EDUC 1 - THE CHILD

AND ADOLESCENT
LEARNERS AND
LEARNING
PRINCIPLES
Jean Piaget’s Theory Of Cognitive Development
Paul Main
WHAT IS PIAGET'S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT?
The Theory of Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget, the Swiss
psychologist, suggests that children's intelligence undergoes changes
as they grow. Cognitive development in children is not only related
to acquiring knowledge, children need to build or develop a mental
model of their surrounding world (Miller, 2011). His work is
regarded as the cornerstone in the field of developmental
psychology. In this article, we examine the implications his work has
for the intellectual development of children in classrooms.
In the 1920s, Piaget was working at the Binet Institute and his main
responsibility was to translate questions written in English
intelligence tests into French. He became interested to find out why
children gave incorrect answers to the questions needing logical
thinking (Meadows, 2019).
Piaget believed that these wrong answers revealed significant
differences between the thinking of children and adults. Piaget
proposed a new set of assumptions about the intelligence of children:
▪ Children think differently and see the world differently from adults.
▪ Children are not passive learners, they actively build up their
knowledge about the surrounding.
▪ The most effective way to understand children’s reasoning is to
think from children's point of view.
Piaget did not want to measure how well children can spell, count or
solve problems to check their I.Q. He was more intrigued to find out
how the fundamental concepts such as the very idea of time, number,
justice, quantity and so on emerged (Greenfield, 2019).
Piaget used observations and clinical interviews of older children
who were able to hold conversations and understand questions. He
also made controlled observation, and used naturalistic observation
of his own three children and developed diary description with charts
of children's development.

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WHO EXACTLY WAS JEAN
PIAGET?
He was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. After finishing high
school he went to study medicine but soon changed course to
philosophy and sociology. During World War 1, he worked as an
army doctor. When war ended, he started studying law and then
switched again to philosophy and sociology. At the age of 30, he
published his first book “Genetic Epistemology” which received
critical acclaim. This led him to become one of the leading
psychologists of his generation. The Jean Piaget Society is named
after him.
His research interests included child development, logic,
mathematics, linguistics, social sciences and education.
His major works include "Logic", "Reasoning and Judgment" and
"Constructionism". Jean Piaget's work is important because it
provides us with insights into cognitive processes during childhood.
It helps teachers identify what needs to be taught and when. The
following sections will explore some of the key ideas behind
Piagetian theories.
Piaget influenced the field of developmental psychology because he
showed that learning takes place through stages rather than just being
acquired all at once. Anyone exploring a career in child psychology
will no doubt come across his influential work. In recent years, it has
come into some criticism but the importance of his contribution to
developmental psychology cannot be denied.
▪ He was one of the first people to study children's development and
he developed the theory that children develop through stages.
▪ He also studied how children learn and he found out that they learn
by doing things and not just listening or reading about them.
▪ He also discovered that children have their own ways of learning
and that they don't always follow the same rules as adults do.
▪ He also found out that children are very creative and imaginative
and that they like to play and explore.
▪ He also believed that children should be allowed to make mistakes
and that they shouldn't be punished for making them.
Stages of Cognitive Development
According to Jean Piaget, stages of development takes place via the
interaction between natural capacities and environmental
happenings, and children experience a series of stages (Wellman,
2011). The sequence of these stages remains same across cultures.
Each child goes through the same stages of cognitive development in
life but with a different rate. The following are Piaget's stages of
intellectual development:
From birth to 18-24 months: Sensorimotor stage (Object
permanence)
The infants use their actions and senses to explore and learn about
their surrounding environment.
A variety of cognitive abilities develop at this stage; which mainly
include representational play, object permanence, deferred imitation
and self-recognition.
At this stage, infants live only in present. They do not have anything
related to this world stored in their memory. At age of 8 months, the
infant will understand different objects' permanence and they will
search for them when they are not present.
Towards the endpoint of this stage, infants' general symbolic
function starts to appear and they can use two objects to stand for
each other. Language begins to appear when they realize that they
can use words to represent feelings and objects. The child starts to
store information he knows about the world, label it and recall it.
From 2 to 7 years: Preoperational stage (Symbolic thought)
Young children and Toddlers gain the ability to represent the world
internally through mental imagery and language.
At this stage, children symbolically think about things. They are able
to make one thing, for example, an object or a word, stand for
another thing different from itself.
A child mostly thinks about how the world appears, not how it is. At
the preoperational stage, children do not show problem-solving or
logical thinking.
Infants in this age also show animism, which means that they think
that toys and other non-living objects have feelings and live like a
person.
By an age of 2 years, toddlers can detach their thought process from
the physical world. But, they are still not yet able to develop
operational or logical thinking skills of later stages.
Their thinking is still egocentric (centered on their own world view)
and intuitive (based on children's subjective judgements about
events).
