Question

Research supports Piaget’s view that children actively try to understand the world around them and organize their knowledge (Flavell, 1996), and this view has been a rich source of ideas about ways for teachers and parents to foster children’s development. The theory identifies several specific conditions that promote cognitive growth: Cognitive growth occurs as children construct their understanding of the world, so teachers should create environments in which children can discover how the world works. A teacher shouldn’t tell children how addition and subtraction are complementary but instead should help children discover the complementarity themselves. Children profit from experience only when they can interpret this experience with their current cognitive structures. The best teaching experiences are just ahead of the children’s current level of thinking. As youngsters begin to master basic addition, teachers and parents should not jump right to subtraction but instead should go to slightly more difficult addition problems. Cognitive growth can be particularly rapid when children discover inconsistencies and errors in their thinking. Teachers should encourage children to look at the consistency of their thinking. If a child is making mistakes in borrowing on subtraction problems, a teacher should encourage the child to look at many errors to discover what he or she is doing wrong. Mrs. Martino is teaching her students about adding and subtracting. One student, Brianna, continually fails to recognize that adding and subtracting are complementary processes; that is, they are the opposite of each other. What would Piaget say Mrs. Martino should do about this to best help Brianna learn?

Answer 1

Jean Piaget, believed that every individual goes through four stages in life that shapes their cognitive development. The four stages being; sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), preoperational stage(2-7 years), concrete operational stage(7-11 years) and finally the formal operational stage(11-adulthood). An individual at birth, in the first stage of cognitive development only relies on his reflexes. It is during the course of time that he learns to imitate actions. It's during this stage that he assimilates and accommodates new information which reflects in his thinking process. It is in the second stage of development, preoperational stage, that a child learns to use language, symbol and gestures for cognitive development. At concrete operational stage an individual is egocentric, It does not mean that he/she is selfish but they focus only on their feelings and thoughts and feel that everybody else around them feel and think the same way. The final stage of cognitive development is the formal operational stage where an individual is capable of making logical decisions and solving abstract problems in a more systematic and logical way.

A child is capable of learning on his own. However, he may be in need of assisted training. Assisted training is guiding or supporting the child in the initial stages of learning, but can be decreased or diminished with time as a child begins to get independent. Helping with classroom work, providing with clues for answers, encouragement at the right time, breezing through steps of complicated problems and etcetera are a few ways of assisted training.

A child is at very point capable of learning and solving problems on their own. They just need little clues, additional information, prompting to help them recollect and solve the problem on their own. Sometimes, they may be just stuck. They are not incapable of solving any problem on their own but they need a little assistance to be able to motor through. Piaget emphasized on cognitive development of a child. He reckoned that a child is a curious little being making sense of the world through his cognitive processes. A child sometimes learns on his own through trial and error methods and other times needs assistance from adults to help him solve problems. Thus, Piaget would have said the above to Mrs. Martino as to help Brianna learn.