Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Stages

1000 Words4 Pages
Psychology is a fascinating subject to me. The study of which gives me an overview towards the human behavior and mental processes. I do realize the discipline relying on the scientific method and empirical evidence after enrolling in this subject. Some theories taught throughout the past lectures, such as the structure of personality in Freud’s theory and Maslow’s humanistic theories, arouse my curiosity to link the discipline and daily life events together. Among these theories, Piaget’s theory of cognitive stages has interested me most. According to Piaget, there are 4 cognitive development stages of children, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. The stage I would like to talk about is the…show more content…
For instance, she can answer single‐digit‐multiplication quickly by reciting multiplication table but not able to answer double‐digit‐addition and subtraction and reverse calculations. Instead, she does finger counting and working on the paper to figure out the answer. The second example is I do spend more than three hours to explain how “hours and minutes” in concept of time are operated. Some features in these two examples appear in the preoperational stages. Most children at this stage are unable to understand abstract ideas and mental operation because of lacking certain cognitive abilities (Carole & Carol, 2012). My sister’s illustration has showed two characteristics of preoperational stage cognitive development. Obviously, one characteristic is her cognitive abilities for abstract thinking have not fully developed so that she is hard to imagine the concept of “hours and minutes”. The concept of time is indeed abstract in her viewpoint as it can neither “see” nor “touch” the time. The second one is that thinking reversibly gives her constraint when doing reverse calculations. This matches Piaget’s theory in which it states thinking of children at this stage is irreversible…show more content…
The contradiction between Piaget’s theory and my daily life experiences appears. The last problem I find is that sex does matter in cognitive development of children during age 2‐7. In my opinions, boys show better in the mental operation abilities while girls are more likely to be better in word spelling and expressions. I work as a part time tutor who teach a primary 2 boy Maths. He does better than my sister in the same topic of mental operations and even the concepts of time. Although I doubt gender difference having effects on the cognitive development, I cannot conclude that sex is influential to cognitive abilities to the preoperational stage children. It is because the study of Psychology relying on scientific method and empirical evidence. Having personal experience on trying to explain my sister’s cognitive abilities by using Piaget’s theory, I realize that a same field of knowledge can be explained by different theories. Different theories looking at a same manner from different perspectives and thus concluding differently give me a more rounded understanding towards cognitive development of
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