Cognitive Development
Piaget relates a child’s cognitive development to learning. He came up with age-related stages. The closer the level of content to be learned matches the level of cognitive development, the better. Only after a certain level of development has been reached can a child comprehend a concept. The stages of cognitive development are
- Sensory-motor 0-2 years
- Pre-operational 2-7 years
- Intuitive thought- substage 4-7 years
- Concrete operational 7-11 years
- Formal operational stage 11 years to adulthood
In a particular scenario, a 5-year-old girl shoves another child and takes away the child’s toy at the playground, then screams at the child and runs away. In this case, the girl is in the pre-operational stage of cognitive development. The girl is ego-centric and is not able to see events from another point of view. As a result, the girl sticks to her viewpoint and does not consider others’ perspectives as she is not aware of the concept of “different viewpoints” (Piaget, 1967). Punishment administered to the girl should focus on putting things right and not making her suffer because of her actions. In other words, discipline in this stage aims to help the offender understand their mistake so as not to repeat it in the future.
In another scenario, a 13-year-old boy takes $20 from his mother’s purse with a plan to buy vapes at school, but his 15-year-old sister reports him to their mother. This happens after the brother refused to give half of the loot to his sister. Both children are in the formal operational stage of cognitive development. In this stage, reasoning moves from only concrete situations to abstract thinking. Also, those in this stage can apply the knowledge they learned in a different case. Here, adolescents can manipulate ideas in their heads without dependence on concrete manipulation ( Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). Children can think logically and have the ability to see the relationship between things (McLeod, 2010). In this stage, the person’s actions reflect the character they have. Choosing to do the right thing is based on their principals, not because of punishment and conformity (Reed, 1987).
In a third scenario, a 21-year-old girl goes home from college and excitedly tells her family about how she met a new guy on Tinder and is going to marry him the following month. She then reveals that she has decided to throw away her career by quitting school as she sees no need for it since her fiancé is rich. In this case, the girl is in the formal operational stage of cognitive development. Vygotsky argued that approaching moral development from a cognitive development perspective occurs when a person is subjected to moral reasoning that is one and a half stages higher than their understanding. This is a common type of situation within the school with peers and educators (Tappan, 1998).
References
Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). Adolescent thinking.
McLeod, S. A. (2010, December 14). Formal operational stage. Simply Psychology.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/formal-operational.html
PIAGET, J. (1967). Cognitions and conservations: Two views. Contemporary Psychology: A
Journal of Reviews, 12(11), 532-533. https://doi.org/10.1037/007869
Reed, T. M. (1987). Developmental moral TheoryThe psychology of moral development.
Lawrence Kohlberg. Ethics, 97(2), 441-456. https://doi.org/10.1086/292850
Tappan, M. B. (1998). Moral education in the zone of proximal development. Journal of Moral
Education, 27(2), 141-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305724980270202