piagetian problem solving theory

Piaget’s Stages: 4 Stages of Cognitive Development & Theory

You’re trying to explain something to a child, and even though it seems so obvious to you, the child just doesn’t seem to understand.

They repeat the same mistake, over and over, and you become increasingly frustrated.

Well, guess what?

• The child is not naughty.
• They’re also not stupid.
• But their lack of understanding is not your fault either.

Their cognitive development limits their ability to understand certain concepts. Specifically, they’re not capable right now of understanding what you’re trying to explain.

In this post, we’ll learn more about Jean Piaget, a famous psychologist whose ideas about cognitive development in children were extremely influential. We’ll cover quite a lot in this post, so make sure you have a cup of coffee and you’re sitting somewhere comfortable.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

Who was jean piaget in psychology, piaget’s cognitive development theory, 1. the sensorimotor stage, 2. the preoperational stage, 3. the concrete operational stage, 4. the formal operational stage, piaget’s theory vs erikson’s, 5 important concepts in piaget’s work, applications in education (+3 classroom games), positivepsychology.com’s relevant resources, a take-home message.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who contributed greatly to the understanding of children’s cognitive development (Papalia & Feldman, 2011; Waite-Stupiansky, 2017).

He was born in 1896 and originally trained as a biologist and philosopher. Although he is well known for his work as a psychologist, he also published research on sparrows and mollusks (Burman, 2012; Papalia & Feldman, 2011; Waite-Stupiansky, 2017).

Piaget’s contribution to psychology was mainly through his observations of children’s cognitive development (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Early in his career, Piaget scored the IQ tests that Alfred Binet administered to children.

Piaget noticed that children of certain ages tended to give the same types of incorrect answers. From these observations and follow-up interviews with children about these mistakes, he developed a theory of how children’s cognitive processes developed (Waite-Stupiansky, 2017).

One of the most important implications of his work is that children are not born with the same cognitive processes as adults (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Instead, children’s cognitive processes:

• develop over time,
• develop in response to their environment, and
• are updated with exposure to new information.

Piaget also influenced psychology in other ways. For example, he emphasized other methods of conducting research, such as the clinical method (Papalia & Feldman, 2011; Waite-Stupiansky, 2017). He relied upon the following research methods:

• Naturalistic observation of play and conversation between children (including his own)
• Interviewing children

Additionally, he was the first psychologist to study ‘theory of mind’ in children (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Theory of mind is the understanding or basic sense that each of us has our own consciousness and thoughts.

Specifically, he posited that as children’s thinking develops from one stage to the next, their behavior also changes, reflecting these cognitive developments.

The stages in his theory follow a specific order, and each subsequent stage only occurs after the one before it.

These stages are:

• Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years old)
• Preoperational stage (2–7 years old)
• Concrete operational stage (7–11 years old)
• Formal operational stage (11 years old through adulthood)

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The sensorimotor stage is the first phase of children’s cognitive development. During this stage, children primarily learn about their environment through their senses and motor activities.

The sensorimotor stage comprises six substages, where children’s behavior moves from being reflex driven to more abstract. Each substage is described briefly.

1. Use of reflexes (0–2 months)

During this stage, children typically use their reflexes. They cannot consolidate information from their sensory organs into a single, unified concept.

2. Primary circular reactions (1–4 months)

Children start to consolidate information from different sensory organs. They start to engage in behavior that satisfies the way their body feels or their needs. For example, they repeat pleasurable behaviors, and they adapt their behavior to feed from different objects. They turn to respond to sounds and sights in their environment.

3. Secondary circular reactions (4–8 months)

Children’s behaviors become more intentional, and the types of behaviors that they repeat expand to include those that result in interesting responses external to their body. For example, they might push buttons on a toy. Children also start to take more interest in their environment. They repeat behaviors that generate interesting responses.

4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8–12 months)

At this point, children’s behaviors become more goal oriented, and they can combine different behaviors to achieve goals.

5. Tertiary circular reactions (12–18 months)

Instead of performing the same actions, children try new behaviors and actions to achieve different results. These behaviors are not spontaneous or by accident, but are purposeful. Unlike primary and secondary reactions, children can combine more complicated behaviors and even perform a behavior similarly but not the same to get the desired result.

6. Mental combinations (18–24 months)

Children start to rely on mental abstractions to solve problems, use gestures and words to communicate, and can pretend. Instead of relying on numerous attempts to solve problems/puzzles, children can deliberate and carefully choose their actions.

At the age of two, children enter the preoperational stage, where their ability to use mental representations, rather than the physical appearance of objects or people, improves greatly.

Examples of abstract representations include engaging in pretend play and talking about events that happened in the past or people who are not currently in the room.

Other interesting cognitive advances occur during this phase. For example, children understand causality. Children also understand identities, where items and people remain the same even if they look different. For example, at some point during this stage, a caregiver dressing up as Santa Claus might not be as convincing.

In this stage, children also learn more about categorization. They can classify items based on similarities or differences. They also start to understand numbers and quantity (e.g., concepts such as ‘more’ or ‘bigger’).

Although abstract thought advances quickly in the preoperational stage, other cognitive processes develop more slowly.

For example:

• Children tend to consider their own viewpoint and perspective.
• Children fail to understand that two things can be the same, even if they appear different (more about this in the next section on Conservation).
• Children struggle to take someone else’s point of view.

The next phase is the concrete operational stage, which begins around the age of seven. During this stage, children are more capable of solving problems because they can consider numerous outcomes and perspectives. All of their cognitive abilities are better developed in this stage.

• Categorization abilities improve so that children can arrange items along a dimension, understand that categories have subcategories, and relate two objects to each other through a third object.
• Their numerical abilities improve a lot, and they can perform more complicated mathematical operations.
• Their spatial abilities are better. They are better at estimating time and distance. They can read maps and describe how to navigate from one location to another.

Conservation

During this stage, children understand the concept of conservation better and, as a result, are better at solving conservation problems. Conservation refers to the idea that things can be the same, even if they look different.

An example would be a cup of water poured into two glasses. One glass is tall and thin, while the other is short and wide. Recognizing that both glasses contain the same amount of water shows an understanding of conservation.

Children in the preoperational stage struggle with problems of conservation. For example, they struggle with tasks where the following is conserved even it appears different:

• Number of items (e.g., two sets of 10 items arranged differently)
• The volume of liquid (e.g., the same volume of liquid in two differently shaped glasses)

Children struggle with conservation because they can only focus on one dimension at a time; this is known as centering. For example, with the volume of liquid, they can only consider the shape of the glass, but not the shape of the glass and the volume of water.

They also do not yet understand reversibility. Irreversibility refers to a child’s inability to reverse the steps of an action in their mind, returning an object to its previous state. For example, pouring the water out of the glass back into the original cup would demonstrate the volume of the water, but children in the preoperational stage cannot understand this.

In contrast, children in the concrete operational stage can solve conservation problems. This is because children now have the following cognitive abilities:

• They understand reversibility (i.e., items can be returned to original states).
• They can decenter (i.e., concentrate on multiple dimensions of items, rather than just one).
• They better understand identity (i.e., an item remains the same even if it looks different).

Abstract thought characterizes this stage. Children can think about abstract concepts and are not limited to a current time, person, or situation.

They can think about hypothetical situations and various possibilities, like situations that don’t exist yet, may never exist, or might be unrealistic and fantastical.

