DEVELOPMENT IS CONTINUOUSLY GOING ON : Think of any two children around you. Would you say that they are alike? Do they learn the same things the same way? It is very unlikely because children are extremely varied. In fact, no two children are alike. They learn at different paces, respond to situations differently and go through different experiences in life. But, in all this variation you must have noticed a pattern, a pattern in their development and learning abilities.
Children follow certain broad stages of development. Each stage builds on the one before it. The stages of cognitive development have been categorised by Piaget as the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operation stages.
For the purposes of this course and this section, we shall concentrate on the second and third stages.