Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development

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It is important to remember that Piaget was the first to point out that the qualitive change in the nature of mental ability is to be expected at or around puberty. We may also add that before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults (McLeod, 2009). According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based. At the center of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and abstract levels of thought.…show more content…
These schemas are constantly being modified by two complementary processes: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation refers to the process of taking in new information (incorporating it into an existing schema). On the other hand, accommodation is what happens when the schema itself changes to accommodate new knowledge. According to Piaget, cognitive development involves an ongoing attempt to achieve a balance between assimilation and accommodation that he termed…show more content…
They can imagine and reason about hypothetical situations. Formal operations refer to the ability to perform mental operations with abstract, intangible concepts such as "justice" or "poverty" and to be able to estimate or describe the effect of these intangible concepts. In addition to the ability to perform abstract mental operations, teens become more scientific and logical in the way they approach problems. This approach to problem-solving is called "hypothetico-deductive reasoning". Youth can now consider a problem, or situation, and can identify the many variables that may influence or affect the outcome. They can also estimate the most likely outcome if one or more variables are changed or manipulated. This ability has very practical applications because it enables youth to select the most logical or sensible solution to a problem. (Oswalt, 2009). Aanother process considered by Piaget is the so called “propositional thought”. Adolescents can determine whether a statement is logical or not, just by considering its wording, which means that observation of the concrete scenario is no

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