Should We Abandon Piaget’s Theory Given the Amount of...

Developmental psychology 2 Should we abandon Piaget’s theory given the amount of criticism it has received over the year? Jean Piaget (1896-1980) in his early years of age was a biologist who originally studied molluscs but later he moved into the study of the development of children s understanding, through observing them and talking and listening to them while they worked on exercises he set. He started his tests with his own children on describing the mechanism by which the mind processes new information. His views of how children’s minds work and develop have been enormously influential for parents, scientists, philosophers, and most particularly influence the educational theory (Siegler, 2005). Piaget noticed that infants have†¦show more content†¦The next stage generally begins at about seven years of age and ends at about 11. During this stage, children begin to reason logically, and organize thoughts coherently. The child advances in his or her ability to use symbols, especially in a logical way. Mathematics becomes easier, but such concepts are used in a material way. Numbers are understood as applying directly to things, fingers, or lines scratched on a paper. From age twelve or thirteen through adulthood we live in the Formal Operations Stage. (Siegler, 2006) This means that they doing abstract thinking and applying that thinking to the real world. It means experimentation and understanding that experiments can have broad applications. The formal operational stage is characterized by the ability to formulate hypotheses and systematically test them to arrive at an answer to a problem. (Siegler, 2005) Although in the next decades since Piaget’s theory of cognitive development became widely known, other researchers have contested some of his principles, claiming that children’s progress through the four stages of development is more irregular and less constant than Piaget believed. They found that children do not always reach the different stages at the age levels he specified, and that their entry into some of the stages is more gradual than was first though, for example, infants