Jean Piaget

Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory has four stages in it. He thought adolescents had to make sense of the world by organizing their experiences. By organizing their experiences, adolescents are adapting to this world. By organizing information adolescents can separate important information from unimportant and connect ideas to one another. Adolescents use schemas to construct this world. Adolescents use schemas through two processes. Assimilation is one of them; it is when you use your prior knowledge to something new (2.4). Accommodation is the other; it is when you realize you need help with something new that you cannot figure out by yourself. Piaget's theory has four stages that kids go through. He believes that every kid goes through each stage and you could not skip a stage. The four stages are: sensorimotor (birth-2 years old), preoperational (2-7 years old), concrete operational (7-11 years old), and formal operational (11- adulthood). Concrete operational stage is when intuitive thought is being replace by logical reasoning but it has to be applied to specific examples. Children at this stage can mentally do things that in earlier stages they could only do physically. They also get social skills and can hold onto a conversation, unlike earlier stages.  Formal operation stage is the fourth stage of Piaget’s theory. Thinking in this stage is more abstract than in concrete operational stage. Also, adolescents start thinking about their future and who they want to be when they grow up. Adolescents in early formal operation have hypothetical-deductive reasoning. They can think hypothetically and can take their best guess on how to figure out a problem. Then late formal operation adolescents start to adjust to their experiences.

In my classroom I will have all formal operational students. I will give them algebraic math problems (2x+5=57) to get them  use to hypothetical-deductive reasoning. Also, I will have my students make 5 and 10 year plans so they can imagine how they want their future to turn out (2.5). I will have them also keep charts of their grades to help them organize their results on homework assignments and test.