Show Medically Reviewed by Hansa D. Bhargava, MD on August 17, 2020 Piaget's stages of development are part of a theory about the phases of normal intellectual development, from infancy through adulthood. This includes thought, judgment, and knowledge. The stages were named after psychologist and developmental biologist Jean Piaget, who recorded the intellectual development and abilities of infants, children, and teens. Piaget's four stages of intellectual (or cognitive) development are: Piaget acknowledged that some children may pass through the stages at different ages than the averages noted above. He also said some children may show characteristics of more than one stage at a given time. But he insisted that: Piaget's 1936 theory broke new ground because he found that children's brains work in very different ways than adults'. Before his theory, many believed that children were not yet capable of thinking as well as grown-ups. Some experts disagree with his idea of stages. Instead, they see development as continuous. Another criticism is that Piaget didn't consider how a child's culture and social environment affect their development. During the early stages, according to Piaget, infants are only aware of what is right in front of them. They focus on what they see, what they are doing, and physical interactions with their immediate environment. Because they don't yet know how things react, they're constantly experimenting. They shake or throw things, put things in their mouth, and learn about the world through trial and error. The later stages include goal-oriented behavior that leads to a desired result. Between ages 7 and 9 months, infants begin to realize that an object exists even though they can no longer see it. This important milestone -- known as object permanence -- is a sign that memory is developing. After infants start crawling, standing, and walking, their increased physical mobility leads to more cognitive development. Near the end of the sensorimotor stage (18-24 months), infants reach another important milestone -- early language development, a sign that they are developing some symbolic abilities. During this stage (toddler through age 7), young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future, and engage in make-believe. But their thinking is based on intuition and still not completely logical. They cannot yet grasp more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison. At this time, elementary-age and preadolescent children -- ages 7 to 11 -- show logical, concrete reasoning. Children's thinking becomes less focused on themselves. They're increasingly aware of external events. They begin to realize that their own thoughts and feelings are unique and may not be shared by others or may not even be part of reality. But during this stage, most children still can't think abstractly or hypothetically. Adolescents who reach this fourth stage of intellectual development -- usually at age 11-plus -- are able to use symbols related to abstract concepts, such as algebra and science. They can think about things in systematic ways, come up with theories, and consider possibilities. They also can ponder abstract relationships and concepts such as justice. Although Piaget believed in lifelong intellectual growth, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development. He also said that continued intellectual development in adults depends on the buildup of knowledge. Along with the stages of development, Piaget's theory has several other main concepts. Schemas are thought processes that are essentially building blocks of knowledge. A baby, for example, knows that it must make a sucking motion to eat. That's a schema. Assimilation is how you use your existing schemas to interpret a new situation or object. For example, a child seeing a skunk for the first time might call it a cat. Accommodation is what happens when you change a schema, or create a new one, to fit new information you learn. The child accommodates when they understand that not all furry, four-legged creatures are cats. Equilibrium happens when you're able to use assimilation to fit in most of the new information you learn. So you're not constantly adding new schemas. Piaget's theory has influenced education and parenting. Here are some practical ways teachers and parents can put his ideas to work: The Theory of Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, suggests that children's intelligence undergoes changes as they grow. Cognitive development in children is not only related to acquiring knowledge, children need to build or develop a mental model of their surrounding world (Miller, 2011). His work is regarded as the cornerstone in the field of developmental psychology. In this article, we examine the implications his work has for the intellectual development of children in classrooms. In the 1920s, Piaget was working at the Binet Institute and his main responsibility was to translate questions written in English intelligence tests into French. He became interested to find out why children gave incorrect answers to the questions needing logical thinking (Meadows, 2019). Piaget believed that these wrong answers revealed significant differences between the thinking of children and adults. Piaget proposed a new set of assumptions about the intelligence of children:
