Piaget's Cognitive Stages of Development

There are five major perspectives to educational psychology, (cognitive, behavioral, humanistic, psychobiological, and psychodynamic), that affect education process. Reflect and explain in one page how you view them and what perspective you think is the most appropriate to education.

 Major Educational Psychology Perspectives

Within the last few centuries, psychologists and scientists worked hard to determine which psychological perspective and theory may affect the educational process productively. Amongst the most widely spread ones are; the cognitive perspective, the behavioral, the humanistic, psychobiological, and psychodynamic. However, my main concern is the cognitive theory as it the psychological approach that emphasizes the mental processes such as: language learning, problem solving and divergent behaviors. As Piaget assumes that the human beings think in terms of schemas. These schemas altered, enlarged and made more complicated through two complementary processes; assimilation and accommodation. Thus, the human brain stores the information and retrieve it when needed. Therefore, the cognitive approach focuses more on the mental information processing that is required in the education process. In this theory, the learner is at the center of the learning stage and the teacher is just a facilitator rather than instructor.

Consequently, teachers have to be aware of the importance of the students’ abilities while teach them. Teachers should think of what sort of information they intend to teach. Teachers should take adequate time to explain this piece of information in the class using different terminologies to cope up with different class levels. In addition, teachers should grant students enough space to process this information into their minds and to construct knowledge through their own experiences. Instructor and students should use examples, images, elaborations, and connections to prior knowledge to make information more meaningful, to bridge from what is known to what is unknown. This makes it very important for instructors to know what kinds of knowledge and experiences students bring to the new learning situation.

In the Arabic-medium of instructions, we have to develop learners’ cognitive skills to be able to integrate new information. As the ability to process the new information is very crucial to fruitful learning. That is why Piaget theory is based on two major aspects ‘Age and Stage’. This theory predicts that learners can or cannot comprehend at different ages and describes how children develop their cognitive abilities through different life spans. We can conclude that Jean Piaget's theory is still very practical in today's schools and still widely used as a form for educators to create curriculum that suits the students’ needs and demands.