Jean Piaget

Cognitive Theory of Development

Basic Cognitive
Concepts
Schema
-Mental representation / Cognitive structure
-An individual’s way to understand or create
meaning about a thing or experience

Ex. A child’s schema about a dog – an animal with

four legs, has a tail and furry
  Assimilation
-Fitting a new experience into an existing or previously
created schema
Ex. If a child sees another dog, a smaller one, he would
add this new information into his schema of a dog.
Dog - an animal with four legs, has a tail and furry
- vary in sizes
 Equilibrium
- The person’s experience fit with their schema.

Ex. The child sees a dog at the park and it fits

their description - an animal with four legs, has
a tail and furry
 Disequilibrium
- A new experience disturbs the child’s schema.

Ex. The child sees a cat at the park and it is ALSO

an animal with four legs, has a tail and furry, but it
is NOT a dog. This upsets the schema.
  Accommodation
- Process of creating a NEW schema

Ex. The child sees another animal at the park that is

similar to a dog but somehow different. He might try to fit
it into his schema of a dog. Then the guardian will explain
that it is another animal and it’s a cat.
The child will now create a new schema, that of a cat.
 Jean Piaget’s
Stages of Cognitive
Development
 1. Sensori-motor Stage
Birth to infancy

Object Permanence
- an object still exists even when
out of sight
2. Pre-operational Stage (2-7 years old)

Symbolic Function
- to represent objects and events
Ex. Nico, a four-year old turns the
glass into a rocket ship or a telephone.
Enzo, who is six, can do a whole ninja turtle routine
without any costume nor “props.”
Egocentrism
- to only see his own point of
view

Centration
- to focus on only
one aspect
of a thing or event
Irreversibility
- inability to reverse their thinking

Animism
- to attribute human like traits
or characteristics to inanimate objects

Transductive Reasoning
- neither inductive nor deductive
3. Concrete-Operational Stage
7-11 years old

Decentering
- to perceive the different features of objects and
situations

Reversibility
- to follow that certain operations can be done in
reverse
 Conservation
- to know that certain properties of
objects like number, mass, volume,
or area do not change even if there
is a change in appearance
Seriation
- to order or arrange things in series
4. Formal Operational Stage
12 through adulthood
Hypothetical Reasoning
- to come up with different hypothesis
about a problem

Analogical Reasoning
- to perceive the relationship in one instance
to narrow down possible answers
Deductive Reasoning
- to think logically by applying a general rule to
a particular instance or situation