PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE 05/12/2017

MADAM AISHAH HANIM

DEVELOPMENT ABD KARIM
 JEAN PIAGET
BORN IN SWITZERLAND IN 1896
MOST INFLUENTIAL DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGIST IN THE
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

PIAGET EXPLORED BOTH WHY AND HOW MENTAL ABILITIES

CHANGE OVER TIME
FOR PIAGET, DEVELOPMENT DEPENDS IN LARGE PART ON THE
CHILD’S MANIPULATION OF AND ACTIVE INTERACTION WITH THE
ENVIRONMENT
PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
PROPOSES THAT A CHILD’S INTELLECT, OR
COGNITIVE ABILITIES, PROGRESSES THROUGH FOUR
DISTINCT STAGES. EACH STAGEIS CHARACTERIZED BY
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW ABILITIES AND WAYS OF
PROCESSING INFORMATION

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: GRADUAL, ORDERLY

CHANGES BY WHICH MENTAL PROCESSES BECOME
MORE COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED
PIAGET’S VIEW OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
 Schemes
 Adaptation
1. Assimilation
2. Accommodation
 Equilibration
 Constructivism
HOW DEVELOPMENT OCCURS
• Piaget believes that all children are born with an innate tendency
to interact with and make sense of their environment

• Young children demonstrate patterns of behaviour or thinking,

called SCHEMES, that older children and adults also use in dealing
with objects in the world.
• For example, most young infants will discover that one
thing you can do with objects is bang them. When they do
this, the object makes a noise, and the see the object
hitting a surface.

• Babies learn about objects by biting them, sucking on

them, and throwing them.

• Each of these approaches to interacting with objects is a

scheme, which is a mental patterns that guide behaviour.
• When babies encounter a new object, they will use the
schemes they have developed and will find out whether
the object makes a loud or soft sound when banged, what
it tastes like, whether it gives milk.
 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION
 Adaptation is the process of
adjusting schemes in response
to the environment by means
of assimilation and
accommodation
 Assimilation is the process of
understanding a new object or
event in terms of an existing
scheme
If you give young infants small
objects that they have never
seen before but that resemble
familiar objects, they are
likely to grasp, bite and bang
them
They will try to use their
existing schemes to learn
about these unknown things
MORE EXAMPLES OF ASSIMILATION
 A CHEF LEARNING A NEW COOKING TECHNIQUE

 A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER LEARNING A NEW

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

 A COLLEGE STUDENT LEARNING HOW TO USE A

NEW COMPUTER PROGRAMME
 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION
 A child may modify an  The process of restoring
existing scheme in light of balance between present
new information or a new understanding and new
experience. This is called experiences is called
ACCOMMODATION. EQUILIBRATION.
 CONSTRUCTIVISM
 Piaget’s theory of In other words, it
development represents emphasized the active role
constructivisim, a view of of learners in building their
cognitive development as a own understanding of
process in which children reality
actively build systems of  Children actively construct
meaning and understandings knowledge by continually
of reality through their assimilating and
experiences and accommodating new
interactions information
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (BIRTH TO AGE 2)
 Stage during which infants learn about their surroundings
by using their SENSES and MOTOR skills
 All infants have inborn behaviours called REFLEXES

 Reflexes: inborn, automatic responses to stimuli

 For example, eye blinking in response to bright lights, place

your finger in the palm of an infant’s hand and the infant will
grasp it.
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (BIRTH TO AGE 2)
 By the END of the sensorimotor stage, infants have
progressed from earlier trial-and-error approach to a more
planned approach to problem solving
 They can mentally represent objects and events

 Object Permanence- the fact that an object exists even if

it is out of sight
 For example: if you cover an infant’s bottle with a towel,
the child may NOT remove it, believing that the bottle is
gone. However, by 2 years of age, the child understand that
objects exist even if they cannot be seen.
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (BIRTH TO AGE 2)

1. Reflexes
2. Object Permanence
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 2 TO AGE 7)
 Stage at which children learn to represent things in the MIND
 Young children lacked an understanding of the principle of
CONSERVATION

 Conservation: the concept that certain properties of an object

(such as weight) remain the same regardless of changes in other
properties (such as length)

 For example: if you pour milk from a tall, narrow container into a
shallow, wide one in the presence of a preoperational child, the child
will firmly believe that the tall glass has more milk. The child focuses
on only one aspect (the height of the milk) ignoring all others, and
cannot be convinced that the amount of milk is the same.
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 2 TO AGE 7)
 To explain the error on conservation tasks
 Centration: paying attention to only one aspect of a situation
 For example: children’s focus on the length of the line of
blocks but ignore its density (or the actual number of blocks)
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 2 TO AGE 7)
 Pre-schoolers’ thinking can also be irreversible
 Reversibility: the ability to perform a mental operation and
then reverse one’s thinking to return to the starting point

