... is not a blank slate. "On the contrary, the child has a host of ideas about the physical and natural world, but these ideas differ from those of adults." (Santrock, 2002). Piaget used his theory on adaptation, the ideas that children took learned knowledge and applied it to a new situation and that they modified existing schemas to include or exclude this new information, to formulate his four infamous stages of cognitive development. He proposed that all children progress through these four age related stages in their cognitive development and that progress through these stages is in a fixed order. "Each successive stage builds on, and is derivative of, the previous one when more adaptive cognitive abilities are added to what has previously been achieved. Transition from one stage to the next entails a fundamental reorganisation of how the child interprets the world and while the order of stages does ...

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