During this stage, children are capable of hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which allows them to test hypotheses and draw conclusions from the results. Unlike younger children who haphazardly approach problems, children in the formal operational stage can apply their reasoning skills to apply more complicated problems in a systematic, logical manner.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one of several theories about how children develop. Other contrasting theories include Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, and importantly for this post, Erikson’s psychosocial theory of development.

Differences

Unlike Piaget, who focused on cognitive development, Erikson emphasized healthy ego development (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Healthy egos are developed when people resolve specific personality issues at set periods in their lives.

Specifically, each developmental stage is characterized by two conflicting personality traits, one positive and one negative. Successful resolution occurs when the positive trait is more emphasized than the other, resulting in the development of a virtue, which aids healthy resolution of subsequent stages.

As an example, between 12 and 18 months, children experience two feelings: trust and mistrust. If they resolve this crisis by balancing a healthy level of trust with mistrust, then they develop the virtue of ‘hope.’

Overall, Erikson proposed eight personality crises, five of which occur before the age of 18:

• Basic trust versus mistrust ( 0–12/18 months)
• Autonomy versus shame and doubt (12/18 months–3 years)
• Initiative versus guilt (3–6 years)
• Industry versus inferiority (6 years–puberty)
• Identity versus identity confusion (puberty–young adulthood)

Not all of the developmental stages in Erikson’s theory correspond to the cognitive stages proposed by Piaget. For example, Piaget’s preoperational stages overlap with the second and third stages in Erikson’s theories.

Similarities

Like Piaget, Erikson also emphasized that children’s development occurs through interacting with the external environment, but Erikson’s stages focus more on societal influences. Both Piaget and Erikson emphasized that children are active participants in their world and that development occurs in stages.

Schemas and constructivism

Piaget argued that children learn about the world by interacting with it. This notion of gaining knowledge about the world is known as constructivism (Waite-Stupiansky, 2017).

Through their interactions, children construct schemas – or cognitive patterns – about how the world works (Waite-Stupiansky, 2017). These schemas come about through organization, which is how categories are formed, organizing items together based on common characteristics.

According to Piaget schemas can then be repeated and tested. For example, an infant has a schema about a rattle: shake it, and it makes a noise.

Importantly, schemas are not static, and they can be improved and updated with new information. When children learn new information, they do not disregard their previous schemas; instead, they build upon them. As a result, children’s cognitive development happens in stages as schemas are continuously updated with new information.

Adaptation describes how children update their current cognitive organizations and schemas with new information. Adaptation takes place in two ways: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation

Assimilation describes how children incorporate new information into existing schemas. For example, a child refers to dogs as ‘woofs.’ When they see a cat for the first time, they refer to the cat as a ‘woof’ too.

Accommodation

Accommodation describes how children adapt their cognitive structures to match new information in the world. Continuing with the previous example, the child realizes that dogs and cats are different. The child updates their cognitive schema of the world, and now refers to cats as ‘cats’ and dogs as ‘woofs’.

Equilibrium

Piaget’s background as a biologist influenced some of his work, notably the concept of ‘equilibrium,’ which resembles homeostasis (Waite-Stupiansky, 2017). He posited that children’s cognitive processes are aimed toward equilibrium. When children learn new information that is at odds with their current schemas, they are in an undesirable state of disequilibrium.

To achieve equilibrium, children adapt their mental instructions by:

• Assimilating new information
• Accommodating new information by updating their cognitive schemas

By achieving equilibrium, children learn new information.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

One premise of constructivism is that knowledge about the world is gained and made sense of through active participation. In other words, children are not passive recipients of knowledge. They’re not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. Instead, children’s knowledge is generated when they interact with the world (Yilmaz, 2008).

Some of the education implications of this concept are that children cannot be expected to ‘just sit down and learn’ and that teaching methods that emphasize passive learning are discouraged.

An example of passive learning is reading a text without engaging with it, debating with it, or trying to connect it to real life. Instead, teaching rooted in Piaget’s theories emphasizes that children learn by interacting. Here are some examples:

• Physical interaction (e.g., seeing and touching insects when learning about them)
• Verbal interaction (e.g., talking about how new learning material connects to everyday experiences)
• Abstract interaction (e.g., thinking about new ideas, wrestling with difficult or challenging topics, imitating or acting out concepts/ideas/people)

Play theory

Piaget (1951) argued that play is vital for children’s learning. Play is an example of assimilation, and imitation is an example of accommodation.

He argued that there are three types of games that children can play based on their cognitive development:

• Practice games
• Symbolic games
• Games with rules

Practice games include the repetition of a particular set of actions for pure enjoyment. Although it might not seem like much, these practice games are very important for cognitive development.

Symbolic games involve make-believe scenarios and characters, and appear during the preoperational stage.

Rule-based games appear later during the concrete operational stage. As well as abstract elements, these games also include rules and consequences for violating them.

Classroom games

It’s important to tailor classroom games to match the overall development stage of the children.

For very young children in the sensorimotor stage, classroom games that rely on repetition and interesting results are best. In these games, the child repeatedly demonstrates a new skill or behavior that they have learned, reinforcing the behavior . Examples include splashing water, kicking leaves, shaking a rattle or toys, and playing with music instruments.

For children in the preoperational stage, classroom games that involve imitation are useful ways to teach new concepts. For example, children can learn about animals by pretending to be different animals (e.g., ‘roar like a lion,’ ‘jump like a frog’).

Children can also learn about social skills and social interactions by acting out certain social situations, like pretending to be a shopkeeper. Symbolic games are also used when children pretend one item is something else; for example, pretending that a stick is a lightsaber.

Rule-based games are more suitable for older children. These games can teach concepts like theory of mind, because they encourage decentering (DeVries & Kamii, 1975).

For example, in ‘Simon Says,’ children learn to watch the teacher and know that if they don’t follow the teacher, they are out. Typically, young children don’t understand rule-based games and are not good at counting or numbers.

This is why, for example, very young children don’t understand that there is a penalty for one child in ‘Musical Chairs’ (DeVries & Kamii, 1975). Young children will enjoy the game if the penalty is removed and the chairs stay the same.

Other ways that games can facilitate learning is by allowing children to make up the rules (DeVries & Kamii, 1975). New toys related to the concepts that they’re learning about should be available when children engage in unstructured play without the assistance of the teacher.

For more on this, we recommend reading our article How to Promote Cognitive Development: 23 Activities & Games .

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At PositivePsychology.com, you’ll find lots of exercises, tasks, and activities that you can use in the classroom. We’ve highlighted these two as examples.

The Nice Things tool is useful in teaching children compassion. Children are encouraged to recall something ‘nice.’ It could be something nice that happened to them or something nice that they did. Children are also encouraged to share these nice things with each other and the class.

Since this task requires that children have mental/abstract representations of other people and things, it is more applicable for children in the preoperational and concrete operational stages.

In the Shuffle game, children learn how to resolve conflict. In this game, the play area is marked out with a set of items. Each child starts at one item, and an extra player is in the middle. At the start of the game, children have to move to another item.

However, if two children reach the same item simultaneously, they resolve this by playing Rock–Paper–Scissors. Since this is a rule-based game, it is best suited to children in the concrete operational stage; younger children will not understand the consequences of losing Rock–Paper–Scissors.

