In the first five years of life, children grow and develop rapidly in four major areas. Motor, language, communication, cognitive, and social/emotional are the five domains. The way children think, explore, and find things out is referred to as cognitive growth. It is the growth of intelligence, skills, problem-solving abilities, and dispositions that assist children in thinking about and comprehending the world around them. Cognitive development requires brain development.
As a parent, it’s important to promote your child’s cognitive growth from the moment he or she is born, because this lays the foundations for your child’s academic and later life success. Children who can discern sounds at six months of age, for example, have an easier time learning to read at four and five years of age, according to studies.
Piaget’s cognitive growth theory
The theory of cognitive development developed by French psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is the most well-known and influential. Piaget’s theory, first published in 1952, was based on decades of careful study of children in their natural settings, including his own, as opposed to behaviorists’ laboratory studies. Piaget was interested in how children responded to their surroundings, but he advocated a more active role for them than learning theory indicated. He saw a child’s knowledge as being made up of schemas, which he described as “simple units of knowledge used to organize past experiences and provide a framework for understanding new ones.”
Assimilation and accommodation, two complementary processes defined by Piaget, are constantly changing schemas. Assimilation is the method of assimilating new data by adding it to an existing schema. To put it another way, people assimilate new experiences by comparing them to previous experiences. Accommodation, on the other hand, occurs when the schema itself shifts to accommodate new information. Piaget defined cognitive growth as an ongoing effort to achieve equilibration, which he defined as a compromise between assimilation and accommodation.
The idea that cognitive growth occurs in four distinct, universal phases, each marked by increasingly sophisticated and abstract levels of thinking, is at the heart of Piaget’s theory. These stages often take place in the same order, and each one builds on the previous one. The following are the details:
- Sensorimotor stage (infancy): Intelligence is demonstrated by motor activity without the use of symbols during this phase, which has six sub-stages. Since it is focused on physical encounters and perceptions, knowledge of the environment is minimal but growing. Around the age of seven months, children develop object permanence (memory). Physical growth (mobility) enables a child to begin learning new cognitive abilities. At the end of this point, some symbolic (language) abilities are created.
- Stages leading up to service (toddlerhood and early childhood): Intelligence is demonstrated by the use of symbols, language matures, memory and imagination grow, but the thought is done in a non-logical, non-reversible manner during this time, which has two sub-stages. The dominant mode of thought is egocentric.
- Operational stage concrete (elementary and early adolescence): Intelligence is demonstrated by logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects during this level, which is characterized by seven types of conservation (number, length, liquid, mass, weight, area, and volume). The development of operational thought (mental actions that are reversible). Egocentric thinking becomes less prevalent.
- Adolescence and adulthood are the formal organizational stages: Knowledge is illustrated at this point by the logical application of symbols to abstract concepts. There is a return to egocentric thought early in the period. In developed countries, about 35% of high school graduates receive formal employment; many people do not think formally until they are adults.
The knowledge-processing approach, which uses the machine as a model to provide new insight into how the human mind collects, stores, retrieves, and uses information, has been the most important alternative to Piaget’s work. Researchers researching cognitive growth in children have concentrated on areas such as children’s growing attention spans and memory storage capacity, as well as their incremental changes in their ability to take in information and concentrate selectively on certain parts of it. Researchers have discovered, for example, that older children’s superior memory abilities are due in part to memorization techniques such as repeating objects to memorize them or categorizing them.