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Jean Piaget Theory Of Cognitive Development Essay

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Jean Piaget Theory Of Cognitive Development Essay
Jean Piaget believed that cognitive development during childhood plays a significant role in how well children will develop later on in life. The two main properties that encompass Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in children is that nature and nurture both play an equal role in cognitive development and that cognitive development is not a continuous chain of events, but rather composed of four distinct stages. The four stages of cognitive development in children are the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage. According to Module 10 in the textbook, the sensorimotor stage occurs between birth and two years old and describes development as “seeing the world through senses and actions”, the developmental phenomenon in this stage includes object permanence and stranger anxiety. According to Module 10 in the …show more content…
Allison Gopnik compares the development of a child’s mind to a scientist experimenting with their surroundings. Young children are able to absorb large amounts of information at a time while being able to explore their environment through hypothetical deductive reasoning. Hypothetical deductive reasoning is a scientific method that involves constructing and testing a hypothesis in order to come to a conclusion about one’s environment; if the hypothesis is proven correct then that hypothesis becomes a theory, if not then a new hypothesis is created and tested. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, theory of mind is the ability to recognize your own mental state as well as understand that other people may have different mental states than your own. Piaget and Gopnik’s perspectives are similar in that they involve using abstract thinking in order to make conclusions about one’s surroundings, while their perspectives are different in that Piaget views cognitive development as a collection of different stages and Gopnik views cognitive development as a continuous

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