 If preoperational children could think this way, then they

could mentally reverse the process of pouring the milk and
realize that if the milk were poured back into the tall beaker,
its quantity would not change
 7 + 5 = 12; then 12 – 5 = 7
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 2 TO AGE 7)
 Preoperational child’s thinking focuses on states
 They ignore the POURING PROCESS
 They only focus on the beginning state (milk in a tall glass)
and end state (milk in a shallow dish)
 Preoperational children are EGOCENTRIC in their thinking
 They believe everyone sees the world exactly as they do
 They are unable to take the perspective of others
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 2 TO AGE 7)

1. Conservation
2. Centration
3. Reversibility
4. Focus on states
5. Egocentric
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
 Stage at which children develop the capacity for logical
reasoning and understanding of conservation but can use these
skills only in dealing with familiar situations
 Children at this stage can form concepts, see relationships,
solve problems, but only as long as they involve objects and
situations that are familiar
 Older concrete operational child is able to response to
inferred reality, seeing things in the context of other meanings
 Inferred reality: the meaning of stimuli in the context of
relevant information
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
 Seriation: arranging objects in sequential order according to
one aspect such as size, weight or volume
 For example – lining up sticks from smallest to largest
 To do this, they must be able to order or classify objects
according to length
 Once that is achieved, then they can master a related skill
known as - transitivity
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
 Transitivity: a skill learned during the concrete operational
stage of cognitive development in which individuals can
mentally arrange and compare objects

 In other words, transitivity refers to the ability to infer a

relationship between two objects on the basis of knowledge of
their respective relationships with a third object
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
 At this stage, children are able to understand time and space
well enough to draw a map from their home to school
 They also understand events in the past
 They move from egocentric thought to decentred or
objective thought
 Decentred thought allows children to see that others can
have different perceptions than they do
 For example: they would understand that different children
may see different patterns in cloud
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
 A final ability that children acquire during the concrete
operational stage is class inclusion

 Class inclusion: a skill learned during the concrete

operational stage of cognitive development in which
individuals can think simultaneously about a whole class of
objects and about relationship among its subordinate class
 CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
Piaget and Szeminska (1941) showed children twenty wooden beads.
Eighteen were brown and two were white. Each child was asked several questions:

1. Are all the beads wooden?

2. Are there more brown beads or white beads?
3. Are there more brown beads or more wooden beads?

Pre-operational children usually answer the first two questions correctly. However they usually
answered question three by saying that there were more brown beads. Children in the stage
of concrete operations usually answered all three questions correctly. Notice that in question
two, the child has to think about two separate classes of beads – the brown ones and the white
ones. But in question three, the two classes are not separate – they overlap. The class of brown
beads is included in the class of wooden beads (this is class inclusion). The wrong answer is
given, perhaps because the child assumes that if brown beads are one class, and they are the
majority, they must have more members than any other possible class.
CONCRETE STAGE (AGE 7 TO AGE 11)
1. Inferred Reality
2. Seriation
3. Transitivity
4. Decentred Thought
5. Class Inclusion
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 11 TO ADULTHOOD)
 The ability to deal abstractly with hypothetical situations
and can reason logically

 By adolescence period, they can monitor or think about their

own thinking

 Hypothetical condition: the ability to reason about situations

and conditions that have not been experienced
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 11 TO ADULTHOOD)
 They can accept, for the sake of argument or discussion,
conditions that are arbitrary, that are not known to exist, or
even that are known to be contrary to fact

They can apply logic to any given set of conditions

They acquire higher order thinking skills – able to think

abstractly, test hypothesis, form concepts
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 11 TO ADULTHOOD)
 Thinking characteristic of the formal preoperational stage
usually occurs between the ages of 11 to 15 years old

 But there are many individuals who never reach this stage

 Some individuals tend to use formal preoperational thinking

in some situations and not others
 FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (AGE 11 TO ADULTHOOD)

1. Hypothetical Situations
2. Systematic Reasoning
3. Monitored Reasoning
CRITICISMS OF PIAGET’S THEORY
 Piaget’s tasks can be taught to children at earlier
developmental stages

 For example, young children can succeed on simpler forms

of Piaget’s tasks that require the same skills. They can solve
the conservation problem involving the number of blocks in a
row when the task was presented in a simpler way with
simpler language.
CRITICISMS OF PIAGET’S THEORY
 Children are able to demonstrate their ability to consider
the point of view of others (they are not necessarily
egocentric)

 Infants have been shown to demonstrate aspects of object

permanence much earlier than Piaget predicted

 Children’s skill develop in different ways on different tasks

and their experience can have a strong influence on the pace
of development