Piaget did not want to measure how well children can spell, count or solve problems to check their I.Q. He was more intrigued to find out how the fundamental concepts such as the very idea of time, number, justice, quantity and so on emerged (Greenfield, 2019). Piaget used observations and clinical interviews of older children who were able to hold conversations and understand questions. He also made controlled observation, and used naturalistic observation of his own three children and developed diary description with charts of children's development. Use the Universal Thinking Framework for promoting cognitive development Who exactly was Jean Piaget?He was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. After finishing high school he went to study medicine but soon changed course to philosophy and sociology. During World War 1, he worked as an army doctor. When war ended, he started studying law and then switched again to philosophy and sociology. At the age of 30, he published his first book “Genetic Epistemology” which received critical acclaim. This led him to become one of the leading psychologists of his generation. The Jean Piaget Society is named after him. His research interests included child development, logic, mathematics, linguistics, social sciences and education. His major works include "Logic", "Reasoning and Judgment" and "Constructionism". Jean Piaget's work is important because it provides us with insights into cognitive processes during childhood. It helps teachers identify what needs to be taught and when. The following sections will explore some of the key ideas behind Piagetian theories. Piaget influenced the field of developmental psychology because he showed that learning takes place through stages rather than just being acquired all at once. Anyone exploring a career in child psychology will no doubt come across his influential work. In recent years, it has come into some criticism but the importance of his contribution to developmental psychology cannot be denied. - He was one of the first people to study children's development and he developed the theory that children develop through stages. - He also studied how children learn and he found out that they learn by doing things and not just listening or reading about them. - He also discovered that children have their own ways of learning and that they don't always follow the same rules as adults do. - He also found out that children are very creative and imaginative and that they like to play and explore. - He also believed that children should be allowed to make mistakes and that they shouldn't be punished for making them. Stages of Cognitive DevelopmentAccording to Jean Piaget, stages of development takes place via the interaction between natural capacities and environmental happenings, and children experience a series of stages (Wellman, 2011). The sequence of these stages remains same across cultures. Each child goes through the same stages of cognitive development in life but with a different rate. The following are Piaget's stages of intellectual development:
The infants use their actions and senses to explore and learn about their surrounding environment. A variety of cognitive abilities develop at this stage; which mainly include representational play, object permanence, deferred imitation and self-recognition. At this stage, infants live only in present. They do not have anything related to this world stored in their memory. At age of 8 months, the infant will understand different objects' permanence and they will search for them when they are not present. Towards the endpoint of this stage, infants' general symbolic function starts to appear and they can use two objects to stand for each other. Language begins to appear when they realise that they can use words to represent feelings and objects. The child starts to store information he knows about the world, label it and recall it. Cognitive development in early years
Young children and Toddlers gain the ability to represent the world internally through mental imagery and language. At this stage, children symbolically think about things. They are able to make one thing, for example, an object or a word, stand for another thing different from itself. A child mostly thinks about how the world appears, not how it is. At the preoperational stage, children do not show problem-solving or logical thinking. Infants in this age also show animism, which means that they think that toys and other non-living objects have feelings and live like a person. By an age of 2 years, toddlers can detach their thought process from the physical world. But, they are still not yet able to develop operational or logical thinking skills of later stages. Their thinking is still egocentric (centred on their own world view) and intuitive (based on children's subjective judgements about events). Building Schemas in the Mind
At this stage, children start to show logical thinking about concrete events. They start to grasp the concept of conservation. They understand that, even if things change in appearance but some properties still remain the same. Children at this stage can reverse things mentally. They start to think about other people's feelings and thinking and they also become less egocentric. This stage is also known as concrete as children begin to think logically. According to Piaget, this stage is a significant turning point of a child's cognitive development because it marks the starting point of operational or logical thinking. At this stage, a child is capable of internally working things out in their head (rather than trying things out in reality). Children at this stage may become overwhelmed or they may make mistakes when they are asked to reason about hypothetical or abstract problems. Conservation means that the child understands that even if some things change in appearance but their properties may remain the same. At age 6 children are able to conserve number, at age 7 they can conserve mass and at age 9 they can conserve weight. But logical thinking is only used if children ask to reason about physically present materials. Building Scientific Schemas
At this stage, individuals perform concrete operations on things and they perform formal operations on ideas. Formal logical thinking is totally free from perceptual and physical barriers. At this stage, adolescents can understand abstract concepts. They are able to follow any specific kind of argument without thinking about any particular examples. Adolescents are capable of dealing with hypothetical problems with several possible outcomes. This stage allows the emergence of scientific reasoning, formulating hypotheses and abstract theories as and whenever needed. Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development made no claims about any specific age-associated with any of the particular stage but his description provides an indication of the age at which an average child would reach a certain stage.
