Theories Of Piaget's Theory Of Child Development

Child development is an area of significant interest to professionals who deal with children on a daily basis. It is through child development theorists and their theories that we begin to form an understanding of how children develop emotionally and socially to become fully grown adults in society with a moral and emotional compass/. Teachers need to study child development in order to provide developmentally appropriate educational experiences for children. Health professionals also need to understand this area to support children in their physical, social, emotional and cognitive journey to becoming functioning adults in society. Childhood is a concept that is affected by social context and also by history. Here in the West childhood

This means that at the core of the theory is the ability of humans to change and adapt to their environment. Piaget posited that we as humans possess two internal cognitive structures called schemata and operations and it is through these concepts that we grow and develop our intellect. Schema is an internal transfer of understanding of a physical or mental action that the child performs. An example of a schema in a young baby would be that of a sucking schema. Piaget believed that each new born child possesses these schemata which enable them to adapt and survive in the environment. Key to this belief of Piaget’s is the ability of the child to acquire more elaborate schemata as they grow older and as they are faced with different and more complex tasks in their lives. An example of a child developing a new schema in their cognitive development would be when a child uses a schema for the description of a dog and applies it to another new animal that it sees (this being a cat). When the child cannot equate the two schemata it acquires the new information externally and processes it to form a new schema for that of a cat. Essentially Piaget’s schemata can be considered to be building blocks of the

In this stage children’s abilities are limited to the here and now and experiences of the world are largely based around touching things that they can see. According to Piaget children at this stage do not possess complex enough schemata to realise the permanency of objects that they see, so hence the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’.The next stage of development that Piaget identified was the Pre-operational stage which was between the ages of two and seven. Piaget’s theory focuses greatly on this period of child development. He identified a number of characteristics of children’s cognitive development particular to this stage. He conducted interviews and tests on the children to ascertain their cognitive abilities and recorded the results. Piaget found that children were largely egocentric in their interactions with the world and that they were unable to see the world from the viewpoint of anyone else other than