John Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Daigon Elmy

11255190

University of Saskatchewan, College of Education

ECUR 483: Trends and Issues in the Early Years

Dr. Oluwole Caleb Falode

Due: September 28, 2023

 John Piaget’s theory of cognitive development began in 1919 when he believed humans

created their own understanding of the world (Kurt, 2020). Accommodation and assimilation are

two of the processes that children learn through. Children must learn and understand a concept

and then adjust their ways to include their new experience. This means children are always

learning and continuedly working towards gaining new knowledge for short term benefits, but

Piaget was much more focused on how a child’s cognitive develops over a long period of time.

There are four major stages that our children go through throughout their cognitive development,

each of which scaffolds off the previous stage. With these developments many of them have their

positives, but with those positive must come the negatives. The word negative gives a bad

connotation to the development, the negative pieces are pieces that could use some more

research or a different approach at the cognitive development of our children.

Piaget established there are four stages that happened through cognitive development of

our children those stages will occur in order; they will not skip a stage but pass through each

stage. There will be visible changes from one stage to another, and each stage is a building block

for the next stage (Kurt, 2020).

The stage known as the Sensorimotor stage is the first stage: during this stage children begin to

develop as soon as they are born in this stage till about age 2. Infants can absorb information and

learn simply through their senses which are: touching, looking, and listening. We begin to

understand how children interpret knowledge and understanding by allowing them to play with

toys and manipulatives of their choice. The children learn to manipulate, feel, and begin to gain

an understanding of the toys, they are then able to identify their toys with how they associate
with it. In a study Piaget hid a toy underneath a blanket, children aged 18-24 months would

search for it, children under 6 months did not (Kurt, 2020). This simple example shows us how

infants develop a better understanding of their surroundings.

The next stage occurs in children aged 2 years to 7 years and is known as the

preoperational stage. This stage allows children to build on representation in which is significant

to different activities they will participate in, although the way they represent these ways has no

logic of reasoning behind it. Dramatic play is encouraged for students to grow through this stage,

this is why dramatic play is such an important part of young children’s play routine. This allows

children to develop their dual thinking, while they are playing, they are reflecting or viewing it as

realistic as possible.

The concrete operation stage occurs from ages 7-11 years old and throughout this stage

children begin to represent objects and ideas in a much more logical way compared to the stage

prior. This leads to problem solving in a much more sensible way, the children can manage

objects but struggle with representations of the object. There are two things that separate

concrete operation from preoperational thinking, reversibility, and decentering. Reversibility

allows children to manipulate an object in any process and be able to recall the events in any

order, in order or out of order, where a child in the previous stage would be able to just describe

the procedure. Decentering allows children to view issues and analyze their procedure form more

than one angle. A major part of the concrete operational stage is being able to look at items and

procedures from a different perspective. This would allow students to excel in simple
worksheets, using multiple step instructions where a child in the preoperational stage may use a

banana as a phone, they identify the banana can be both a banana and a phone.

The formal operational stage is the final stage of Piaget cognitive development theory.

From the previous stages children have scaffolded to reason about much more abstract ideas and

have expectations that hypothetical questions will be answered with reasonable answers. Once

children hit this stage at age 11 and beyond, they require fewer supports in problem solving, this

allows for them to be much more independent than students in the previous 3 stages. However, it

comes with the reality that students are still going to need assistance and will not be able to solve

all problems on their own.

There are some negatives that come with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Some

of the critical information includes that “children do not pose a given cognitive ability until a

certain age” and the “success in resolving certain key problems reveals the stage of development

reached by children.” (Borst, Poirel, Pineau, Cassotti, Houde, 2013). With many of these

developments they were developed many years ago. Our children have developed with our very

quick changing world and that has not only allowed children to develop but forced them to

develop at the rate our world is developing. The four stages of Piaget’s cognitive development

allow us as teachers to take a deeper dive and investigate the cognitive development we will be

dealing with within our students, where they have been in terms to development and what their

next steps will be regarding their cognitive development.

 References

Kurt, S. (2020). Jean Piaget and His Theory & Stages of Cognitive Development.

Educational Technology Consulting Services.

Borst, G. Poirel, N. Pineau, A. Cassotti, M. Houde, O. (2013) Inhibitory Control

Efficiency in a Piaget-Like Class- Inclusion Task in School-Age Children and Adults: A

Developmental Negative Priming Study. Developmental Psychology, 49 (7).