THEORIES OF COGNITIVE

DEVELOPMENT

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PIAGET’S COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
THEORY

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LEARNING OUTCOMES:
Explain the characteristics of each stage
of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory
Identify the key features of cognitive
development based on Piaget’s Theory;
Explain the implications of cognitive
development of this theory to the T & L
process in the classroom

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 JEAN PIAGET (1896 – 1980)
A biologist who originally studied molluscs
(publishing twenty scientific papers on them by
the time he was 21)
Moved into the study of the development of
children's understanding, through observing
them and talking and listening to them while
they worked on exercises he set.
"Piaget's work on children's intellectual
development owed much to his
early studies of water snails"
(Satterly,1987:622)
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His view of how children's minds work and develop
has been enormously influential, particularly in
educational theory.
His particular insight was the role of maturation
(simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity
to understand their world: they cannot undertake
certain tasks until they are psychologically mature
enough to do so.
His research has spawned a great deal more, much of
which has undermined the detail of his own, but like
many other original investigators, his importance
comes from his overall vision.

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He proposed that children's thinking does not
develop entirely smoothly: instead, there are
certain points at which it "takes off" and moves
into completely new areas and capabilities.
He saw these transitions as taking place at
about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years.
This has been taken to mean that before these
ages children are not capable (no matter how
bright) of understanding things in certain
ways, and has been used as the basis for
scheduling the school curriculum. Whether or
not should be the case is a different matter.
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Let’s view this clip:
Video Clips_Child Develp
\Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development.mp4

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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
While conducting intelligence tests on
children, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget
began to investigate how children think.
According to Piaget, children’s thought
processes change as they mature physically
and interact with the world around them.
Piaget believed children develop schema,
or mental models, to represent the world.

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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
As children learn, they expand and modify
their schema through the processes of
assimilation and accommodation. 
Assimilation is the broadening of an
existing schema to include new
information. 
Accommodation is the modification of a
schema as new information is incorporated.

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Example
Suppose a young boy knows his pet parrot is a bird.
When he sees a robin outside and calls it a bird too, he
exhibits assimilation, since he broadened his bird
schema to include characteristics of both parrots and
robins. His bird schema might be “all things that fly.”
Now suppose a bat flaps out at him one night and he
shrieks, “Bird!” If he learns it was a bat that startled
him, he’ll have to modify his bird schema to “things
that fly and have feathers.” In modifying his definition,
he enacts accommodation.

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Piaget proposed that children go through
four stages of cognitive development

Stage 1: Sensorimotor Period

In this stage, which lasts from birth to roughly two years,
children learn by using their senses and moving around.

 By the end of the sensorimotor period, children become

capable of symbolic thought, which means they can
represent objects in terms of mental symbols. More
important, children achieve object permanence in this stage. 
Object permanence is the ability to recognize that an
object can exist even when it’s no longer perceived or in one’s
sight.

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Example:
 If a three-month-old baby sees a ball, she’ll probably be
fascinated by it. But if someone hides the ball, the baby
won’t show any interest in looking for it. For a very
young child, out of sight is literally out of mind. When
the baby is older and has acquired object permanence,
she will start to look for things that are hidden because
she will know that things can exist even when they can’t
be seen.

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Stage 2: Preoperational Period
This stage lasts from about two to seven
years of age.
During this stage, children get better at
symbolic thought, but they can’t yet reason.
According to Piaget, children aren’t capable
of conservation during this stage.
Conservation is the ability to recognize
that measurable physical features of objects,
such as length, area, and volume, can be the
same even when objects appear different.
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Stage 2: Preoperational Period
Example:
Suppose a researcher gives a three-year-old
girl two full bottles of juice. The girl will
agree that they both contain the same
amount of juice. But if the researcher pours
the contents of one bottle into a short, fat
tumbler, the girl will then say that the bottle
has more. She doesn’t realize that the same
volume of juice is conserved in the tumbler.
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Piaget argued that children are not capable of conservation
during the preoperational stage because of three weaknesses
in the way they think.
He called these weaknesses:  centration, 
irreversibility, and egocentrism.
Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a
problem and ignore other key aspects.
In the example above, the three-year-old looks only at the
higher juice level in the bottle and ignores the fact that the
bottle is narrower than the tumbler.
Because of centration, children in the preoperational stage
cannot carry out hierarchical classification, which means
they can’t classify things according to more than one level.

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Irreversibility is the inability to mentally
reverse an operation. In the example, the three-
year-old can’t imagine pouring the juice from the
tumbler back into the bottle. If she poured the
juice back, she’d understand that the tumbler
holds the same amount of liquid as the bottle.

Egocentrism is the inability to take someone

else’s point of view. Animism, or the belief that
even inanimate objects are living, results from
egocentrism. Children assume that since they are
alive, all other things must be too.
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Stage 3: Concrete Operational Period
From the age of seven to about eleven,
children become capable of performing
mental operations or working through
problems and ideas in their minds.
However, they can perform operations
only on tangible objects and real events.
Children also achieve conservation,
reversibility, and decentration during
this stage.
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Stage 3: Concrete Operational Period

Reversibility is the ability to mentally

reverse actions.
Decentration is the ability to focus
simultaneously on several aspects of a
problem.
Furthermore, children become less
egocentric during this stage as they start to
consider simultaneously different ways of
looking at a problem.
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Stage 4: Formal Operational Period
In this stage, which begins around
eleven years of age and continues
through adulthood, children become
capable of applying mental operations
to abstract concepts.
They can imagine and reason about
hypothetical situations. From this point
on, people start to think in abstract,
systematic, and logical ways.
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Critiques of Piaget’s Theories
Although Piaget made important
contributions to the research on cognitive
development, his theory has come under
attack for several reasons:
1. Recent research has shown that he greatly
underestimated children’s capabilities. For
example, researchers have shown that
babies achieve object permanence much
sooner than Piaget said they do.

