Piaget-cognitive development

PIAGET – Cognitive Development.

By Prof Dr Abd Majid Mohd Isa

By any standard, Jean Piaget’s contribution to the study of intelligence was profound. Piaget viewed intelligence as arising from construction of cognitive structures (scheme) that mature as a function (operation) of the interaction of the organism with environment, Piaget recognized the importance of adaptation to intelligence as he proposed adaptation as most importance principle to the development of intelligence. As individuals learn from the environment, he has to discover how to address the changes in the environment.

Adjustment consists of two complementary processes namely assimilation and

accommodation. Assimilation is the process of absorbing new information and fitting it into already existing cognitive structure. Accommodation on the other hand is forming new cognitive structure seems adequate to understand new information. The complementary process of assimilation and accommodation, taken together in an interaction, constitute what Piaget referred to as equilibrium – the balancing of the two. It is through this balance that people either add to old scheme or form new one. In modern terms, it is Piaget suggested that the intelligence of children progresses through four discrete stages. Each of this stage builds on the preceding one so that the development of intelligence is essentially cumulative. The first stage is sensorimotor, which occupied birth through roughly age 2. The infant is endowed with reflexes. He slowly learned to discriminate object that is significant to him. For an example, the newborn will suck whatever objects that being put in his mouth. Later he learned to discriminate to which object to be attended and which object to be ignored.

By the end of the sensorimotor period, the infant has started to acquire object

permanence that is the realization that other object can exist apart from him or her. The second stage is the preoperational, which emerges roughly between ages 2 to 7. The child is now beginning to represent the world through symbols and images. The limitation is the symbol and image is directly dependent on the immediate perception of the child. As for example, the child may refer animal by the sound such cat as ‘meow’, dog as ‘ung’ and cow as ‘mooo’. The child is essentially egocentric where he or she sees object and people only from his or her own view. The third stage is the concrete-operational, which occurs between ages of 7 through 11. The milestone of this stage is the child able to perform concrete mental operations such as reversibility. It now is possible for the child to reverse the direction of thought. The child comes to understand, for example, that subtraction is reverse of addition. He or she can thus understand that two schemes of adding and then subtracting a given number of objects cancel each other and leave the number in variant. The period is called concrete because operations are performed for objects that are physically present. A major acquisition of the stage is conservation whereby the child can be able to recognize that objects or quantities remained the same despite changes in their physical appearance. Suppose, for example, a child is shown two glasses, one that is short and fat and another that is tall and thin with same amount of water. The preoperational child will say tall and thin glass has more water than the short and fat glass. The concrete operational child will recognize that both glasses have same amount of

water.

The stage of formal operations begins to evolve at around age of 11 and usually fairly developed by age of 16. There are research findings indicated that some adults never completely develop formal operations. In this stage, the adolescent can think abstractlyand hypothetically. The formal operations individual can view a problem from multiplepoints of view and can think much more systematically. For example, if formal operations individual is asked to provide all possible permutation of the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, he or she can implement a systematic strategy for listing all these permutations. In contrast, the concrete operational child will have listed permutations at random. The milestone of formal-operations adolescent is to think scientifically by using hypothetico-deductive reasoning. They can utilized logic to form hypothesis and generate alternatives. The simples modus-operandi is using ‘if….., then…’. As for example, if the shop sells expired goods (hyphothetical), then he may report to authority (alternative 1), go to other shop (alternative 2), …and so on.