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Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development
Piaget
believed that cognitive development happened through stages.
The
levels of development correspond roughly to infancy, pre-school, childhood and adolescence.
The
four stages, are labeled the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age
two, (children experience through their senses), the Preoperational stage,
which occurs from ages two to seven (motor skills are acquired), the Concrete
operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven (children think
logically about concrete events), and the Formal Operational stage, which
occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here).
These
ages are approximate and there are variations between children.
For
Piaget, each stage is characterised by a general cognitive structure that
affects all of the child's thinking (a structuralist view)
Development from one stage to the next is caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment, an accumulation which eventually causes such cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganising.
