THEORIST IN EDUCATION:

JEAN PIAGET:

Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist who was the first to make a systematice study of the axquisition of understanding in children. Piaget took the intellectual functioning of adults as the central phenomenon to be explained and wanted to know how an adult acquired the ability to think logically and to draw valid conclusions about he world from evidence. Jean Piaget teory is based on the idea that the child develops through stages until they arrive at a stage of thinking that resembles that of an adult. He believes that intellectual growth of a child arises primarily our of the interactions with objects in the environment. Children organize and adapt their experiences to allow them to deal with future situations in a more effective way.

The four stages Piaget separates children in to are sensorimotor (birth-2yrs), preoperational (2yrs-7yrs), concrete-operational (7yrs-12yrs), and formal operations (12yrs-adult). During the sensorimotor stage, the child learns about oneself and their environment through motor and reflex. Though derives from sensation and movement and the child learns that they are separate from their environment and aspects within it. In the preoperational stage, children start to use symbols to represent objects and assumes that others see situations from their viewpoints. Children take in information and then changes it to fit their ideas. During the concrete stage, accommodation increases. The child develops an ability to think abstractly and to make rational judgements about concrete or observable factors. In the final stage, people no longer need concrete objects to make rational judgements. People are capable of reasoning and understanding many possibilities from several different perspectives.

It makes sense that children go through different stages and this is exactly why it is so important to make sure learning is at an appropriate level. There are certain things that children can process. Depending on their age and developmental stage, children are able to process certain social and cognitive situations. In some cases children can not process information because they are not ready and their cognitive process is not at the same level. It is important for children to build on their knowledge and learn from their experiences in order to understand how to handle and process situations effectively.


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