Epistemology: Cognitivism: Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development

• Overview:  No one in recent years has made a greater impact on educational thought and research than Jean Piaget. His contributions to the field of genetic epistemology and intellectual development are now recognized as the most important to have been made this century. Piaget combined elements from biology, philosophy, psychology and also mathematics to create his theories which have since dominated the investigation of cognitive development.
  
  Piaget declared that the function of intelligence and human processing is so that the human can adapt to their environment.
  Organization can first be seen in an infant soon after birth when, instead of sucking as just a reflexive action, it becomes an organized pattern. In this instance, a scheme is a generalization that the child has made based on similar instances of physical actions .
  
  Piaget went on to argue that cognitive growth in children's development processes results from the changes that occur as their schemes change and become more complex with age. Piaget argued that schemes could change through three separate processes of adaptation: assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium.
  
  With the processes of assimilation and accommodation in mind, Piaget came up with four stages of cognitive development. He argued that as humans grow, they proceed through a series of psychological stages that are defined by the changing ways in which they operate upon the world. The stages are: sensorimotor (birth to 2 year),  pre-operational (2 to 7 years), concrete operational (7 to 11 years), and formal operational (11 years onwards).
  

More..............................  Cognitive Development