understanding develop. I will look at various research that has been conducted by i.e. Piaget et al, Mitchell, Wimmer and Hartl, and I will look at how these experiments set ups have been challenged and changed to see if they would obtain new results.
I will contrast both theories in an attempt to find out how development progresses.
Piaget presented a theory which explained how development actually proceeded. He was a constructivist who believed that children through experience gained new skills which allowed them to deal with more complex tasks but also to build upon that. When we talk about discontinuous development the general
References: Mitchell, P (1997) Introduction to theory of mind: children, autism and apes, third edition. J.W. Arrowsmith limited: Bristol, UK Siegal, M (1997) Knowing children: experiments in conversation and cognition, second edition Psychology press limited: Sussex, UK Slater, A and Bremner, G (2004) An introduction to developmental psychology, first edition. Blackwell publishing: Cornwall, UK. Smith, L and Dockrel, J and Tomilnson, P (1997) Piaget, Vygotsky and beyond: Future issues for developmental psychology and education, first edition. Routledge: New York, USA