Piaget's Developmental Model

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ages of about seven to twelve gain the ability to empathize with others, consider more than one perspective, and evaluate situations to determine some potential outcomes. The child is learning better and better, how to process information quickly and funnel it into a single succinct response or reaction. This information processing gets better as they enter formal operations and gain more practice. During the fourth and final stage, titled the Formal Operational stage, children gain the ability to think abstractly and reason theoretically (1). Piaget realized during his research that although most do, not all people reach this final stage. As they begin to move from one stage to another children develop adaptive processes that allow them to …show more content…
Piaget’s models contradict a lot of behaviorist understanding of how knowledge is obtained. Piaget’s model shows that all children go through the same stages of cognitive development, the speed at which is determined by the child’s personal developmental context. Experiments in comparative psychology during Piaget’s time would help support his model. One such study, which was Piaget himself quoted in his self-written and produced documentary about himself, showed that illiterate Iranian children from the town Tehran of ended up giving the same answers as children from Geneva, when answering questions that determine developmental status. However, in comparison to the Swiss children, the Iranian children were on average three years behind developmentally, so they would answer what would be developmentally appropriate for children three years younger than them. The idea that all children go through the same developmental stages regardless of where they grow up is different from the blank-slate theory that people don’t know initially know anything, but learn everything through their experiences, which behaviorists …show more content…
Piaget helped the rest of the world understand that children aren’t only simply little adults, they think differently than adults, and they interpret and describe the world around themselves in different ways than adults. This epiphany has transformed how researchers and clinicians alike approach and study child psychology. His accomplishments in the field of child psychology rival that of Anna Freud, and G. Stanley Hall, the original founder of child psychology. Anna Freud compiled her father Sigmund’s ideas into concise theories, and furthermore used psychoanalysis as the prism through which she examined child psychology. Hall, among other things, studied the effect of adolescence on education and was instrumental in the development of educational psychology, or more commonly known as child psychology. Piaget’s theory wasn’t initially related to education, although researchers have later explained how parts of his theory may be applied to teaching and learning (3). Other psychologists, such as Erikson, Kohlberg, and Greenspan, would further expand upon Piaget’s model. These other child psychologists would make their own theoretical models to explain different parts of child development. Erik Erikson borrowed from Freud and took a psychoanalytic view of child development in his eight-stage
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