What is Piaget's cognitive development theory?

Piaget's cognitive development theory is a theory that children's cognitive development can be divided into four stages, which was put forward by Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist, in his genetic epistemology, Operational Logic and Child Psychology System.

1, perceptual motor stage (birth -2 years old).

Equivalent to infancy. This is the stage before language and representation come into being. The main feature of this stage is that children only rely on perceptual actions to adapt to the outside world and construct action formats. The main achievements of children's cognition at this stage are: the differentiation of subject and object and the formation of causality.

2. Preoperative stage (2-7 years old).

Compared with the previous stage, its qualitative leap is as follows: due to the appearance of signal function or symbol function, children at this stage begin to get rid of specific actions and can think visually in symbolic format in their minds. This stage can be further divided into two small stages: pre-conceptual or symbolic thinking stage (2-4 years old) and intuitive thinking stage (4-7 years old).

3. Specific operation stage (7, 8- 1 1, 12 years old).

At this stage, children's cognition and thinking have two characteristics. First, thinking has great variability and reversibility at the beginning, so we can solve the conservation problem with the help of specific things or images and understand the logical relationship by classification; The other is the ability to perform cluster operations on specific things, including operations such as combination, inversion, combination, identity, repetition or redundancy.

4. Formal operation stage.

Also known as the proposition operation stage. The biggest feature of this stage is that children's thinking has been able to get rid of the shackles of specific things and is not limited by the content of specific things. They can separate form from content and make abstract logical thinking, that is, they can use symbols to make propositional calculus and make logical reasoning according to assumptions.

Definition of basic concepts of Piaget s cognitive development theory;

1, cognitive structure and schema.

Cognitive structure refers to the knowledge and behavior system of understanding the surrounding environment gradually developed in the process of adapting to the acquired environment on the basis of congenital inheritance. Schema is the cognitive structure that individuals have when dealing with specific situations, and it is the smallest unit of cognitive structure. Such as grab-drawing type and suction-drawing type.

2. Assimilation and adaptation.

Assimilation means that individuals can use their existing schema to deal with the problems they face or incorporate new things they encounter into the existing schema, that is, the analogical application of knowledge. Adaptation refers to the psychological process that individuals actively modify their original schema in order to adapt to the requirements of the environment when they can't directly assimilate new knowledge by using the existing schema.