Applications: Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage

1.Reinforce and continue using concrete and hands on materials. For example, use models and demonstrate experiments in Science, show replicas or artifacts in History, demonstrate how to's in EPP and many more.

2. Organize the materials and concepts presented. Don't bombard children with too many factors and lengthy explanations. Be concise and brief. For example, Give an experiment or instruction with considerable number of steps. Or let children only read short stories 2-4 pages or children's book rather giving them lengthy stories with a lot of twisting plots.

3. Always relate the children to their prior experiences before presenting a new topic. Ask questions related to their lives or personal experiences so that it will be easier for them to assimilate information and to instill in their minds what is being presented. Like in discussing a story, teachers often ask if children can find similarities on the traits or on the situation the characters in the story are into.

4. Let the children classify or group things. Use graphic organizers to make it easier like matrices, charts, diagrams, etc. This will make their logical ability improve and develop. Riddles, Mind Twisters and Brain Teasers can also help. Give more of divergent questions rather than convergent questions because the former give children more opportunity to think and stimulate imagination.

Educational Psychology: Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

This is my very first post about education so I really hope that whoever will read this post can learn a lot and should be able to apply it in their everyday lives, whether they are teachers, educators, parents, students and the like.
Piaget is only one of modern psychologists who influenced the notion of learning most especially about how humans develop mentally. He believes that human mind has what he calls "schema" or mental/cognitive structures. In short, we humans are already born with something in our heads, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled. He also introduced the concepts of assimilation and accomodation. Assimilation is the adding of new experience or learning to an existing or already made schema. Example, if we had a schema of what a fish is, and we saw another fish of different color, then we try to add or fit in that new information to our current schema. And in the process of seeing another kind of fish, then we "accommodate" or create a new schema. As we grow, our minds pass through 4 stages: sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational. Each stage has its own characteristics which later I will discuss one by one. I will also tackle the practical applications of this theory especially in pedagogy and instruction.
This is only the introduction of my series of discussion about Piaget and the rest of other educational psychologists. I hope you find this post of mine helpful to your study. And I really hope that whoever got to read my post will tell their friends and classmates and teachers about my blog so that I could extend and share my knowledge about these topics.