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Knowing that children’s learning and understanding are limited by their cognitive development, what can you do the next time you explain something?

• Use simple, age-appropriate examples.
• Explain concepts simply, considering the limitations of each cognitive stage.
• Encourage discussion and creativity so that they create meaningful interactions and memories.

Most importantly, remember that children are not born as ‘mini-adults.’ They do not have adult cognitive abilities, and they do not have the lifetime of experiences for these abilities to develop.

Instead, to learn, they need to participate actively with their world and the people in it. They must be exposed to new experiences and information for learning to occur, and importantly, they must have the opportunities to make mistakes.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

• Burman, J. T. (2012). Jean Piaget: Images of a life and his factory. History of Psychology , 15 (3), 283–288.
• DeVries, R., & Kamii, C. (1975). Why group games? A Piagetian perspective . ERIC Clearinghouse.
• Papalia, D. E., & Feldman, R. D. (2011). A child’s world: Infancy through adolescence  (12th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Piaget, J. (1951). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood (vol. 25). Routledge.
• Waite-Stupiansky, S. (2017). Jean Piaget’s constructivist theory of learning. In L. E. Cohen & S. Waite-Stupiansky (Eds.), Theories of early childhood education: Developmental, behaviorist, and critical (pp. 3–17). Routledge.
• Yilmaz, K. (2008). Constructivism: Its theoretical underpinnings, variations, and implications for classroom instruction. Educational Horizons , 86 (3), 161–172.

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Jean Piaget and His Theory & Stages of Cognitive Development

One of the most popular theories of cognitive development was created by Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who believed that cognitive growth occurred in stages. Piaget studied children through to their teens in an effort to determine how they developed logical thinking. He attempted to document the stages of cognitive development by observing the memory processes of children.

Essentially, Piaget believed that humans create their own understanding of the world. In theological terms, he was a psychological constructivist , believing that learning is caused by the blend of two processes: assimilation and accommodation. Children first reflect on their prior experiences to understand a new concept and then adjust their expectations to include the new experience. This means that children are continuously constructing knowledge based on the newly presented ideas, which lead to long-term changes. Piaget was more focused on the cognitive developments presented over time.

• Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding
• Lev Vygotsky – Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
• Andragogy Theory – Malcolm Knowles
• Social Learning Theory: Albert Bandura

Through his studies, Piaget declared that cognitive development occurred in four stages throughout one’s childhood:

• Stages occur in order.
• Children did not skip stages but pass through each one.
• There are visible changes from one stage to the next.
• The stages occur as building blocks, each one using pieces from the last stage.

This type of developmental model incorporates each stage into the next, which is why it is often called a “staircase” model. On this staircase, Piaget labeled four stages of cognitive growth that occurred at an approximate age in children.

• Sensorimotor Intelligence, from birth to age 2.
• Preoperational Thinking, from ages 2 to 7.
• Concrete Operational Thinking, from ages 7 to 11.
• Formal Operational Thinking, from age 11 on.

The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to Age 2

The first stage is aptly named after how infants learn until age two. From birth, infants absorb information through their senses: by touching, looking, and listening. They are very orally fixated and tend to put everything in their mouths. Piaget believed that this stage was valuable to their development, and each consecutive step is built on the growth that occurs in this stage.

We can observe the thought processes of infants through their actions. From about 6 months on, children begin to organize ideas into firm concepts that do not change. An infant may first not make sense of a specific toy, but as they begin to look at it, feel it, and manipulate it often, they are able to represent the object in their minds. This is how we can begin to observe knowledge in babies, as they begin to show understanding of an object for what it is. For example, by playing continuously with a toy animal, an infant begins to understand what the object is and recall their experiences associated with that toy. Piaget labeled this understanding as object permanence , which indicates the knowledge of the toy even if it is out of sight. He considered this understanding to be a major milestone in the sensorimotor stage and believed that it demonstrated the differences in the thought processes of toddlers compared to young infants.

The sensorimotor stage is unique in that is occurs without the use of language. As infants cannot speak, Piaget developed a few creative experiments in an effort to understand what they were thinking. His experiments were able to demonstrate that infants do represent objects and understand that they are permanent. In one of his experiments, Piaget consistently hid a toy underneath a blanket. Toddlers, or children between the ages of 18 and 24 months, took initiative to look for the toy themselves, but infants less than 6 months of age did not. The older infants interpreted the hiding of the toy as a prompt to search for it, which is thought to support the idea of object permanency.

The Preoperational Stage: Age 2 to 7

Children continue to build on the object representation that is significant to the sensorimotor stage in different activities. While the way they represent objects has no logic or reasoning behind it, they continue to grow in this area through dramatic play . Imaginative play, or the art of make-believe, is an indicative sign of this age and stage.

As dramatic play is considered to be beneficial to educational growth, teachers often promote its use in the classroom. The preoperational stage occurs from age two to age seven, which means that imaginative activities are encouraged from preschool all the way to second grade. Dramatic play is considered to be one of the first demonstrations of metacognition in children, or dual thinking. While engaged in imaginative play, children are simultaneously reflecting on the realistic experience.

The Concrete Operational Stage: Age 7 to 11

In Piaget’s next stage, children begin to represent objects and ideas in a more logical way. While the thought process is not on the same level as an adult, they begin to be more flexible in their thoughts and ideas. This allows them to solve problems in a more systematic way, leading to more success in educational activities in school. Piaget labeled this stage as concrete operational because he believed that children were able to manage concrete objects, but not yet think methodically about the representations of objects. It is only later that children are able to reflect on abstract events and manipulate representations of events. For example, a child may implement the rule “if nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.” Applying systemic rules or ideas may help a child solve simple tasks in the classroom, such as addition and subtraction problems or scientific calculations.

There are two things that distinguish concrete operational thinking from preoperational thinking. The first is reversibility , which allows a child to manipulate the order of any process. We can use the example of a sink or float science experiment to demonstrate the presence of reversibility. In this experiment, the child places various objects in a bucket of water, testing to see if they float or sink. A child in the preoperational stage would be able to describe the procedure taken, but only a child in the concrete operational stage would be able to retell the experiment in various ways, such as chronologically or out of order. Multi-step procedures are common in the classroom setting, which makes reversibility a valuable skill in learning. Children that are still in the preoperational stage may require assistance in activities in the form of prompts or reminders from the teacher. We can use the task of learning vocabulary from a story as an example in the classroom. The teacher may assign a multi-step instruction to the students: first, write down the words you don’t know as you come across them in the story, second, search for the definition before continuing on with the story, and third, have a friend quiz you on all of the words that you just learned. This type of multi-step instruction involves returning to the first and second tasks many times, which only children who have already reached the concrete operational stage are able to do.

The second skill that is acquired is decentering . This allows the child to step back and analyze an issue from more than one angle. Being able to consider a problem from another perspective is a key feature of the concrete operational stage. We can view the emergence of this ability in the preoperational stage when children start participating in dramatic play. For example, a child may use a banana as a pretend telephone, demonstrating an awareness that the banana is both a banana and a telephone. Piaget argued that children in the concrete operational stage are making more intentional and calculated choices, illustrating that they are conscious of their decentering. An example in the classroom can be displayed in the form of a simple worksheet. Using a multi-step instruction, the teacher can ask students to identify all problems that fit two criteria: it is a two-digit subtraction problem and it requires regrouping. The child is only responsible for solving problems that fit both of those requirements. A child in the concrete operational stage can move between the first and second criteria with ease, analyzing each problem to see if it meets both specifications. This task would also assume that the student is already able to regroup subtraction problems independently.

