Promoting Cognitive Development Essay

Promoting Cognitive Development Essay

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LASA 1 Promoting Cognitive Development

Everyone has a different opinion when it comes to raising children. Most parents do not look kindly on people telling them what they are doing is wrong. There are several different theorists that developed theories on how our children grow and develop. Cognitive development is one of the main categories studied by theorists and is still a leading area of study among people today. Jean Piaget, Burrhus Skinner (B.F. Skinner), Erik Erikson, and Lev Vygotsky are four of the leading psychologists that studied cognitive development. Each had their own theory about how children develop. Studying these theories can help us to understand and aid our children’s cognitive development.
Jean Piaget is considered to be the first psychologist to make a “systematic study of child development” (McLeod, 2009). Piaget developed the theory of cognitive development. According to Piaget “children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based” (McLeod, 2009). He believed that children developed in stages. These stages occur in succession and always in the same order and he suggested that “movement from one stage to the next occurred when a child reached an appropriate level of physical maturation and is exposed to relevant experiences” (Feldman, 2011, p. 142). Piaget’s stages were the sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years), the preoperational stage (2-7 years), concrete operational stage (7-11 years), and the formal operational stage (12 and up). In the sensorimotor stage of life Piaget suggested that babies know their surroundings by their movements and sensations. In this stage they develop the sense that when they do something they get a reaction such as when they cry they get picked up. Piaget discovered that babies learn through assimilation and accommodation. Piaget’s second stage, the preoperational stage, children…