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Critiques of Piaget’s Theories
2. Children sometimes simultaneously develop skills
that are characteristic of more than one stage,
which makes the idea of stages seem less viable.

3. Piaget ignored cultural influences. Research has

shown that children from different cultures tend to
go through Piaget’s stages in the same order, but
the timing and length of stages vary from culture
to culture. Some people never develop the capacity
for formal reasoning, even as adults.

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 SUMMARY

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 PIAGET’S KEY IDEAS

Adaptation : What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and
accommodation

Assimilation :The process by which a person takes material into their mind
from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their
senses to make it fit. 

Accommodation :The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the
process of assimilation.  
Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one
without the other. 

Classification :The ability to group objects together on the basis of common
features. 

Class Inclusion :The understanding, more advanced than simple
classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger
class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called
animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of
dogs)  YONGLC
 PIAGET’S KEY IDEAS

Conservation :The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same
even when they are changed about or made to look different. 

Decentration: The ability to move away from one system of classification to
another one as appropriate.

Egocentrism :The belief that you are the centre of the universe and
everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world
as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness", just an early
stage of psychological development. 

Operation :The process of working something out in your head. Young
children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try
things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers): older
children and adults can do more in their heads. 

Schema (or scheme) :The representation in the mind of a set of
perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together. 

Stage :A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of
understanding some things but not others 
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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

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Let’s view 2 video clips on Jean Piaget’s
Cognitive Development Theory
Video Clips_Child Develp
\Pt1_Theories of Cognitive Development, including Piaget and
Vygotsky_Dr. Amanda Waterman.mp4

Video Clips_Child Develp

\Pt2_Theories of Cognitive Development, including Piaget and
Vygotsky_Dr. Amanda Waterman.mp4

(Piaget’s Theory Pt 1 and Pt 2 (0.00 – 5.13)

(Vygotsky Theory Pt 2 (5.14 onwards)
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 Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory
Piaget’s theories have had a major impact on the theory
and practice of education (Case, 1998).
First, the theories focused attention on the idea of
developmentally appropriate education—an education
with environments, curriculum, materials, and instruction
that are suitable for students in terms of their physical and
cognitive abilities and their social and emotional needs
(Elkind, 1989).
In addition, several major approaches to curriculum and
instruction are explicitly based on Piagetian theory
(Berrueta-Clement, Schweinhart, Barnett, Epstein, &
Weikart, 1984),
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Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory
This theory has been influential in constructivist models of
learning.
Berk (2001) summarizes the main teaching implications drawn
from Piaget as follows:
1. A focus on the process of children’s thinking, not just its
products.
In addition to checking the correctness of children’s answers,
teachers must understand the processes children use to get to
the answer.
Appropriate learning experiences build on children’s current
level of cognitive functioning, and only when teachers
appreciate children’s methods of arriving at particular
conclusions are they in a position to provide such experiences.
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Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory
2. Recognition of the crucial role of children’s self-
initiated, active involvement in learning
activities.
In a Piagetian classroom the presentation of ready-
made knowledge is deemphasized, and children are
encouraged to discover for themselves through
spontaneous interaction with the environment.
Therefore, instead of teaching didactically, teachers
provide a rich variety of activities that permit children
to act directly on the physical world.

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Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory
3. A de-emphasis on practices aimed at making children
adultlike in their thinking.
Piaget referred to the question “How can we speed up
development?” as “the American question.”
Among the many countries he visited, psychologists and educators
in the United States seemed most interested in what techniques
could be used to accelerate children’s progress through the
stages.
Piagetian-based educational programs accept his firm belief that
premature teaching could be worse than no teaching at all,
because it leads to superficial acceptance of adult formulas
rather than true cognitive understanding (May & Kundert, 1997).
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Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory
4. Acceptance of individual differences in developmental
progress.
Piaget’s theory assumes that all children go through the same
developmental sequence but that they do so at different rates.
Therefore, teachers must make a special effort to arrange
classroom activities for individuals and small groups of
children rather than for the total class group.
In addition, because individual differences are expected,
assessment of children’s educational progress should be made
in terms of each child’s own previous course of development,
not in terms of normative standards provided by the
performances of same-age peers.
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 TUTORIAL 5

Each group is given a different

development stage to discuss.
Discuss the characteristics of the
particular development stage given.
Suggest suitable teaching methods in
the T & L process.

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 TUTORIAL 7
Using a suitable thinking tool,
compare and contrast the cognitive
and language development of a
child based the theories of Piaget,
Vygotsky and Chomsky.

(To be done at the end of Lecture 7)

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 ISL TASK 5
Make references in the library and
also source for references in the
Internet on:
Cognitive and Language
development by Piaget,
Socio-cultural Theory by
Vygotsky
Nativist Theory by Chomsky
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