Piaget believed that the preschool days fit entirely in a single stage of cognitive development called the preoperational stage.
Explanation:
Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who made great contributions to developmental psychology. His theory of cognitive development expresses how children build a mental model of the world. The author considered cognitive development as a process that is taking place from the biological maturation of the person and how it interacts with the environment. Piaget rejects the theory that intelligence was a fixed feature.
How Piaget explains this process is through the 4 stages of cognitive development, which are:
- Sensorimotor stage: this stage covers from birth to two years. In this stage, children acquire their knowledge through the manipulation of objects. Here children begin in the development of functional language and better understand the information they perceive with their senses and express it in simple sentences.
- Preoperational stage: this stage covers from 2 years to 7 years. In this stage, children learn through imitation. Their thinking becomes self-centered and they develop difficulties in understanding the point of view of other people. Language is another of the most marked characteristics of this stage. The child builds experiences about the world through adaptation.
- Concrete operational stage: this stage covers from 7 to 11 years. Already at this stage children begin to think more logically and are less self-centered. Develop in a greater way the capacity to feel and put oneself in the place of others. They understand the importance of their thoughts and that they should not always be shared.
- Formal operation stage: this stage begins in adolescence and extends to adulthood. Already in this last stage, people have greater development in logic, the ability to use reasoning and understanding abstract ideas. Here too people can think more scientifically about the world around them.
