what propels a child to move through the four stages of cognitive development proposed by piaget?

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Evolution

Groundwork and Key Concepts of Piaget'southward Theory

By Dr. Saul McLeod, updated April 06, 2022

Jean Piaget's theory of cerebral development suggests that intelligence changes equally children grow. A kid's cognitive development is not just nigh acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world.

Cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate capacities and environmental events, and children pass through a series of stages.

Piaget'due south theory of cognitive evolution proposes four stages of development.

Sensorimotor stage: birth to two years

Preoperational stage: 2 to seven years

Concrete operational stage: 7 to 11 years

Formal operational stage: ages 12 and upwards

The sequence of the stages is universal across cultures and follow the same invariant (unchanging) order. All children get through the aforementioned stages in the aforementioned club (just non all at the same rate).

How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his chore 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 wrong answers revealed important differences betwixt the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget branched out on his ain with a new set of assumptions almost children's intelligence:

Children's intelligence differs from an adult'due south in quality rather than in quantity. This means that children reason (think) differently from adults and run across the world in dissimilar means.
Children actively build up their knowledge about the world. They are not passive creatures waiting for someone to fill up their heads with noesis.
The best way to understand children's reasoning was to meet things from their point of view.

What Piaget wanted to exercise was non to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more than interested in was the way in which cardinal concepts similar the very idea of number, fourth dimension, quantity, causality, justice and and then on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation of his own iii babies and sometimes controlled ascertainment also. From these he wrote diary descriptions charting their development.

He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget'due south theory of cerebral development suggests that children movement through four different stages of intellectual development which reverberate the increasing sophistication of children'due south idea

Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

At each stage of development, the child'south thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages, that is, each phase involves a different type of intelligence.

Piaget's Four Stages

Stage	Age	Goal
Sensorimotor	Birth to 18-24 months	Object permanence
Preoperational	2 to 7 years quondam	Symbolic thought
Concrete operational	Ages 7 to 11 years	Logical thought
Formal operational	Adolescence to adulthood	Scientific reasoning

Although no stage can be missed out, in that location are private differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the afterwards stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a sure age - although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage.

The Sensorimotor Phase

Ages: Nascence to two Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

The babe learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring its environment).
During the sensorimotor stage a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; cocky-recognition; deferred faux; and representational play.
They chronicle to the emergence of the general symbolic part, which is the capacity to represent the globe mentally
At about viii months the babe will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they tin't come across them and the babe will search for them when they disappear.

During this stage the infant lives in the present. It does non yet have a mental picture of the globe stored in its retentiveness therefore it does not have a sense of object permanence.

If it cannot encounter something then information technology does not exist. This is why you tin can hide a toy from an baby, while information technology watches, but information technology volition not search for the object once it has gone out of sight.

The main achievement during this phase is object permanence - knowing that an object yet exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

Towards the end of this stage the general symbolic function begins to announced where children bear witness in their play that they can use 1 object to stand up for some other. Language starts to announced because they realise that words can be used to represent objects and feelings.

The child begins to be able to shop information that it knows about the globe, retrieve information technology and label information technology.

Learn More: The Sensorimotor Stage of Cerebral Evolution

The Preoperational Phase

Ages: 2 - 7 Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

Toddlers and young children larn the power to internally stand for the world through language and mental imagery.
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.
A child's thinking is dominated past how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not however capable of logical (problem solving) blazon of thought.
Infants at this stage likewise demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to retrieve that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person's.

By two years, children have made some progress towards detaching their thought from physical world. However accept non yet developed logical (or 'operational') thought characteristic of after stages.

Thinking is nevertheless intuitive (based on subjective judgements about situations) and egocentric (centred on the child's own view of the earth).

Learn More than: The Preoperational Stage of Cerebral Development

The Physical Operational Stage

Ages: 7 - xi Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

During this stage, children begin to thinking logically near concrete events.
Children begin to understand the concept of conservation; agreement that, although things may modify in appearance, sure properties remain the same.
During this stage, children can mentally reverse things (e.thousand. picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape).
During this stage, children besides become less egocentric and begin to call back about how other people might think and feel.

The stage is called physical because children can think logically much more than successfully if they can manipulate existent (concrete) materials or pictures of them.

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning betoken in the child's cerebral development because it marks the first of logical or operational thought. This means the child tin piece of work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).

Children can conserve number (historic period vi), mass (historic period 7), and weight (age ix). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the aforementioned in quantity even though its appearance changes.

Just operational thought only effective here if kid asked to reason most materials that are physically present. Children at this phase will tend to make mistakes or exist overwhelmed when asked to reason nigh abstract or hypothetical problems.

