Jean Piaget's Influence On Child Development

Swiss psychologist and developmental theorist Jean Piaget’s constructivist cognitive theory continues to have substantial impact on our understanding of child development. Piaget interpreted child development as an active process, in which children actively interact with and discover phenomenons of the external environment (Shaffer, David R. Social and Personality Development. Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009, Print, 52). As an active theory, children were labeled as ‘constructivists’ whom construct schemas in order to raise their understanding of the external environment (McLeod, Saul. “Saul McLeod.” Cognitive Theory | Simply Psychology, 1 Jan. 1970). Piaget illustrated how the process of child development consists of four unique stages,

Despite the maturation of my schema, it did not necessarily aid in my subsequent learning and understanding of the world. Dwelling in the ‘Preoperational Stage’, my thinking process was dominated by what Piaget called ‘Intuitive Thought’, the tendency to classify objects based on their predominant physical features (Shaffer, 59). With the absence of intellectual and logical reasoning capabilities, I distinguished other policemen purely based on their physical and perceptual image, leading to multiple misinterpretations. I only understood the fallacies within my thinking process during mid-elementary school, and it forced me to digress from intuitive thought and onto a more rational thinking process, characterized by the tendency to focus on multiple aspects of a problem instead of the most salient one and the deviation from appearance directed conclusions (Shaffer, 61). This led to my transference from the ‘Preoperational Stage’ to the ‘Concrete Operational

The mechanism of accommodation however could not be initiated involuntary, instead a repudiation has to occur in order to provoke a modification of a schema, Piaget labelled these repudiations as ‘disequilibriums’, implicating the “imbalances or contradictions between one’s thought processes and environmental events” (Shaffer, 53). The disequilibrium I faced during math class in year 5 was quite ineffaceable, perpetuating a accommodation in my mathematical calculation schema that remains unchanged till this