Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Abilities example essay topic

I chose to write my paper on Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Abilities. I chose this topic because I as well as many people in my family have been labeled "gifted" early on in school. I realize that this is a measure of intelligence defined as the potential for learning, however none of us labeled gifted have done anything more successful than other members of my family. I fact the opposite may be true.

Perhaps a gifted labeling made us all lazy. Nonetheless, I would like to know how Piaget's theory relates to how intelligence is measured. Piaget became fascinated early in his studies with the discovery that children of the same age often gave the same incorrect answers to questions, suggesting that there were consistent, qualitative differences in the nature of reasoning of different ages, not simply a quanitive increase in the amount of intelligence or knowledge. This discovery marked the beginning of Piaget's continuing effort to identify changes in the way children think, how they perceive their world in different ways at different points in development. The different stages postulated by Piaget help to explain different rates of learning at different ages as well as the types of learning possible at different ages for the majority of the population. Learning itself is seen by Piaget as a process of discovery on the part of the individual, and learning as a formal activity becomes a system of organization, by which instruction is enhanced by the way the teacher arranges experience.

Learning is thus experimental, and Piaget suggests that experiences have meaning to the extent that they can be assimilated. There are two principal learning theories in psychology, one of which focuses on the learning process while the other focuses on ones capacity to learn. Piaget offered a biological theory of intelligence that he presented as a unified approach to intelligence and learning. Piaget restricted the idea of learning to an acquisition of new knowledge that derives primarily from contact with the physical or social environment. He opposes it on one hand to maturation which is based on physiological processes; on the other hand and most importantly he differentiates it from the acquisition of general knowledge or intelligence which he defines as the slowly developing sum total of action coordinations available to an organism at a given stage.

Piaget had actually started out to analyze the meaning and origin of intelligence and he defined intelligence as the totality of behavioral coordinations that characterize behavior in a certain stage of development. Having explained all of that I should explain the distinct stages Piaget believes that we go through. The sensorimotor stage begins at birth and lasts until age two. At this stage, the child cannot form mental representations of objects that are outside his view, so that intelligence develops through his motor interactions with his with his environment. The preoperational stage typically lasts until the child is about six. According to Piaget, this is the stage where true "thought" emerges.

Preoperational children are able to make mental representations of unseen objects, but cannot use deductive reasoning, demonstrate conservation of number, and can differentiate their perspective from that of other people. Formal Operations is the final stage. This stage is typically explained by the ability to think abstractly. In doing research for this paper I thought I would find specific examples of how Piaget's theory helped form standards for and develop intelligence tests.

I really didn't find much of that one resource even suggested that Piaget found standardizing tests dull and it was while helping to develop such tests that he broke away and instead developed his Cognitive abilities Theory. I guess one could say that Piaget has helped develop intelligence tests by measuring what cognitive stage a child is at what age, for instance a child of above average intelligence would be capable of thought in a stage past their chronological age. This though seems like a bit of a long shot I feel that a true intelligence test would have to be more specific than this.