Jean Piaget

Jean paiget put forward one of the most complex and through account of cognitive development. He believed that children’s intelligence develops through interaction between their biological makeup and the world around them. He also believed that children gain a better understanding of the world through exploring on their own and active engagement and trying out different actions and seeing what effect they had. All the knowledge and new experiences are organised into schemas. Schemas are mental structures which organises the child’s experiences.
When new experiences are encountered they must be made to fit into the a schema to achieve the state of equilibrium (mental balance). If the new experience or a confusing experience is encountered, this can lead to disequilibrium or a lack of mental balance.
Change occurs through maturation. Biological readiness is prerequisite for the change. This makes the Piagets theory a biological theory. Piaget came up with the four stage of cognitive development. First stage is sensorimotor, during the age of 0-2 years the child will illustrate some sort of egocentrism which shows that the infant only knows the world through its immediate sense. The infant cannot distinguish between itself and the environment and lack of object permanence. This basically means that if a child can’t see the object, to them it doesn’t exist, even though it’s only been temporarily hidden. The child’s schemas are very simple at that age, they have in born schemas such as sucking, grasping. Towards the end of this stage infants show deferred imitation-Ability to imitate behaviour that was seen before. Second stage which is from 2-7 years. In this stage the child the child develops its centration, this means that child can only focus on one aspect of an object or a situation at a time. Furthermore children also develop their language during this