Jean Piaget: Theories of Cognitive Development

¶ … Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was intrigued with the reasons children gave to justify their incorrect answers to questions that called for the application of logic. He interpreted these as symbols indicating just how differently adults and children think. In his view, a child's thinking is influenced by the experiences they have with their environment and how mature their biological system is. Towards this end, a child will often construct their own understanding of the world based on what they experience in their physical environment, and will adjust the same as they continue to mature, and as they interact more with the larger environment. Gradually, these formative rational constructs, which Piaget refers to as schemas, are integrated into the child's cognitive processes and become more abstract. This text outlines the theoretical constructs behind Piaget's theory, and examines how relevant Piaget's framework is to contemporary education.

Piaget's Contribution

Sigelman and Rider (2014) refer to Piaget as a giant in the field of cognition. Piaget stimulated research in the field of intellectual development through his questions about how human beings come to understand the world (Sigelman & Rider, 2014). He demonstrated that answers to the same could be obtained through observing how thoughts and ideas evolved throughout a child's developmental process. He used a series of ingenious tests and observational studies to develop a cognitive model showing just how different children's schemas are, from those of adults; and how children's thinking, therefore, differs from that of adults as well as that of other children in other stages of development. As Sigelman and Rider (2014) point out, this perspective forms the fundamental framework for human development, and its theoretical constructs continue to guide the study of intellectual development to this day.

Further, with his work, Piaget cast doubt on the historical assumption that children are less competent thinkers compared to adults. He showed that children and infants "are active in their own development -- that from the start, they seek to master problems and to understand the incomprehensible" (Sigelman & Rider, 2014, p. 202). Throughout their development, they strive to correct their cognitive disequilibrium through the processes of accommodation and assimilation.

Piaget's description of cognitive development forms the basis of research studies seeking to describe the content and course of intellectual development in children from different subcultures. Most of these studies have found that although a child's culture has an effect on their cognitive growth, the direction of growth moves from the sensorimotor, to the preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages respectively in all cases (Sigelman & Rider, 2014).

Diagrammatical Representation of Piaget's Model of the Stages of Cognitive Development

The sensorimotor

Stage (0-2 years)

Child creates schema through reinforcing permanency of things

Child creates their understanding of the world through physical and sensory experimentation

Preoperational

(2-7 years)

Child begins to understand symbols and creating language out of them

Egocentrism

Child has difficulty understanding multiple aspects of a situation

Concrete operational

(7-11 years)

Child classifies objects based on appearance

Empathy and sympathy

Child able to sequence numbers

Simplistic understanding of physics, geometry and math

Formal operational

(11 years and above)

Child draws conclusions on the basis of hypotheses, as opposed to objects

Adolescent egocentrism

Higher levels of logic

Three components can be deduced from the model above:

i) Schemas -- the building blocks (units) of intelligent behavior/knowledge

ii) Adaptation processes that make transition from one stage to another possible -- accommodation, assimilation, and equilibration

iii) Developmental stages -- sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and functional operational

Schemas: according to McLeod (2009), schema refers to the different units of knowledge stored in the brain, and which combine to give an individual an understanding of a certain aspect, phenomenon, or object. It is these stored knowledge units that tell an individual how to respond to information or stimuli. A state of cognitive equilibrium is said to exist if one's schemas are able to explain a certain new aspect of the world (Sigelman & Rider, 2014). In case the existing schemas are not able to interpret the same, disequilibrium exists, and the adaptation processes of accommodation and assimilation then come in to try and restore balance by adopting the new information as a new schema.

Assimilation -- this is the process of using pre-existing schemas to interpret new stimuli and information. A child, for instance, who has some form of experience with fish, is likely to refer to a whale as a 'fish' the first time they see it. This is because they have a pre-existing schema representing their knowledge of fish.

Accommodation: the child in the above example may notice that the whale is bigger than a normal fish, and may be prompted to change their understanding of the same because the existing schema does not adequately interpret the new information. This process of adapting to the new stimulus is referred to as accommodation.

Equilibration: this refers to the force that drives the learning process and controls the processes of assimilation to restore balance.

Stages of Development

The four stages of development, as put forward by Piaget, have been summarized in table 1 below.

Table 1: Key Features of the Different Stages of Development

Stage of Development

Key Features

Sensorimotor (0-2 years)

Object permanence

Use of innate behavior (physical and sensory experimentation) to enhance learning

Deferred imitation

Preoperational (2-7 years)

Egocentrism

Poor conversion ability -- the child encounters difficulty in understanding differences in measurements and quantities

Concrete operational

Improved conversion skills -- by age 11, one is able to conserve volumes, weight, and numbers

Low ability to draw conclusions from verbal information -- the children can interpret things better if physical representations such as dolls are involved.

Formal operational

Ability to think outside the box (hypothetically)

Ability to draw logical conclusions from verbal information

(Source: Eddy, 2010)

Relevance to Contemporary Education

Piaget may not have explicitly linked his theory to education, but contemporary researchers have found the same relevant to the processes of learning and teaching. The concept of discovery learning, which is a key component of the school curriculum today, is based on Piaget's idea that children learn best through active doing (McLeod, 2009). When the UK government embarked on reviewing its education system in 1966, its strategies, which included child progress-evaluation, increased centrality of play in the learning process, and curriculum flexibility, were all geared at facilitating discovery learning (McLeod, 2009).