Assessment Post 5 - Piaget

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as
Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)
Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).

Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is therefore caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganising.

Reflective Thinking

Most educational theorists focus on childrens age rather then a stage in life, which makes this theory kind of unique. A way to interpret part of the theory that states that accumulation of errors causes a change in the way the child thinks, is that errors in a childs work is an important part of their education. If a child fails in a chemistry experiment a few times, they must work on a new approach and condsider it from new angles to work out a way to succeed. This causes reflective thinking and uses higher order skills such as evaluating, rather than a student succeeding the first time and moving on without really thinking or condsidering how it works or how to make it work differently.