Both reversibility and decentering tend to occur together in educational settings. As seen in the worksheet example, procedures may occur out of order while multiple criteria are in place. Piaget had a popular example to demonstrate the idea of conservation or the idea that a quantity will remain the same despite the shape. He used two similar size balls of clay for his experiment. While a child in the preoperational stage may attest that the two balls of clay “look the same,” they are basing their assumptions purely on external observations. If one ball of clay were stretched thin like a hot dog, a child in the preoperational stage may state that they are different, even if the shape used the same amount of clay. In the concrete operational stage, a child is able to understand that two different shapes can be made from the same volume of clay. The child may provide reasoning for his answer using reversibility, stating that “you could squish it back into a ball again,” or decentering, as “it may be longer, but it is thinner.” Piaget maintained that children in this stage could demonstrate conservation of quantities despite the shape.

The Formal Operational Stage: Age 11 and Beyond

As children move into the formal operational stage, they are able to reason about more abstract ideas. Much like the concrete operational stage, the formal operational stage gets its name from the newly acquired skill of representing objects or events. In class, a teacher is now able to ask hypothetical questions with reasonable expectations. Students must reflect internally on various ideas and manipulate many perspectives at once. “What if the world had never discovered electricity?” “What if the European settlers had never left for the New World?” Abstract questions such as these force students to use hypothetical reasoning to come up with an answer.

Piaget was most interested in hypothetical reasoning in scientific experiments, which resulted in most of his studies being conducted at the middle and high school levels. In one study, students are asked questions about a pendulum, a pivot from which weights are freely suspended. “What determines how fast the pendulum swings: the length of a string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance that it is pulled to the side?”

Students in Piaget’s experiments were not allowed to physically solve the problem by manipulating the pendulum but were asked to orally reason a solution. This meant that individuals were forced to imagine all of the factors independently while taking into account the factors that remained constant. Being able to resolve this problem in a systemic way was a clear determinant of formal operations in the thought process. The ability to manipulate various outcomes is the precise skill of the formal operational stage.

There are clear advantages for students who have already achieved the formal operational stage. They require far fewer supports in solving problems, which allows them to be more independent in educational settings and need less direction from their teachers. However, this does not mean that they are able to successfully complete all academic tasks nor is it the only way to do so. Self-regulation remains an important part of academic success; if a student is lacking self-motivation or is not well behaved, they do not do as well in school. Formal operational thinking does not offer specialized skills either, such as musical and artistic talent or athletic greatness. One critique of Piaget’s theory is that this stage only covered scientific problem-solving in educational settings, which most people do not come across in their everyday lives. As such, many never achieve this level of operational thinking, or if they do, they use it only inexperienced and familiar situations. This proves that more research is needed on the development of personal and interactive issues of children and youth.

I am a professor of Educational Technology. I have worked at several elite universities. I hold a PhD degree from the University of Illinois and a master's degree from Purdue University.

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Cognitive Development Theory: What Are the Stages?

Sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, formal operational stage.

Cognitive development is the process by which we come to acquire, understand, organize, and learn to use information in various ways. Cognitive development helps a child obtain the skills needed to live a productive life and function as an independent adult.

The late Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was a major figure in the study of cognitive development theory in children. He believed that it occurs in four stages—sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

This article discusses Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, including important concepts and principles.

FatCamera / Getty Images

History of Cognitive Development

During the 1920s, the psychologist Jean Piaget was given the task of translating English intelligence tests into French. During this process, he observed that children think differently than adults do and have a different view of the world. He began to study children from birth through the teenage years—observing children who were too young to talk, and interviewing older children while he also observed their development.

Piaget published his theory of cognitive development in 1936. This theory is based on the idea that a child’s intelligence changes throughout childhood and cognitive skills—including memory, attention, thinking, problem-solving, logical reasoning, reading, listening, and more—are learned as a child grows and interacts with their environment.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory suggests that cognitive development occurs in four stages as a child ages. These stages are always completed in order, but last longer for some children than others. Each stage builds on the skills learned in the previous stage.

The four stages of cognitive development include:

• Sensorimotor
• Preoperational
• Concrete operational
• Formal operational

The sensorimotor stage begins at birth and lasts until 18 to 24 months of age. During the sensorimotor stage, children are physically exploring their environment and absorbing information through their senses of smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound.

The most important skill gained in the sensorimotor stage is object permanence, which means that the child knows that an object still exists even when they can't see it anymore. For example, if a toy is covered up by a blanket, the child will know the toy is still there and will look for it. Without this skill, the child thinks that the toy has simply disappeared.

Language skills also begin to develop during the sensorimotor stage.

Activities to Try During the Sensorimotor Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the sensorimotor stage include:

• Playing peek-a-boo
• Reading books
• Providing toys with a variety of textures
• Singing songs
• Playing with musical instruments
• Rolling a ball back and forth

The preoperational stage of Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs between ages 2 and 7 years. Early on in this stage, children learn the skill of symbolic representation. This means that an object or word can stand for something else. For example, a child might play "house" with a cardboard box.

At this stage, children assume that other people see the world and experience emotions the same way they do, and their main focus is on themselves. This is called egocentrism .

Centrism is another characteristic of the preoperational stage. This means that a child is only able to focus on one aspect of a problem or situation. For example, a child might become upset that a friend has more pieces of candy than they do, even if their pieces are bigger.

During this stage, children will often play next to each other—called parallel play—but not with each other. They also believe that inanimate objects, such as toys, have human lives and feelings.

Activities to Try During the Preoperational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the preoperational stage include:

• Playing "house" or "school"
• Building a fort
• Playing with Play-Doh
• Building with blocks
• Playing charades

The concrete operational stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years. During this stage, a child develops the ability to think logically and problem-solve but can only apply these skills to objects they can physically see—things that are "concrete."

Six main concrete operations develop in this stage. These include:

• Conservation : This skill means that a child understands that the amount of something or the number of a particular object stays the same, even when it looks different. For example, a cup of milk in a tall glass looks different than the same amount of milk in a short glass—but the amount did not change.
• Classification : This skill is the ability to sort items by specific classes, such as color, shape, or size.
• Seriation : This skill involves arranging objects in a series, or a logical order. For example, the child could arrange blocks in order from smallest to largest.
• Reversibility : This skill is the understanding that a process can be reversed. For example, a balloon can be blown up with air and then deflated back to the way it started.
• Decentering : This skill allows a child to focus on more than one aspect of a problem or situation at the same time. For example, two candy bars might look the same on the outside, but the child knows that they have different flavors on the inside.
• Transitivity : This skill provides an understanding of how things relate to each other. For example, if John is older than Susan, and Susan is older than Joey, then John is older than Joey.

Activities to Try During the Concrete Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the concrete operational stage include:

• Using measuring cups (for example, demonstrate how one cup of water fills two half-cups)
• Solving simple logic problems
• Practicing basic math
• Doing crossword puzzles
• Playing board games

The last stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs during the teenage years into adulthood. During this stage, a person learns abstract thinking and hypothetical problem-solving skills.

