Editing Jean Piaget (section)

===Stages===
The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as:

{{Ordered list
|<p>''[[Theory of cognitive development#Sensorimotor stage|Sensorimotor stage]]'': from birth to age two. The children experience the world through movement and their senses. During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints. The sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages:<ref name="Santrock, John W. 1998">Santrock, John W. (1998) Children. 9. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.</ref></p>

{{Ordered list |list_style_type=upper-roman
|Simple reflexes: From birth to one month old. At this time infants use reflexes such as rooting and sucking.
|First habits and primary circular reactions: From one month to four months old. During this time infants learn to coordinate sensation and two types of schema (habit and circular reactions). A primary circular reaction is when the infant tries to reproduce an event that happened by accident (ex.: sucking thumb).
|Secondary circular reactions: From four to eight months old. At this time they become aware of things beyond their own body; they are more object-oriented. At this time they might accidentally shake a rattle and continue to do it for sake of satisfaction.
|Coordination of secondary circular reactions: From eight months to twelve months old. During this stage they can do things intentionally. They can now combine and recombine schemata and try to reach a goal (ex.: use a stick to reach something). They also begin to understand [[object permanence]] in the later months and early into the next stage. That is, they understand that objects continue to exist even when they can't see them.
|Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity: From twelve months old to eighteen months old. During this stage infants explore new possibilities of objects; they try different things to get different results.
|Internalization of schemata.
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<p>Some followers of Piaget's studies of infancy, such as [[Kenneth Kaye]]<ref name="K. Kaye, 1982">Kaye, K. (1982) ''The Mental and Social Life of Babies''. U. Chicago Press.</ref> argue that his contribution was as an observer of countless phenomena not previously described, but that he didn't offer explanation of the processes in real time that cause those developments, beyond analogizing them to broad concepts about biological adaptation generally. Kaye's "apprenticeship theory" of cognitive and social development refuted Piaget's assumption that mind developed endogenously in infants until the capacity for symbolic reasoning allowed them to learn language.</p>

|<p>''[[Theory of cognitive development#Preoperational stage|Preoperational stage]]'': Piaget's second stage, the preoperational stage, starts when the child begins to learn to speak at age two and lasts up until the age of seven. During the preoperational stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information. Children's increase in playing and pretending takes place in this stage. The child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view. The children's play is mainly categorized by symbolic play and manipulating symbols. Such play is demonstrated by the idea of checkers being snacks, pieces of paper being plates, and a box being a table. Their observations of symbols exemplifies the idea of play with the absence of the actual objects involved. By observing sequences of play, Piaget was able to demonstrate that, toward the end of the second year, a qualitatively new kind of psychological functioning occurs, known as the preoperational stage.<ref name="Santrock, John W. 2004">Santrock, John W. (2004). Life-Span Development (9th Ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College – Chapter 8</ref></p>

<p>The preoperational stage is sparse and logically inadequate in regard to mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs, but not perform operations, which are mental tasks, rather than physical. Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others. The preoperational stage is split into two substages: the symbolic function substage, and the intuitive thought substage. The symbolic function substage is when children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. The intuitive thought substage is when children tend to propose the questions of "why?" and "how come?" This stage is when children want the knowledge of knowing everything.<ref name="Santrock, John W. 2004"/></p>

<p>The Preoperational Stage is divided into two substages:</p>
{{Ordered list |list_style_type=upper-roman
|[[Piaget's theory of cognitive development#Symbolic function substage|Symbolic Function Substage]]. From two to four years of age children find themselves using symbols to represent physical models of the world around them. This is demonstrated through a child's drawing of their family in which people are not drawn to scale or accurate physical traits are given. The child knows they are not accurate but it does not seem to be an issue to them.
|[[Piaget's theory of cognitive development#Intuitive thought substage|Intuitive Thought Substage]]. At between about the ages of four and seven, children tend to become very curious and ask many questions, beginning the use of primitive reasoning. There is an emergence in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are. Piaget called it the "intuitive substage" because children realize they have a vast amount of knowledge, but they are unaware of how they acquired it. Centration, conservation, irreversibility, class inclusion, and transitive inference are all characteristics of preoperative thought.<ref name="Santrock, John W. 2004"/>
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|<p>''[[Theory of cognitive development#Concrete operational stage|Concrete operational stage]]'': from ages seven to eleven. Children can now converse and think logically (they understand reversibility) but are limited to what they can physically manipulate. They are no longer egocentric. During this stage, children become more aware of logic and conservation, topics previously foreign to them. Children also improve drastically with their classification skills.</p>

|<p>''[[Theory of cognitive development#Formal operational stage|Formal operational stage]]'': from age eleven and onward (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind. Abstract thought is newly present during this stage of development. Children are now able to think abstractly and use [[metacognition]]. Along with this, the children in the formal operational stage display more skills oriented toward problem solving, often in multiple steps.</p>
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