Learn More: The Physical Operational Stage of Development

The Formal Operational Stage

Ages: 12 and Over

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. Formal operational thought is entirely freed from physical and perceptual constraints.
During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.k. no longer needing to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions).
They can follow the course of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples.
Adolescents can bargain with hypothetical issues with many possible solutions. E.chiliad. if asked 'What would happen if coin were abolished in 1 60 minutes's time? they could speculate well-nigh many possible consequences.

From nigh 12 years children can follow the grade of a logical argument without reference to its content. During this time, people develop the ability to call back about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

This phase sees emergence of scientific thinking, formulating abstract theories and hypotheses when faced with a trouble.

Learn More: The Formal Operational Phase of Evolution

Piaget'due south Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

Piaget's (1936, 1950) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the earth. He disagreed with the thought that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cerebral development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Children's power to understand, recollect near and solve problems in the earth develops in a stop-start, discontinuous manner (rather than gradual changes over fourth dimension).

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

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

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

The goal of the theory is to explicate the mechanisms and processes by which the babe, and so 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 upshot of biological maturation and environmental experience.

Children construct an understanding of the world effectually them, then experience discrepancies betwixt what they already know and what they notice in their environment.

Schemas

Piaget claimed that cognition cannot simply emerge from sensory experience; some initial structure is necessary to make sense of the world.

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.

Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable u.s.a. to form a mental representation of the earth.

Piaget (1952, p. 7) defined a schema as: "a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component deportment that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning."

In more unproblematic terms Piaget called the schema the basic building cake of intelligent behavior – a fashion of organizing cognition. Indeed, it is useful to remember of schemas as "units" of knowledge, each relating to 1 aspect of the world, including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.

Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata (the plural of schema) be thought of as 'alphabetize cards' filed in the brain, each one telling an private how to react to incoming stimuli or information.

When Piaget talked nearly the development of a person's mental processes, he was referring to increases in the number and complexity of the schemata that a person had learned.

When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive effectually it, it is said to be in a country of equilibrium, i.eastward., a land of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.

Piaget emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or acquired. A schema tin can be divers every bit a set of linked mental representations of the world, which we use both to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed.

Examples of Schemas

A person might accept a schema about buying a meal in a eatery. The schema is a stored course of the pattern of behavior which includes looking at a menu, ordering food, eating information technology and paying the bill. This is an example of a type of schema called a 'script.' Whenever they are in a restaurant, they retrieve this schema from memory and apply it to the situation.

The schemas Piaget described tend to be simpler than this - specially those used by infants. He described how - as a child gets older - his or her schemas become more numerous and elaborate.

Piaget believed that newborn babies have a modest number of innate schemas - even earlier they take had many opportunities to feel the world. These neonatal schemas are the cognitive structures underlying innate reflexes. These reflexes are genetically programmed into us.

For example, babies have a sucking reflex, which is triggered by something touching the baby'southward lips. A baby will suck a nipple, a comforter (dummy), or a person's finger. Piaget, therefore, assumed that the baby has a 'sucking schema.'

Similarly, the grasping reflex which is elicited when something touches the palm of a baby'due south manus, or the rooting reflex, in which a baby will turn its head towards something which touches its cheek, are innate schemas. Shaking a rattle would be the combination of ii schemas, grasping and shaking.

The Process of Adaptation

Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a procedure of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

Assimilation

Piaget defined assimilation as the cognitive process of plumbing equipment new data into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and agreement. Overall beliefs and understanding of the world do not alter as a result of the new data.

This means that when you are faced with new information, you brand sense of this information past referring to information you already have (information processed and learned previously) and endeavour to fit the new information into the data yous already accept.

For example, a 2-year-one-time child sees a man who is bald on pinnacle of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father'southward horror, the toddler shouts "Clown, clown" (Siegler et al., 2003).

Accommodation

Psychologist Jean Piaget defined accommodation as the cognitive process of revising existing cerebral schemas, perceptions, and agreement so that new information can be incorporated. This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does non work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or state of affairs.

In order to brand sense of some new information, you lot bodily arrange information you lot already have (schemas yous already take, etc.) to brand room for this new information.

For example, a child may have a schema for birds (feathers, flying, etc.) and then they run across a plane, which also flies, but would not fit into their bird schema.

In the "clown" incident, the male child'south father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was similar a clown's, he wasn't wearing a funny costume and wasn't doing silly things to make people express mirth.

With this new noesis, the boy was able to modify his schema of "clown" and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of "clown".

Equilibration

Piaget believed that all homo thought seeks order and is uncomfortable with contradictions and inconsistencies in cognition structures. In other words, nosotros seek 'equilibrium' in our cognitive structures.

Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas tin can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot exist fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibration is the forcefulness 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).

In one case the new data is acquired the procedure of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next fourth dimension nosotros need to brand an adjustment to it.

Jean Piaget's concept of adaptation

Educational Implications

Piaget (1952) did not explicitly relate his theory to pedagogy, although later researchers have explained how features of Piaget'due south theory can be applied to didactics and learning.

Piaget has been extremely influential in developing educational policy and teaching do. For example, a review of primary didactics by the Britain government in 1966 was based strongly on Piaget's theory. The event of this review led to the publication of the Plowden report (1967).

Discovery learning – the idea that children acquire all-time through doing and actively exploring - was seen as central to the transformation of the master school curriculum.

'The report'southward recurring themes are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the axis of play in children's learning, the use of the environs, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children'due south progress - teachers should 'not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.'

Because Piaget'southward theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of 'readiness' is important. Readiness concerns when sure data or concepts should be taught. According to Piaget's theory children should not be taught certain concepts until they take reached the advisable stage of cognitive evolution.

According to Piaget (1958), assimilation and accommodation crave an active learner, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot exist taught, they must exist discovered.

Within the classroom learning should be student-centered and accomplished through agile discovery learning. The role of the instructor is to facilitate learning, rather than directly tuition. Therefore, teachers should encourage the following inside the classroom:

o Focus on the process of learning, rather than the cease product of it.
o Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing "truths."

o Using collaborative, likewise equally individual activities (so children can acquire from each other).

o Devising situations that present useful problems, and create disequilibrium in the child.

o Evaluate the level of the kid's development so suitable tasks can be set.

Disquisitional Evaluation

Support

The influence of Piaget's ideas in developmental psychology has been enormous. He changed how people viewed the child's world and their methods of studying children.
He was an inspiration to many who came later and took upwardly his ideas. Piaget'southward ideas have generated a huge corporeality of enquiry which has increased our understanding of cognitive development.
Piaget (1936) was 1 of the showtime psychologists to make a systematic report of cognitive development. His contributions include a phase theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple merely ingenious tests to reveal different cerebral abilities.
His ideas take been of practical utilise in understanding and communicating with children, peculiarly in the field of education (re: Discovery Learning).

Criticisms

Are the stages existent? Vygotsky and Bruner would rather non talk about stages at all, preferring to see development as a continuous process. Others accept queried the historic period ranges of the stages. Some studies have shown that progress to the formal operational stage is not guaranteed.
For case, Keating (1979) reported that forty-60% of higher students fail at formal functioning tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only one-tertiary of adults ever accomplish the formal operational stage.
Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he failed to consider the effect that the social setting and culture may take on cognitive development.
Dasen (1994) cites studies he conducted in remote parts of the central Australian desert with 8-14 twelvemonth former Indigenous Australians. He gave them conservation of liquid tasks and spatial awareness tasks. He found that the ability to conserve came later in the Aboriginal children, between aged 10 and 13 ( as opposed to between v and 7, with Piaget's Swiss sample).

However, he found that spatial awareness abilities developed earlier amongst the Ancient children than the Swiss children. Such a study demonstrates cognitive development is non purely dependent on maturation only on cultural factors too – spatial awareness is crucial for nomadic groups of people.

Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is crucial for cognitive development. According to Vygotsky the child'due south learning always occurs in a social context in co-operation with someone more good (MKO). This social interaction provides linguistic communication opportunities and Vygotksy conisdered linguistic communication the foundation of thought.
Piaget's methods (ascertainment and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. Piaget fabricated careful, detailed naturalistic observations of children, and from these he wrote diary descriptions charting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.
Considering Piaget conducted the observations alone the data collected are based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would have been more reliable if Piaget conducted the observations with some other researcher and compared the results afterward to check if they are similar (i.eastward., accept inter-rater reliability).

Although clinical interviews allow the researcher to explore data in more than depth, the estimation of the interviewer may be biased. For instance, children may not sympathise the question/s, they have short attending spans, they cannot express themselves very well and may exist trying to please the experimenter. Such methods meant that Piaget may have formed inaccurate conclusions.
Every bit several studies take shown Piaget underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to empathize (due east.thou., Hughes, 1975).
Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child is capable of doing) and performance (what a child can bear witness when given a particular task). When tasks were altered, performance (and therefore competence) was affected. Therefore, Piaget might have underestimated children'south cognitive abilities.

For example, a kid might take object permanence (competence) but notwithstanding not exist able to search for objects (performance). When Piaget hid objects from babies he found that it wasn't till afterward nine months that they looked for it. Notwithstanding, Piaget relied on manual search methods – whether the child was looking for the object or not.

