Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development: A Closer Look BY PSYCHOLOGY NOTES HQ · APRIL 10, 2017 The very first theorist ever to study cognitive development scientifically and methodically was Jean Piaget, whose research generated the most influential theory of cognitive development to date. Jean Piaget maintained that children from all cultures proceed through a series of four stages in a predetermined order. He suggested that each stage differs from the others in terms of the quantity of information obtained as well as the quality of knowledge/concepts developed. According to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, children are not capable of performing certain tasks or understanding certain concepts until they arrive at a particular stage of cognitive development. A child’s advancement from one Piaget stage to the next is achieved after extensive exposure to relevant stimuli and experiences. Physical and cognitive maturation, which is defined as the readiness to master new skills, is also necessary to facilitate the child’s progress to the succeeding Piaget stage. Without these experiences, Piaget believed that children would be unable to reach their optimum level of cognitive growth.

Let’s have a look at Piaget’s stages of cognitive development: Piaget’s stage #1: Sensorimotor Stage (0 – 2 years)

A child’s thinking at this stage is governed by actions as demonstrated by his attempts to learn about the world by grasping, watching, sucking and manipulating objects. The child is ruled by his sensations and actions and, as such, learns by sensing and doing.

From an infant who is at the mercy of reflexes and responds through random behavior, the child now develops into a goal-oriented toddler with more complex cognitive and behavioral schemas. Schemas comprise categories of knowledge that help people interpret and understand their world.

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the sensorimotor stage is further divided into six substages, each highlighted with the establishment of a new skill.

. Reflexes (0 – 1 month): Understanding of environment is attained through reflexes such as sucking and crying. . Primary Circular Reactions (1 – 4 months): New schemas and sensations are combined, allowing the child to engage in pleasurable actions deliberately, such as sucking his thumb. . Secondary Circular Reactions (4 – 8 months): Child is now aware that his actions influence his environment and purposefully perform actions in order to achieve a desired result. . Coordination of Reactions (8 – 12 months): Child now explores his environment and often imitates the behavior of others. . Tertiary Circular Reactions – (12 – 18 months): Child begins to experiment and try out new behavior. . Early Representational Thought (18 – 24 months): Child begins to recognize and appreciate symbols that represent objects or events. The practical knowledge developed during this stage will form the basis for the child’s ability to form mental representations of objects in later Piaget’s stages. Piaget’s stage #2: Preoperational Stage (2 – 7 years)

The use of language is one of the most significant developments during the preoperational stage. At this stage of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, a child can make use of internal representational systems to describe people, his feelings and his environment. Symbolic play also evolves at this stage allowing the child to engage in pretend play using available objects to represent something else, such as a spoon being waved in the air to represent an airplane.

According to Jean Piaget’s theory, the child is so engrossed in egocentric thoughts that he believe his view of the world is shared by everyone around him. The child can’t comprehend that there are other ways of looking at the world and interpreting information. For example, a child who plays hide and seek may close his eyes while standing in plain sight, believing that since he cannot see, no one else can see him. Piaget’s stage #3: Concrete Operational Stage (7 – 12 years)

The growing understanding of the principle of conservation signals the entry to the Piaget’s concrete operational stage. At this Piaget’s stage of cognitive development, a child begins to think with logic but is still constrained by his affinity to the concrete, physical realities of the here and now. Therefore, he still has some difficulty understanding questions and problems of an abstract or hypothetical nature.

In addition to mastering some aspects of conservation, the child acquires greater proficiency at tasks that require logical reasoning, distinguishing facts from fantasies, classification of objects, deduction and induction, formulating judgments about cause and effect, spatial thought, seriation, and knowledge of numbers. It is also during this Piaget stage that the child begins to shed off some of the egocentrism characteristic of earlier stages.

The concrete operational stage is the third in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage lasts around seven to eleven years of age, and is characterised by the development of organized and rationale thinking. Piaget (1954a) considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development, because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. The child is now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic to physical objects (hence concrete operational). Children gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation) and reversibility. However, although children can solve problems in a logical fashion, they are typically not able to think abstractly or hypothetically.

Conservation Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. To be more technical conservation is the ability to understand that redistributing material does not affect its mass, number, volume or length.

By around seven years the majority of children can conserve liquid(see video below), because they understand that when water is poured into a different shaped glass, the quantity of liquid remains the same, even though its appearance has changed. Five-year- old children would think that there was a different amount because the appearance has changed. Conservation of number (see video below) develops soon after this. Piaget (1954b) set out a row of counters in front of the child and asked her/him to make another row the same as the first one. Piaget spread out his row of counters and asked the child if there were still the same number of counters. Most children aged seven could answer this correctly, and Piaget concluded that this showed that by seven years of age children were able to conserve number.

Piaget’s stage #4: Formal Operational Stage (12 years to adulthood)

At this stage of cognitive development, a child’s thinking is no longer bound to observable, physical events. The child now utilizes abstract, logical and formal thinking in order to make sense of his environment. He is able to approach and resolve problems systematically by formulating hypotheses and methodically testing them out. However, according to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, not all individuals reach this stage of development are capable of formal operational thought.

Piaget’s theory has been very influential and has proven invaluable, particularly in the field of child development. In particular, his theory has guided the direction in which educational curricula proceed and in designing strategies for teaching children. Assimilation and Accommodation Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation(adjustment) to the world. This happens through:

 Assimilation

– Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.

 Accommodation

– This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.

 Equilibration

– This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.

Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation). Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

Example of Assimilation A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003). Example of Accommodation In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh. With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.

Piaget's Stages of Development.wmv