Concrete experiences enable children to understand abstract concepts Key Concepts Relating to Piaget's Schema Theory
Piaget believes that a schema involves a category of knowledge and the procedure to obtain that knowledge. As individuals gain new experiences, the new information is modified, and gets added to, or alter pre-existing schemas. A child may have a schema about cats. For example: if his only experience has been with small cats, the child may believe that all cats are small. If this kid encounters a large cat, he would take in this new knowledge, altering the old schema to incorporate this new piece of information.
Assimilating new knowledge using our blocks Educational Implications of Piaget's Cognitive Development TheoryAlthough, later researchers have demonstrated how Piaget's theory is applicable for learning and teaching but Piaget (1952) does not clearly relate his theory to learning. Piaget was very influential in creating teaching practices and educational policy. For instance, in 1966 a primary education review by the UK government was based upon Piaget’s theory. Also, the outcome of this review provided the foundation for publishing Plowden report (1967). Discovery learning – the concept that children learn best through actively exploring and doing - was viewed as central to the primary school curriculum transformation. Piaget believes that children must not be taught certain concepts until reaching the appropriate cognitive development stage. Also, accommodation and assimilation are requirements of an active learner only, because problem-solving skills must only be discovered they cannot be taught. The learning inside the classrooms must be student-centred and performed via active discovery learning. The primary role of an instructor is to facilitate learning, rather than direct teaching. Hence, teachers need to ensure the following practices within the classroom:
Cognitive development using 'blocks of knowledge'After having revisited some of this theory you can hopefully see the implications for the development of knowledge using our 'Writers Block'. Our earlier stages of developing this tool started with the idea of using concrete objects to represent abstract concepts. Children could start with their pre-existing schema and build from there. You can read more about this active process of learning on the mental modelling page. Beginning an activity by asking a child the question 'What do I already know?' gives the pupil something to build on when starting an academic task. These cognitive structures serve as a platform for mental development. No one likes starting with a blank piece of paper and having previous knowledge visualised enables even the most reluctant of learner to 'get going'. Promote cognitive development using our block building method Critical Evaluation of Piaget's TheoryPiaget’s ideas have enormous influence on developmental psychology. His theories changed methods of teaching and changed people's perceptions about a child’s world. Piaget (1936) was the foremost psychologist whose ideas enhanced people's understanding of cognitive development. His concepts have been of practical use in communicating with and understanding children, specially in the field of education (Discovery Learning). Piaget's main contributions include thorough observational studies of cognition in children, stage theory of children's cognitive development, and a series of ingenious but simple tests to evaluate multiple cognitive abilities. Do stages really exist? Critiques of Formal Operation Thinking believe that the final stage of formal operations does not provide correct explanation of cognitive development. Not every person is capable of abstract reasoning and many adults do not even reach level of formal operations. For instance, Dasen (1994) mentioned that only less than half of adults ever reach the stage of formal operation. Maybe they are not distinct stages? Piaget was extremely focused on the universal stages of biological maturation and cognitive development that he failed to address the effect of culture and social setting on cognitive development. A contemporary of Piaget, Vygotsky argued that social interaction is essential for cognitive development. Vygotsky believes that a child's learning always takes place in a social context involving co-operation of someone more knowledgeable (MKO). This kind od social interaction offers language opportunities and according to Vygotksy language provides the basis of thought. Hughes (1975) believes that Piaget underestimated children's abilities as his tests were frequently unclear and hard to understand. Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1966) were against the concept of schema. Behaviorism also disapproves Piaget’s schema theory as it is an internal phenomenon which cannot be observed directly. Due to this, they would claim schema cannot be measured objectively. References
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