7 to 11 years: Concrete operational stage (Logical thought)
At this stage, children start to show logical thinking about concrete
events.
They start to grasp the concept of conservation. They understand
that, even if things change in appearance but some properties still
remain the same.
Children at this stage can reverse things mentally. They start to think
about other people's feelings and thinking and they also become less
egocentric.
This stage is also known as concrete as children begin to think
logically. According to Piaget, this stage is a significant turning point
of a child's cognitive development because it marks the starting point
of operational or logical thinking. At this stage, a child is capable of
internally working things out in their head (rather than trying things
out in reality).
Children at this stage may become overwhelmed or they may make
mistakes when they are asked to reason about hypothetical or
abstract problems. Conservation means that the child understands
that even if some things change in appearance but their properties
may remain the same. At age 6 children are able to conserve number,
at age 7 they can conserve mass and at age 9 they can conserve
weight. But logical thinking is only used if children ask to reason
about physically present materials.
age 12 and above: Formal operational stage (Symbolic
reasoning)
At this stage, individuals perform concrete operations on things and
they perform formal operations on ideas. Formal logical thinking is
totally free from perceptual and physical barriers.
At this stage, adolescents can understand abstract concepts. They are
able to follow any specific kind of argument without thinking about
any particular examples.
Adolescents are capable of dealing with hypothetical problems with
several possible outcomes.
This stage allows the emergence of scientific reasoning, formulating
hypotheses and abstract theories as and whenever needed.
Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development made no claims about
any specific age-associated with any of the particular stage but his
description provides an indication of the age at which an average
child would reach a certain stage.
HOW IS PIAGET'S THEORY DIFFERENT
FROM OTHERS?
Jean Piaget vs Vygotsky: Vygotsky claims that cognitive
development is led by social interactions and children are social
beings. Whereas, Piaget believes that a child's development is led by
his own self-centered and focused activities as he is more
independent.
Piaget vs Kohlberg: For Piaget, moral development is a construction
process, and the interplay of thought and action creates moral
concepts. Whereas, Kohlberg believes that process of exploring
universal moral principles is called development.
Piaget vs Erikson: The main difference between Erikson and Piaget
is that Erikson focused on the understanding of development during
the entire life of a person. Whereas, Piaget mainly emphasized life
events that occur from infancy to the late teenage years. Also,
Piaget's most work is on the topic of cognitive development;
whereas, Erikson was more interested in the area of emotional
development.
KEY CONCEPTS RELATING TO PIAGET'S
SCHEMA THEORY
Schemas – A schema indicates both the physical and mental actions
involved in knowing and understanding. Schemas represent the
categories of knowledge that help people to understand and interpret
the world. A current schema can be built on and and become more
complex. In many ways, this is the very nature of learning and
teaching. Schema in psychology is a term that is used a lot, we think
that schools and teachers need to turn their attention to this concept.
If we talk about learning as something that needs to be built then the
idea of cognitive schemas makes perfect sense. These hidden worlds
of the learner are what we as educators are trying to develop. In
many ways our ability to build on our schemas is a fundamental
aspect of intelligence. This could be where metacognition plays a
central role.
Piaget believes that a schema involves a category of knowledge and
the procedure to obtain that knowledge. As individuals gain new
experiences, the new information is modified, and gets added to, or
alter pre-existing schemas.
A child may have a schema about cats. For example: if his only
experience has been with small cats, the child may believe that all
cats are small. If this kid encounters a large cat, he would take in this
new knowledge, altering the old schema to incorporate this new
piece of information.
Adaptation – Adaptation is a type of schema that explains how
persons understand and learn new information. According to Piaget's
theory, There are two ways in which adaptation can occur.
Adaptation through Assimilation – When new information is taken
from the outside world and is incorporated into a previously existing
schema, it is called assimilation. This process is thought to be
subjective, as people tend to modify information or experience that
should match with their pre-existing beliefs. In Schema's example,
seeing a cat and labelling it “cat” is an example of assimilating an
animal into the child’s cat schema.
Adaptation through Accommodation – Accommodation occurs
when persons process new information by altering their
psychological representations to fit the new information. It is an
additional constituent of adaptation that includes altering people's
current schemas to suit the new information, this process is called
accommodation. In accommodation, people change their existing
ideas or schemas, due to a new experience or new information. These
processes may give rise to the development of new schemas.
Equilibration – According to Piaget, each child tries to create a
balance between accommodation and assimilation, which is only
possible by implementing a mechanism called equilibration. As
children grow through each stage of cognitive development, it
becomes essential to uphold a balance between the application of
past knowledge (assimilation) and altering attitude to acquire new
knowledge (accommodation). Equilibration assists and demonstrates
how children must move from one stage of thinking into the next
stage.