Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development PDF

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Background Jean Piaget is a Swiss-born psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children. He was Zoologist by profession, He was started working with Alfred Binet on Intelligence tests and because of h...

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Background Jean Piaget is a Swiss-born psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children. He was Zoologist by profession, He was started working with Alfred Binet on Intelligence tests and because of his interest, he also studied child development with a focus on cognitive development. Piaget is also known as radical Constructivist Piaget has explained and discussed the different stages of cognitive development. He believed that cognitive development takes place through four fundamental stages. All children have to pass through these stages to reach the next higher level of cognitive thinking. Piaget’s Stages of Child Development Jean Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development is divided into four Major stages are: Sensory Motor Stage: (0—2 Years) Preoperational stage: (2—7 Years) Concrete Operational Stage: (7—11 Years) Formal Operational Stage: (11 Years —Adulthood) ✓ The Sensory Motor Stage Ages: Birth to 2 years The main characteristic of this stage of development are: ✓ It involves the senses and motor activities. ✓ Children do reflexive activities such as sucking and grasping. ✓ The child observes and imitates his or her surroundings. Thought and memory also start to develop systematically.  ✓ Children learn to recognise objects and understand that objects have their separate permanent existence As infants grow older, they learn that even if an object is not in front of them, it still exists. Piaget called it to object permanence. It is also known as ‘out of sight, out of mind Children also learn to work in a particular direction. Catching a particular thing which they are asked to catch, playing with puzzles and so on are common activities they learn to do. They move from simple to complex logical action and thinking. This goal-directed thinking helps them to progress to a higher-level scheme to achieve a goal. ✓ The Preoperational stage Ages: 2 to 7 Years ✓ This stage is known as a pre-operational stage of cognitive development. It is called ‘pre’ because, in this stage, children cannot perform a logical operation. The Main Characteristics of the stage involves: ✓ Children begin to process their thoughts at this stage although in a manner that is far less efficient than the logical thought-processing of adults. ✓ Their vocabulary expands and develops during this time because they change their working style and habits and start behaving like little adults Some of the other important characteristics are: ✓ Ego-centrism is one of the main characteristics of pre-operational. Children focus on their perspectives and feel that they are correct. They also believe that others also share the same perspective because they think that it is the only perspective that exists. But gradually they understand that there are many perspectives and Piaget called it ‘decentering: They start believing that they are not at the centre of everything. ✓ Animism is also a characteristic of the pre-operational stage. It is a characteristic by which children believe that all objects or things are living and has some consciousness. An example of this is that children often believe that a table also feels pain if it is hit or kicked; a car does not get started because it is tired and so on. A child believes that everyone is like him or her. ✓ Reversibility Children in this stage cannot do reversible thinking. While children can do simple logical operations, they face difficulty in understanding reverse counting, extended family relation tree and so on. ✓ Conservation Along with reversibility, they also face difficulty in the conservation of various concepts such as height and width. Conservation is a principle according to which some characteristics of an object remain the same despite the change in its appearance. A famous example of conservation is that regarding the conservation of volume, where children said the  glass with more height has more water than the other glass, although the volume of water was the same in both the glasses. Such examples show that children can think only in one direction and face difficulty in the conservation of various concepts. ✓ The Concrete Operational Stage Ages: 7 to 11 years The main characteristic of the Concrete Operational stage are: ✓ Children can do operations on concrete objects and situations. However, they will find it hard to solve abstract problems and have difficulty with words like ‘assume’ that relate to mental conjecture. ✓ They can do logical thinking if they are allowed to manipulate objects. By comparison, however, it is seen that thoughts can be manipulated, and the presence of the object is not necessary for the thought to take place in the formal operations stage. ✓ They start thinking more like mature persons and rarely believe in animism and ego- centrism. However, there may be a few exceptions where some children continue to hold on to these fixations as do some people who carry them well into their adulthood. During the concrete operational stage, children gradually develop the ability to conserve or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. They start taking many perspectives about concepts. They begin to develop the ability to understand identity, compensation, and reversibility. ✓ Once children have learned to conserve, they also learn that objects remain the same even after changes in colours, etc. ✓ The Formal Operational Stage Ages: 11 years to Adulthood This is the final stage of Piaget’s cognitive development in this stage. The Main Characteristics of the formal operational stage are: ✓ Children become capable of abstract thinking and can understand the combination and coordination of numbers and variables. ✓ Developed formal operational thought. ✓ Children move ahead from concrete objects to abstract concepts ✓ They develop a logical system of intelligence and try to incorporate all possible solutions while working on a problem. ✓ They also learn to coordinate between different variables. Children in this stage use the formal operations problem-solving strategy in which an individual begins by identifying all the factors that might affect a problem and then deduces them systematically. Piaget called it hypothetico-deductive reasoning.