Educator's Toolkit to promote a Healthy Child

    Piaget was a developmental biologist who made observations on intellectual abilities of children up to about 15 years old (Child Development Institute, 2011). Piaget's theories are part of cognitive learning.

 

    In the sensory motor period (0 – 24 months), the child is typically able to perform discovery of motor and sensory functions, such as bending limbs, and holding toys.

In the preoperational period (2 – 7 years), visual representation increases and speech begins to develop, but still self-centric.

 

    Perceptions are still more influential than individual judgement. For example, illusions will be easily expressed as how they appear as is and not through other perspectives (Santrock, 1998). In Piaget's Mountain Task, when a child was placed with a doll with mountains between them. The child would see her/his own view when asked to describe the doll's (Learning and Development, 2015).

 

    By the formal operations period (about 12 years), through becomes more abstract, complex operations such as multiple consequences are possible (Child Development Institute, 2011). Ideas can be explained symbolically. By this stage, children and youth often have acquired higher-level thinking (American Psychological Association, 2002, p 11).

 

     Not all children and youth follow these periods, and some may be in overlapping periods (Learning and Development, 2015). The goal of this is to have constructivism in the learning to develop cognition functions.