Deductive reasoning—or the ability to make a conclusion based on information gained from a person's environment—is also learned in this stage. This means, for example, that a person can identify the differences between dogs of various breeds, instead of putting them all in a general category of "dogs."

Activities to Try During the Formal Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the formal operational stage include:

• Learning to cook
• Solving crossword and logic puzzles
• Exploring hobbies
• Playing a musical instrument

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is based on the belief that a child gains thinking skills in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. These stages roughly correspond to specific ages, from birth to adulthood. Children progress through these stages at different paces, but according to Piaget, they are always completed in order.

National Library of Medicine. Cognitive testing . MedlinePlus.

Oklahoma State University. Cognitive development: The theory of Jean Piaget .

SUNY Cortland. Sensorimotor stage .

Marwaha S, Goswami M, Vashist B. Prevalence of principles of Piaget’s theory among 4-7-year-old children and their correlation with IQ . J Clin Diagn Res. 2017;11(8):ZC111-ZC115. doi:10.7860%2FJCDR%2F2017%2F28435.10513

Börnert-Ringleb M, Wilbert J. The association of strategy use and concrete-operational thinking in primary school . Front Educ. 2018;0. doi:10.3389/feduc.2018.00038

By Aubrey Bailey, PT, DPT, CHT Dr, Bailey is a Virginia-based physical therapist and professor of anatomy and physiology with over a decade of experience.

Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Categories Development

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children progress through a series of stages of mental development. The theory outlines four distinct stages from birth through adolescence, focusing on how children acquire knowledge, reasoning, language, morals, and memory.

Piaget’s stages of development are:

Table of Contents

An Overview of Jean Piaget’s Theory

The theory was the work of Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who became the first to conduct systematic research on children’s cognitive development. This theory had a tremendous impact on the fields of developmental psychology and education.

What made Piaget’s stages so unique and revolutionary?

• Piaget was one of the first to suggest that the way children think is fundamentally different than that of adults. Prior to Piaget, the prevailing belief was that children were smaller versions of adults and that their thinking was simply less competent than that of adults. Piaget’s work demonstrated that children think about the world differently than adults do.
• Piaget’s stages suggest that kids actively participate and construct their knowledge. Rather than believing that children passively take in what they observe, Piaget believed that kids play an active role in learning about the world around them.
• Each of Piaget’s stages is marked by distinctive shifts in how kids think. His theory describes four stages of cognitive development that children go through as they learn more about the world.
• During the earliest stages of development, children learn about the world primarily through their senses. As development progresses, children’s intellectual abilities become increasingly sophisticated, eventually allowing them to think and reason about abstract concepts and problems.

How Did Jean Piaget’s Theory Develop?

Piaget’s fascination with science began early in life, with his initial interests lying in the natural sciences. Born in the late 1800s, Piaget was a child prodigy. He published his first scientific paper on mollusks when he was just 11 years old. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Zoology. After spending a semester studying with Carl Jung , Piaget developed a stronger interest in psychology.

It was through his work in Alfred Binet’s laboratory in Paris that Piaget developed an interest in children’s cognitive development. Charged with interpreting the results of the standardized intelligence tests that Binet had developed for the French government, Piaget was interested in why children answered questions incorrectly. Upon questioning kids about their answers, he realized that how they responded depended upon their level of intellectual development.

His observations of his young nephew and later his own children added to his growing theory of childhood cognitive development.

Piaget’s theory focused on three critical components:

• Schemas , or the mental frameworks that make up knowledge
• The ways that this knowledge is acquired or altered ( assimilation , equilibration, and accommodation )
• The stages of mental development that children go through as they obtain and create knowledge.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

In Jean Piaget’s theory, he proposed that children progress through four distinct stages of intellectual development. Each stage is marked by changes in how kids think about and relate to the people and objects in their environment.

1. The Sensorimotor Stage (ages 0-2)

• Children learn about the world via their senses
• Basic activities such as sucking, rooting, listening, grasping objects, and sucking on things are how infants learn about the world
• As they progress through this stage, they eventually learn object permanence, or that things continue to exist even when they can no longer be seen

During the first two years of life, a child’s knowledge of the world stems from motor actions and sensory information. A remarkable amount of learning takes place during this relatively brief period.

One of the critical events of the sensorimotor stage is the development of object permanence or the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen.

The physical milestones of this stage also contribute to cognitive development as children explore the world through reaching, grasping, rolling, crawling, and eventually walking. The earliest foundations of language development are established during this stage as well.

During the sensorimotor stage, infants learn about the world around them through their senses, perceptions, and motor skills. Infants are limited in terms of their ability to independently explore, so every interaction they have with people and the environment serves as an important learning opportunity.

Babies and toddler rely on the basic abilities they were born with, such as rooting, sucking, chewing, and looking, to learn more about themselves, the people around them, and the environment they live in.

Looking at a very young child, you might question just how much they really are able to generate knowledge from their actions. The truth is that babies can acquire a tremendous amount of information just by utilizing their sensory systems and motor skills. Sights, sounds, movements, tastes, smells, and textures provide valuable information that helps infants discover the world.

6 Sensorimotor Substages

Piaget believed that the events of this stage were so dramatic that he divided the sensorimotor stage further into six distinct substages.

1. Reflexive Activities (0 to 1 month): The infant gains knowledge of the world through their inborn reflexes at this substage. At this point, an infant’s actions involve performing reflexive actions such as sucking at a nipple or chewing on a toy.

Through these actions, new objects are assimilated, and reflexes are accommodated to respond to new objects. While these actions seem very basic, they serve as an important stepping stone in intellectual development.

2. Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 months): Infants begin to repeat reflexive actions that are related to their own bodies and that they find pleasurable. For example, a baby might suck her thumb or kick her legs against a soft blanket. Babies also begin to notice when objects disappear.

3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 months): Babies continue to repeat actions that they find enjoyable, but they also begin to perform actions that involve manipulating objects. For example, a baby might shake a toy in order to hear the sound that it makes.

4. Coordination of Reactions (8 to 12 months): During this stage infant begin to perform more goal-directed actions. Rather than simply repeating pleasurable actions, they will intentionally seek out actions or objects in the environment that they want to play with. For example, a child might push aside unwanted object to get to an interesting toy.

5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 months): During this substage, infants begin to experiment with new ways of solving problems. Babies now display intentional reactions that they have learned during the earlier substages. For example, a child might take a stack of blocks apart and will now try to figure out how to put it back together again. Babies also explore trial-and-error processes in order to see what happens or what sort of reaction they will get.

6. Early Representational Thought (18 to 24 months): During this final sensorimotor stage, children begin to show signs of symbolic thought. Babies now possess mental representations of objects, which means they are also able to think about things that are not there.

Object Permanence During the Sensorimotor Stage

One of the hallmarks of the sensorimotor period in Piaget’s stages of development is the presence of egocentrism . Children at this stage of development cannot take other people’s perspective.

In addition to being unable to see things from other people’s perspectives, children at this stage also develop object permanence or the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. During the early sub-stages of the sensorimotor stage, children lack any sense of object permanence. If an object cannot be seen, it simply no longer exists in their view.

As children progress through this stage, they begin to learn more about the objects around them and the fact that things can exist even though they may be hidden. During the first month of life, a baby may track an object with its eyes but ignore the objects sudden disappearance. From about 1 to 4 months, an infant will stare at the spot where an object vanished.