Afterwards, research such every bit Baillargeon and Devos (1991) reported that infants as young equally four months looked longer at a moving carrot that didn't do what it expected, suggesting they had some sense of permanence, otherwise they wouldn't accept had whatsoever expectation of what it should or shouldn't practice.
The concept of schema is incompatible with the theories of Bruner (1966) and Vygotsky (1978). Behaviorism would as well refute Piaget's schema theory because is cannot be straight observed as information technology is an internal procedure. Therefore, they would claim it cannot be objectively measured.
Piaget studied his own children and the children of his colleagues in Geneva in order to deduce general principles about the intellectual evolution of all children. Not merely was his sample very small, but it was composed solely of European children from families of high socio-economic status. Researchers have therefore questioned the generalisability of his information.
For Piaget, language is seen every bit secondary to action, i.e., idea precedes language. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the evolution of language and thought go together and that the origin of reasoning is more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the fabric globe.

Piaget vs Vygotsky

Piaget maintains that cerebral development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct noesis of their ain. Whereas Vygotsky argues that children larn through social interactions, building knowledge past learning from more than knowledgeable others such as peers and adults. In other words, Vygotsky believed that culture affects cognitive development.

These factors pb to differences in the teaching fashion they recommend: Piaget would contend for the teacher to provide opportunities which challenge the children'due south existing schemas and for children to be encouraged to discover for themselves.

Alternatively, Vygotsky would recommend that teacher's assist the child to progress through the zone of proximal development by using scaffolding.

However, both theories view children as actively constructing their own knowledge of the world; they are not seen as just passively absorbing knowledge. They also agree that cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, non only a matter of learning more things.

	Piaget	Vygotsky
Sociocultural	Piddling emphasis	Strong accent
Constructivism	Cognitive constructivist	Social constructivist
Stages	Cerebral evolution follows universal stages	Cognitive evolution is dependent on social context (no stages)
Learning & Development	The kid is a 'lone scientist', develops knowledge through own exploration	Learning through social interactions. Child builds knowledge by working with others
Office of Language	Idea drives language evolution	Language drives cognitive evolution
Role of the Instructor	Provide opportunities for children to learn about the earth for themselves (discovery learning)	Assist the kid to progress through the ZPD past using scaffolding

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What are the four stages of Piaget'due south theory?

Piaget divided children'due south cognitive development in four stages, each of the stages represent a new way of thinking and agreement the globe.

He called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence, (two) preoperational thinking, (3) concrete operational thinking, and (4) formal operational thinking. Each phase is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

Co-ordinate to Piaget, intellectual development takes place through stages which occur in a fixed order and which are universal (all children pass through these stages regardless of social or cultural groundwork). Development tin can simply occur when the brain has matured to a indicate of "readiness".

What are some of the weaknesses of Piaget's theory?

Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the aforementioned order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological procedure of maturation.

However the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals which suggests that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

What are Piaget's concepts of schemas?

Schemas are mental structures which contains all of the information we have relating to ane aspect of the globe effectually united states of america.

According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas such as sucking which give united states a mean to collaborate with the world.

These are physical just as the child develops they get mental schemas. These schemas become more complex with feel.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2018, June 06). Jean piaget's theory of cognitive evolution. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

Heed to a cursory summary of this commodity.

APA Style References

Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence. Child development, 1227-1246.

Bruner, J. Southward. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belkapp Press.

Dasen, P. (1994). Culture and cognitive development from a Piagetian perspective. In W .J. Lonner & R.S. Malpass (Eds.), Psychology and culture (pp. 145–149). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Hughes , Thou. (1975). Egocentrism in preschool children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Edinburgh University.

Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York: Bones Books.

Keating, D. (1979). Boyish thinking. In J. Adelson (Ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 211-246). New York: Wiley.

Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1936). Origins of intelligence in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1945). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. London: Heinemann.

Piaget, J. (1957). Structure of reality in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J., & Melt, M. T. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York, NY: International University Press.

Plowden, B. H. P. (1967). Children and their primary schools: A report (Research and Surveys). London, England: HM Stationery Role.

Siegler, R. Due south., DeLoache, J. S., & Eisenberg, North. (2003). How children develop. New York: Worth.

Vygotsky, 50. S. (1978). Mind in society: The evolution of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wadsworth, B. J. (2004). Piaget's theory of cognitive and affective evolution: Foundations of constructivism. New York: Longman.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2018, June 06). Jean piaget's theory of cognitive development. Merely Psychology. world wide web.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

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what propels a child to move through the four stages of cognitive development proposed by piaget?

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Evolution

How Piaget Developed the Theory