One thinker that has had huge effect on the educational world, especially regarding the education of children, is the Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980). His specialty was child development and he described a series of stages that he believed children go through as they cognitively develop.
Sensori-motor Stage: from birth to about twenty four months and is characterised by children understanding their environment by acting on it. Through touch and sight, children begin to understand basic relationships which affect them and objects in their immediate experience. These include space, location of objects, and the relationships of cause and effect. The children cannot make use of abstract objects. This develops over the next stages.
During the pre-operational stage, from around two to seven years, children develop the “symbolic function” (the ability to understand, use and manipulate symbols) , which includes such skills as drawing, language and mental imagery. Children also begin to develop the mental ability to use CONCEPTS dealing with number, classification, order and time, but use these concepts in very limited ways.
The concrete operational stage, from about seven to eleven years is the period when children begin to use mental operations and begin to acquire a number of concepts of conservation* . During the formal operational stage, from around eleven onwards, children begin to be able to deal with abstract concepts and PROPOSITIONS, and to make hypotheses, inferences and deductions,. Since the mental processes described by Piaget are important for language development, linguists and psychologists have made use of Piaget´s ideas in studying how mental development and linguistic development are related.
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Tags: abstract concepts, children, Jean Piaget, PROPOSITIONS, psychology, young learners
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