It is during the age from around 4 to 8 months that children start to search for an object that is partially concealed, and from 8 to 12 months a clear understanding of object concepts begins to emerge.

If you have ever played peek-a-boo with an infant, you can see the development of object permanence in action. A very young infant might not search for a hidden object and will be very surprised when it pops out from a hidden spot. On the other hand, a child with an emerging sense of object permanence will actively search for the hidden object.

The sensorimotor stage of development serves as an important building block for future cognitive growth. While children may be limited to learning through their senses and motor actions, this does not mean that this is an uneventful stage of development. A tremendous amount of growth takes place during the sensorimotor stage, laying the foundation for the upcoming preoperational stage of development.

 2. The Preoperational Stage (ages 2 to 7)

• Egocentrism is a common characteristic of this stage, since children struggle to see things from other’s point of view
• Children begin to think symbolically and are able to understand that symbols and words represent objects in the real world

The early part of this stage of cognitive development is marked by the emergence of language. Why is this an important part of Piaget’s stages? Because it suggests that children are capable of symbolic thought. Children utilize language to symbolically represent objects, people, and ideas.

While their thinking is becoming increasingly sophisticated, kids at this stage of cognitive development struggle with logic and mentally transforming information.

Piaget’s experiments demonstrated, for example, that kids in the preoperational stage have difficulty with conservation.  For example, kids are shown two glasses containing the same amount of liquid. The liquid is then poured into two different containers – a short, wide glass and a tall skinny glass. While they saw that the two amounts were equal, children in the preoperational stage will invariably select the tall skinny glass as containing more.

This period of cognitive development is also marked by an inability to take another person’s perspective, which Piaget called egocentrism.

In his experiments, Piaget found that when children were asked to select an image depicting another person’s view of a scene, they would simply select their own view because they could not imagine the scene from the other individual’s perspective.

 3. The Concrete Operational Stage (ages 7 to 11)

• Children begin to utilize logical and organized in their thinking, but they tend to think about things in very concrete terms
• They struggle to think about abstract ideas or concepts
• They learn conservation, or the idea that the total amount of something such as a glass of water remains the same even if it is divided into smaller parts

The concrete operational stage of cognitive development is marked by the emergence of logical thought. Kids become much more capable at applying logic, but they also tend to be very concrete, literal thinkers. At this point, they still struggle with abstract ideas and hypothetical situations.

In addition to thinking more logically, kids also become less egocentric and capable of conservation. At this stage of cognitive development, children can better consider other people’s perspectives and understand that other people do not see things the same way they do.

 4. The Formal Operational Stage (age 11 to adulthood)

• Children at this stage of cognitive development are beginning to utilize abstract thinking when they consider problems
• As they consider complex problems about the world, including social and moral issues, they become better at considering theoretical and abstract ideas

The fourth and final stage in Piaget’s stages of cognitive development is characterized by the emergence of abstract thought. Instead of simply relying on their own experiences, kids begin to imagine multiple possible ways of solving problems.

Whereas younger kids typically rely on trial and error when solving problems, those who have reached the formal operational stage can systematically solve problems using logic. Trial-and-error may still come in to play, but it involves a more methodical and organized approach rather than the haphazard style that younger kids use.

In Jean Piaget’s theory, he did not identify exact ages when these stages occur. However, most explanations of the theory identify a typical range during which the stage often occurs.

While Piaget believed that these stages were universal, not all individuals reach the later stages. Not everyone, for example, reaches formal operations and becomes skilled at deductive reasoning and abstract thinking.

The Impact of Jean Piaget’s Theory

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development had a lasting impact on the fields of psychology and education. Most educational programs today are based around the idea that instruction should be geared towards a child’s developmental level. Strategies such as peer-led instruction and social facilitation are also rooted in the tenets of Piaget’s stages.

While influential, Piaget’s theory has not been without criticism. Many note that development does not necessarily align to a series of distinct stages, a fact that even Piaget himself observed.

Others suggest that his stages may have been too broad, vague, and not clear on how children’s learning actually occurs.

Researchers also suggest that Piaget underestimated children’s abilities. For example, the understanding of object permanence is thought to occur much earlier than what Piaget believed.

Nevertheless, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development had a powerful impact on our understanding of the intellectual abilities and growth of children.

Fischer KW, Bullock D.  Cognitive development in school-age children: Conclusions and new directions . In:  Development During Middle Childhood: The Years From Six to Twelve.  National Academies Press.

Hugar SM, Kukreja P, Assudani HG, Gokhale N. Evaluation of the relevance of Piaget’s cognitive principles among parented and orphan children in Belagavi City, Karnataka, India: A comparative study . Int J Clin Pediatr Dent . 2017;10(4):346-350. doi:10.5005/jp-journals-10005-1463

Phillips, J.L. (1975). The Origins of Intellect: Piaget’s Theory. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.

Piaget, J. (1977). Gruber, H.E.; Voneche, J.J. eds. The Essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books.

Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget’s theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.

Schaffer, D.R. & Kipp, K. (2010). Developmental Psychology: Childhood & Adolescence. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

[…] each phase of development. References https://www.explorepsychology.com/child-development-theories/ https://www.explorepsychology.com/piagets-theory-cognitive-development/ […]

The Developing Learner

Psychological Constructivism: Piaget’s Theories

Piaget believed that when we are faced with new information that we experience a cognitive disequilibrium. In response, we are continuously trying to regain cognitive homeostasis through adaptation. Piaget also proposed that, through maturation, we progress through four stages of cognitive development.

When it comes to maintaining cognitive equilibrium, novices have much more of a challenge because they are continually being confronted with new situations. All of this new information needs to be organized. The framework for organizing information is referred to as a schema. We develop schemata through the processes of adaptation. Adaptation can occur through assimilation and accommodation.

Video 3.6.1   Semantic Networks and Spreading Activation explains the creation and use of schemas.

Sometimes when we are faced with new information, we can simply fit it into our current schema; this is called assimilation. For example, a student is given a new math problem in class. They use previously learned strategies to try to solve the problem. While the problem is new, the process of solving the problem is something familiar to the student. The new problem fits into their current understanding of the math concept.

Not all new situations fit into our current framework and understanding of the world. In these cases, we may need accommodation , which is expanding the framework of knowledge to accommodate the new situation. If the student solving the math problem could not solve it because they were missing the strategies necessary to find the answer, they would first need to learn these strategies, and then they could solve the problem.

Figure 3.6.1  Model of Piaget’s adaptation theory.

Video 3.6.2.  Schemas, Assimilation, and Accommodation explains Piaget’s theory of constructing schemas through adaptation.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

After observing children closely, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence. By stages he meant a sequence of thinking patterns with four key features:

• They always happen in the same order.
• No stage is ever skipped.
• Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
• Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.

Piaget proposed four major stages of cognitive development: (1) sensorimotor intelligence, (2) preoperational thinking, (3) concrete operational thinking, and (4) formal operational thinking. Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

Video 3.6.3. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development explains the structure of the four stages and major cognitive developments associated with each stage.

The Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

At birth, the beginning of the sensorimotor stage, children have only a few simple reflexes (sucking, grasping, looking) to help them satisfy biological needs, such as hunger. By the end of this stage, children can move about on their own, solve simple problems in their heads, search for and find objects that are hidden from view, and even communicate some of their thoughts. Between 4 and 8 months of age, infants learn that they can make things move by banging and shaking them, which is why babies of this age love to play with rattles. Sometime between the eighth and twelfth months, they figure out how to get one thing (like a bottle) by using another (for instance, by knocking a pillow away). Between 12 and 18 months, children can represent hidden objects in their minds. They search for what they want, even when they cannot see it. At the end of this period, children are beginning to use images to stand for objects. For example, a 2-year-old places her doll inside a dollhouse and imaginatively reconstructs her doll’s view of the miniature rooms and furniture. This ability, called mediation , is a significant achievement because it frees the child from the need to think about only those objects she can see around her. A child who can mediate can think about the whole world.

Let us examine the transition that infants make from responding to the external world reflexively as newborns, to solving problems using mental strategies as two-year-olds by examining the various substages that children move through from birth to their second birthday.

Substages of Sensorimotor Intelligence

For an overview of the substages of sensorimotor thought, it helps to group the six substages into pairs. The first two substages involve the infant’s responses to its own body, call  primary circular reactions . During the first month first (substage one), the infant’s senses, as well as motor reflexes, are the foundation of thought.

Substage One:  Reflexive Action (0-1month)

This active learning begins with automatic movements or reflexes (sucking, grasping, staring, listening). A ball comes into contact with an infant’s cheek and is automatically sucked on and licked. This reflexive response is also what happens with a sour lemon, much to the infant’s surprise! The baby’s first challenge is to learn to adapt the sucking reflex to bottles or breasts, pacifiers or fingers, each acquiring specific types of tongue movements to latch, suck, breath, and repeat. This adaptation demonstrates that infants have begun to make sense of sensations. Eventually, the use of these reflexes becomes more deliberate and purposeful as they move onto substage two.

Substage Two:  First Adaptations to the Environment (1-4 months)

Fortunately, within a few days or weeks, the infant begins to discriminate between objects and adjust responses accordingly as reflexes are replaced with voluntary movements. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it interesting, such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again and helps the infant learn a new behavior that initially occurred by chance. The behavior is identified as circular and primary because it centers on the infant’s own body. At first, most actions have to do with the body, but in months to come, it will be directed more toward objects. For example, the infant may have different sucking motions for hunger and others for comfort (i.e., sucking a pacifier differently from a nipple or attempting to hold a bottle to suck it).

The next two substages (3 and 4), involve the infant’s responses to objects and people, called  secondary circular reactions.  Reactions are no longer confined to the infant’s body and are now interactions between the baby and something else.

Substage Three:  Repetition (4-8 months)

During the next few months, the infant becomes more and more actively engaged in the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen by responding to people and objects. Babies try to continue any pleasing event. Repeated motion brings particular interest as the infant can bang two lids together or shake a rattle and laugh. Another example might be to clap their hands when a caregiver says, “patty-cake.” Any sight of something delightful will trigger efforts for interaction.

Substage Four:  New Adaptations and Goal-Directed Behavior (8-12 months)

Now the infant becomes more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects and can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate upcoming events. Babies may ask for help by fussing, pointing, or reaching up to accomplish tasks, and work hard to get what they want. Perhaps because of continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the infant becomes capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed activity such as seeking a toy that has rolled under the couch or indicating that they are hungry. The infant is coordinating both internal and external activities to achieve a planned goal and begins to get a sense of social understanding. Piaget believed that at about 8 months (during substage 4), babies first understood the concept of  object permanence,  which is the realization that objects or people continue to exist when they are no longer in sight.

The last two stages (5 and 6), called  tertiary circular reactions , consist of actions (stage 5) and ideas (stage 6) where infants become more creative in their thinking.

Substage Five:  Active Experimentation of “Little Scientists” (12-18 months)

The toddler is considered a “little scientist” and begins exploring the world in a trial-and-error manner, using motor skills and planning abilities. For example, the child might throw their ball down the stairs to see what happens, or delight in squeezing all of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toddler’s active engagement in experimentation helps them learn about their world. Gravity is learned by pouring water from a cup or pushing bowls from high chairs. The caregiver tries to help the child by picking it up again and placing it on the tray. And what happens? Another experiment! The child pushes it off the tray again, causing it to fall and the caregiver to pick it up again! A closer examination of this stage causes us to appreciate how much learning is going on at this time and how many things we come to take for granted must actually be learned. This time is a wonderful and messy time of experimentation, and most learning occurs by trial and error.

Substage Six:  Mental Representations (18-24 months)

The child is now able to solve problems using mental strategies, to remember something heard days before and repeat it, to engage in pretend play, and to find objects that have been moved even when out of sight. Take, for instance, the child who is upstairs in a room with the door closed, supposedly taking a nap. The doorknob has a safety device on it that makes it impossible for the child to turn the knob. After trying several times to push the door or turn the doorknob, the child carries out a mental strategy to get the door opened – he knocks on the door! Obviously, this is a technique learned from the past experience of hearing a knock on the door and observing someone opening the door. The child is now better equipped with mental strategies for problem-solving. Part of this stage also involves learning to use language. This initial movement from the “hands-on” approach to knowing about the world to the more mental world of stage six marked the transition to preoperational thinking.

Current Research

Piaget lacked today’s sophisticated research techniques and scientific equipment for studying early cognition. Today researchers can study the preferences of infants by tracking their eye movements. They can also use sophisticated techniques to teach infants how to manipulate their environments (for example, suck on a bottle more vigorously to see or hear more interesting sights and sounds). This research has shown that infants gain a sense of the stability of objects (called object permanence) much earlier than Piaget estimated—at about 4 months (Baillargeon, 1987). Meltzoff (1988) showed 9- month-old infants a video of an adult playing with toys unfamiliar to the infants. A day later, the infants imitated the adult’s actions they had seen. This behavior suggests that deferred imitation (a form of mediation) is present almost a year earlier than Piaget expected it to occur. Although Piaget appears to have underestimated the ability of infants to take in information, store, organize, remember, and imitate it, he appears to have described correctly the sequences by which these skills develop. Furthermore, his view of the infant as a “mini-scientist” who acts on the world and builds theories about it is very much consistent with current research findings.

The Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years)

Pretend Play

One of the most obvious examples of this kind of cognition is  pretend play , the improvised make-believe of preschool children. For example, during the preoperational period, children can make a horse out of a broom, a daddy out of a doll, or a truck or train out of a block of wood. Later (between 3 and 4 years), they play parts or roles: doctor and patient, mommy and daddy, good guys and bad guys, bus driver and passengers. In a way, children immersed in make-believe seem not to think realistically. However, at some level, these children know that it is just pretend and that they are merely representing objects. They are thinking on two levels at once—one imaginative and the other realistic. This dual processing of experience makes dramatic play an early example of  metacognition , or reflecting on and monitoring of thinking itself. Metacognition is a highly desirable skill for success in school, one that teachers often encourage (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; Paley, 2005). Partly for this reason, teachers of young children (preschool, kindergarten, and even first or second grade) often make time and space in their classrooms for dramatic play, and sometimes even participate in it themselves to help develop the play further.

Piaget believed that children’s pretend play and experimentation helped them solidify the new schemas they were developing cognitively. This process involves both assimilation and accommodation, which results in changes in their conceptions or thoughts. As children progress through the preoperational stage, they are developing the knowledge they will need to begin to use logical operations in the next stage.

