PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

                                                                                                 

PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) 

Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget’s (1896-1980) theory of children’s cognitive development has  tremendous impact on the field of education. Before Piaget, people thought children’s brains functioned much the same as adults. They just needed to be filled with raw knowledge and experience in order to function in an adult manner, children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget rejected this, saying that our brains and mental functioning develops through a series of universal stages. We think in distinctly different ways at each stage. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based. His theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

 

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. Piaget (1936) was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions include a stage theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities. What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number (concrete-operational), time, quantity, causality (formal-operational), justice (piaget-moral) and so on emerged.

 

 

Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.

 

Piaget's Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

▪It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.

▪It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviours.

▪It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviours, concepts, ideas, etc.

 

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding (constructivism.html) of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

 

                                  Illustration by Joshua Seong, Verywell

  Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

According to Piaget, changes in thinking are a result of developmental processes that occur naturally as our brains develop. All children, he said, go through four stages:

1.      Sensorimotor stage (birth to approximately age two):

Children’s early cognitive development is largely controlled by their senses and their ability to move – hence the label sensorimotor. An important cognitive milestone at this stage is object permanence, that is, the realization that something not immediately available to one’s senses, still exists. Children gradually develop the ability to form mental representations of sensory objects (mother’s face, doll, pet dog) that they can carry in their developing memory and can access as needed. This new cognitive function is known as representational thinking. As this ability grows, children begin to realize that if you put a doll behind your back it still exists. Likewise, Children’s ability to move and thereby to view the world from different perspectives enhances their cognitive development. The greater their ability to move, the greater their ability to see the world from different perspectives: front and back, above and below, near and far. This ability to move allows them to seek out hidden objects whose representations now exist in memory.

A second major accomplishment at the sensorimotor stage is the ability to carry out goal-directed actions. This is the ability to contemplate and carry out more than one action in order to reach a goal. For example, if a child cannot open a cardboard box to get to a cookie, he or she might seek some sort of tool to open the lid or tear the box.

 2.     Preoperational stage (approximately age two to seven):

Piaget described an operation as an action carried out through logical thinking. Having acquired representational thinking (see above), preoperational thinking is the stage just before children are able to use formalized logic. Here vocabularies (i.e., mental or symbolic representations of objects, actions or relationships) generally expand from 200 to around 2,000 or more words. Although children are learning language and language rules, they do not yet understand logical relationships and they cannot mentally manipulate information. This stage is marked by irreversible thinking, that is, the ability to think in one only direction (they can not reverse an operation). For example, they may know that 2+1=3, but they cannot use reverse logic to understand that 3-2=1. Preoperational children are also highly egocentric in that they have a hard time taking another person’s point of view. They still see the world only in terms of themselves.

A major learning task that occurs near the end of this stage is conservation. This is where children begin to understand that even though the appearance or characteristics of an object may change, the amount or volume stays the same. They realize, for example, that if you have two equal balls of cookie dough and flatten one, the two balls still contain the same amount. Or, if you break one ball of cookie dough into four big pieces and a similar ball into 20 little pieces they still contain the same amount. Or, even though one row of 20 M&Ms is spaced close together and another row of 20 M&Ms is spaced further apart, they still contain the same number. Children generally achieve this realization around age 6 or 7.

 

3.     Concrete operational stage (approximately age seven to eleven):

            This stage is marked by the start of logical thinking. For example, irreversible thinking begins to give way to reversible thinking. That is, children are now able to understand that that 3-2 = 1 is the reverse of 2+1 = 3. However, all thinking must be very concrete and based in the present. When introducing numbers and the concepts of addition and subtraction, children in preschool through grade one should be given chips, buttons or other concrete counters to see and manipulate. Likewise, all science instruction should be as hands-on and active as possible (learning by doing vs. learning by listening, watching, or reading).

Children at this stage are also beginning to understand if/then thinking. If X happens then Y will happen. For example, if I put too many block on the pile, then it will tip over. If the tinfoil boat has high sides, then it will hold more pennies. If a bug has six legs, then it is an insect. However, when learning to think in logical sequences, the objects of thought or some physical representation of them should always be present. This is the very beginning of their system of logical thinking. A particular type of thinking that develops at this stage is classification. In the previous (preoperational) stage, children could group objects only according to one attribute (color, size, etc) at a time. Concrete-operational children, however, are able to group things based on a number of different attributes. For example, given a description of felines, they can put tigers, panthers, and house cats in one group, and foxes, wolves, and pugs in another group. However, children at this stage are still unable to think abstractly. For example, given a list of storybook and movie characters, children at this stage would have hard time putting them in a group according to which are evil and which are good. They would also have a hard time deciding which actions represent free speech or which rules illustrate democracy and which do not. This is because children at this stage are still highly dependent on perceptual differences in classifying objectives or experiences.

4.    Formal operational (approximately age eleven on):

At this stage children begin to acquire the ability to think abstractly, that is, to develop and manipulate symbols and to generalize to similar situations. For example, they are able to make the following mental operations: If A>B and B>C then A>C. Or, make analogies such as: big is to little as slow is to (a) wide, (b) turtle, or (c) fast. Or even, create abstract metaphors: Math class was a big puddle of mud. And, given a set of facts, they are able to make inferences. For example: in the movie, The Wizard of Oz (MGM 1939), Dorothy slapped Lion, defied the Wizard of Oz, and set off to steal the Witch’s broom. What can does this say about Dorothy? Or, the Wicked Witch of the West showed no remorse over the death of her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. Why do you think? What does this tell us about her? Or even, what do you think happened in Oz after Dorothy left?

Children also develop the ability to use more advanced deductive thinking (Sherlock Holmes thinking) and inductive thinking (looking at a field and inducing order on it by categorizing or creating groups), and hypothetical (if-then) thinking. Learning these types of formal operational thinking can be enhanced through the use of thinking skill lessons (Johnson, 2000). A thinking skill is a cognitive process broken down into steps and taught explicitly. Figure 3.2 shows examples of three cognitive processes broken down into their subsequent steps.