An Overview of Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory is one of the most influential frameworks for understanding how children’s thinking evolves in structured stages as they grow. Here’s a comprehensive look at his theory and its stages.

Background of Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was an influential Swiss psychologist known for his theory on cognitive development; he developed his theory after observing children’s learning and problem-solving behaviours.

Piaget argued that children were more than just smaller and less able versions of adults by using a process-orientated view, which showed how children constructed knowledge through interactions with their environments.

This process helped to show how children’s thinking evolves in stages, showing how children of different ages appeared to have qualitative differences.

Key Concepts in Piaget’s Theory

There are four key concepts to Piaget’s theory:

Schema

These mental structures help children organise and interpret the world around them. A child might have a cat schema based on a family pet, with concepts for cats, including four legs, meowing and catching mice.

Schemas should be considered as flexible, active knowledge organisers. This flexibility allows children to adapt and reshape themselves as they encounter new information.

Over time, schemas can grow in complexity and become interconnected with other schemas. Over time, simple schemas such as “Dog” and “Cat” can mature and develop into “Animals” or “Canines” and “Felines”. (See Schema Theory)

Assimilation

This is when children process and incorporate new information into existing schemas. For example, a child might visit a friend's house with a different cat breed and add this to their existing cat schema.

Accommodation

This is when children come across new information which does not fit into existing schemas, meaning that the child has to adjust or create new schemas. An example of this is that a child might associate any four-legged animal with being part of their cat schema, and later on, they realise that the new animal is not a cat and will create a new schema. (such as a dog schema which has four legs, a tail and barks)

Equilibration

This is the balance children experience between assimilation and accommodation; this balance allows children to move from one stage of cognitive development to the next.

A state of disequilibrium, when new information does not fit into an existing schema, keeps children motivated to adapt their schemas, fostering intellectual growth.

The Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory identified four key stages of cognitive development that children progress through. Piaget also thought that these stages of development happened at predictable ages, with each stage allowing children to adopt new ways of thinking and understanding:

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

Children learn about the world using their senses and basic motor actions. Towards the end of this stage, children develop object permanence (where they learn that objects can continue to exist, even when they cannot be seen). Most learning at the sensorimotor stage will be done through trial and error and physical interactions with their environments.

Goal-directed behaviours, where infants show purposeful actions aimed at achieving specific outcomes (like tipping their cup to drink from it and deferred imitation, which involves the ability to remember and replicate an action at a later time, both develop in this stage

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

Children develop language skills and the ability to think symbolically – meaning that they begin to use symbols such as words and images to represent objects. They can also start to engage in pretend play that can form more complex ideas.

However, children in the preoperational stage will often struggle to see things from other people's perspectives as their thinking remains egocentric.

Children in this stage will also lack understanding of conservation, leading to them believing that a tall, thin glass will have more water inside than a short, wide glass, even if the volume inside is equal in both.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

Children in this stage will start to understand conservation, leading to them understanding that changing the appearance of an object does not alter its properties.

During this stage, children become less egocentric and more empathetic and develop logical thinking skills. They can understand the concept of cause and effect and consider problems from different.

Some key math skills develop during this stage as children begin to understand reversibility and that actions can be reversed. They learn how this can be applied to mathematical reasoning as they learn that adding and subtracting a number will bring them back to their original amount.

Another key math skill that develops is classifying objects based on shared characteristics. They could, for example, sort bricks by colour or shape or numbers as odd or even.

Formal Operational Stage (11+ years)

In this stage, children develop the ability to think abstractly and hypothetically; this allows them to use deductive reasoning and think about moral, philosophical, and scientific issues systemically. This stage includes the development of hypothetical-deductive reasoning, where adolescents can use logical frameworks to predict outcomes or test hypotheses without physically manipulating objects.

Applications in Education

Piaget’s cognitive development theory has helped shape today's educational world. His emphasis on learning through exploration and interaction can be seen in our focus on ‘learning through play’; where teachers provide hands-on activities, children can explore concepts independently.

Piaget believed that children should only be taught concepts that they are developmentally ready to do; expecting a 2-year-old to multiply numbers would be inappropriate, just in the same way that trying to teach a 5-year-old to use hypothetical reasoning is not likely to yield any results.

Teachers can further support development by setting problem-solving situations where children are given opportunities to discover concepts independently. This would promote learning through trial and error.

Critiques and Limitations of Piaget’s Theory

While there are some criticisms of Piaget’s theory, understanding the theory allows us to understand better how children develop and grow. The stages will not be a one-size-fits-all but will give a general overview of children's development.

Some of Jean Piaget’s main critiques of cognitive development theory came from researchers who felt that his framework underestimated the complexity of children's cognitive abilities or did not sufficiently account for cultural and social contexts. Here are the primary critics and their main arguments:

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)

Vygotsky felt that social and cultural context played a more important part in cognitive development, contrasting with Piaget’s view of children as solitary learners. Vygotsky's concept of “Zone of Proximal Development” shows how children learn through the guidance and knowledge of others.

Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)

Bruner felt that Piaget had underestimated the role of language in cognitive development. Bruner felt that children could achieve more through a process that he called “scaffolding”, which relied on guidance from others and a structured learning environment.

Margaret Donaldson (1926-2020)

Donaldson felt that Piaget’s tasks were too abstract and detached from real-world contexts as she felt that children's cognitive abilities were more sophisticated than Piaget’s suggestions.

Bärbel Inhelder (1913-1997)

Inhelder, A close ally of Piaget, had disagreements with him around the formal operational stage. She found that not all adolescents reach these stages and suggested that this might be because of educational and cultural factors.

Martin Hughes (1947-2014)

Hughes challenged the idea that young children are egocentric. Hughes's research demonstrated that children as young as three could understand situations from the perspectives of others.

Kurt Fischer (1943-2020)

Fischer proposed the Dynamic Skill Theory, which suggests that cognitive skills develop as a dynamic, non-linear process and not as rigid stages as proposed by Piaget.