Egocentrism

Egocentrism  in early childhood refers to the tendency of young children to think that everyone sees things in the same way as the child. Piaget’s classic experiment on egocentrism involved showing children a three-dimensional model of a mountain and asking them to describe what a doll that is looking at the mountain from a different angle might see. Children tend to choose a picture that represents their own, rather than the doll’s view. However, when children are speaking to others, they tend to use different sentence structures and vocabulary when addressing a younger child or an older adult. Consider why this difference might be observed. Do you think this indicates some awareness of the views of others? Or do you think they are merely modeling adult speech patterns?

Video 3.6.4. Egocentrism is a demonstration of a Piagetian task assessing a child’s ability to take another’s perspective. The first child in the video is a preschool-aged child. Despite just being in the same position as the adult, the child cannot imagine what the adult sees from their perspective and assumes that the adult sees what he sees. The second child, a school-aged child, after already being in the adult’s seat, can take her perspective and name the items that she likely sees from where she is sitting. Why is it that the first child cannot take the adult’s perspective and the second child can?

Precausal Thinking

Similar to preoperational children’s egocentric thinking is their structuring of cause-and-effect relationships based on their limited view of the world. Piaget coined the term ‘precausal thinking’ to describe how preoperational children use their existing ideas or views, like in egocentrism, to explain cause-and-effect relationships. Three main concepts of causality, as displayed by children in the preoperational stage, include animism, artificialism, and transductive reasoning.

Animism  is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike qualities. An example could be a child believing that the sidewalk was mad and made them fall down, or that the stars twinkle in the sky because they are happy. To an imaginative child, the cup may be alive, the chair that falls down and hits the child’s ankle is mean, and the toys need to stay home because they are tired. Young children do seem to think that objects that move may be alive, but after age three, they seldom refer to objects as being alive (Berk, 2007). Many children’s stories and movies capitalize on animistic thinking. Do you remember some of the classic stories that make use of the idea of objects being alive and engaging in lifelike actions?

Artificialism  refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human actions or interventions. For example, a child might say that it is windy outside because someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because someone painted them that color.

Finally, precausal thinking is categorized by transductive reasoning.  Transductive reasoning  is when a child fails to understand the true relationships between cause and effect. Unlike deductive or inductive reasoning (general to specific, or specific to general), transductive reasoning refers to when a child reasons from specific to specific, drawing a relationship between two separate events that are otherwise unrelated. For example, if a child hears a dog bark and then a balloon pop, the child would conclude that because the dog barked, the balloon popped. Related to this is  syncretism,  which refers to a tendency to think that if two events occur simultaneously, one caused the other. An example of this might be a child asking the question, “if I put on my bathing suit, will it turn to summer?”

Cognition Errors

Between about the ages of four and seven, children tend to become very curious and ask many questions, beginning the use of primitive reasoning. There is an increase in curiosity in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are. Piaget called it the “intuitive substage” because children realize they have a vast amount of knowledge, but they are unaware of how they acquired it.

Centration and conservation are characteristic of preoperative thought.  Centration  is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation while disregarding all others. An example of centration is a child focusing on the  number  of pieces of cake that each person has, regardless of the size of the pieces. Centration is one of the reasons that young children have difficulty understanding the concept of conservation.  Conservation  is the awareness that altering a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Imagine a 2-year-old and 4-year-old eating lunch. The 4-year-old has a whole peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He notices, however, that his younger sister’s sandwich is cut in half and protests, “She has more!” He is exhibiting centration by focusing on the number of pieces, which results in a conservation error.

In Piaget’s famous conservation task, a child is presented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers do contain the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are younger than seven or eight years old typically say that the two beakers no longer contain the same amount of liquid. They believe that the taller container holds the greater quantity (centration), without taking into consideration the fact that both beakers were previously noted to contain the same amount of liquid.

Figure 3.6.2 . A demonstration of the conservation of liquid.

Irreversibility is also demonstrated during this stage and is closely related to the ideas of centration and conservation.  Irreversibility  refers to the young child’s difficulty mentally reversing a sequence of events. In the same beaker situation, the child does not realize that, if the sequence of events was reversed and the water from the tall beaker was poured back into its original beaker, then the same amount of water would exist.

Centration, conservation errors, and irreversibility are indications that young children are reliant on visual representations. Another example of children’s reliance on visual representations is their misunderstanding of ‘less than’ or ‘more than.’ When two rows containing equal amounts of blocks are placed in front of a child with one row spread farther apart than the other, the child will think that the row spread farther contains more blocks.

Conservation

Video 3.6.5. Conservation Task is a demonstration of a few Piagetian tasks to assess children’s ability to understand various types of conservation. The first child is a preschooler and is not able to understand conservation. The second child is in elementary school. She does the same task and clearly understands conservation, although she does have some difficulty explicitly articulating her reasoning. A few additional conservation tasks are demonstrated by preschool children.

Class inclusion refers to a kind of conceptual thinking that children in the preoperational stage cannot yet grasp. Children’s inability to focus on two aspects of a situation at once (centration) inhibits them from understanding the principle that one category or class can contain several different subcategories or classes. Preoperational children also have difficulty understanding that an object can be classified in more than one way. For example, a four-year-old girl may be shown a picture of eight dogs and three cats. The girl knows what cats and dogs are, and she is aware that they are both animals. However, when asked, “Are there more dogs or more animals?” she is likely to answer “more dogs.” This error is due to her difficulty focusing on the two subclasses and the larger class all at the same time. She may have been able to view the dogs as dogs or animals, but struggled when trying to classify them as both, simultaneously. Similar to this is a concept relating to intuitive thought, known as “transitive inference.”

Transitive inference is using previous knowledge to determine the missing piece, using basic logic. Children in the preoperational stage lack this logic. An example of transitive inference would be when a child is presented with the information ‘A’ is greater than ‘B’ and ‘B’ is greater than ‘C.’ The young child may have difficulty understanding that ‘A’ is also greater than “C.”

Theory of Mind

How do we come to understand how our mind works? The  theory of mind  is the understanding that the mind holds people’s beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. One component of this is understanding that the mind can be tricked or that the mind is not always accurate.

A two-year-old child does not understand very much about how their mind works. They can learn by imitating others, they are starting to understand that people do not always agree on things they like, and they have a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect (although they often fall prey to transitive reasoning). By the time a child is four, their theory of the mind allows them to understand that people think differently, have different preferences, and even mask their true feelings by putting on a different face that differs from how they truly feel inside.

To think about what this might look like in the real world, imagine showing a three-year-old child a bandaid box and asking the child what is in the box. Chances are, the child will reply, “bandaids.” Now imagine that you open the box and pour out crayons. If you now ask the child what they thought was in the box before it was opened, they may respond, “crayons.” If you ask what a friend would have thought was in the box, the response would still be “crayons.” Why?

Before about four years of age, a child does not recognize that the mind can hold ideas that are not accurate, so this three-year-old changes their response once shown that the box contains crayons. The child’s response can also be explained in terms of egocentrism and irreversibility. The child’s response is based on their current view rather than seeing the situation from another person’s perspective (egocentrism) or thinking about how they arrived at their conclusion (irreversibility). At around age four, the child would likely reply, “bandaids” when asked after seeing the crayons because by this age a child is beginning to understand that thoughts and realities do not always match.

Video 3.6.6. The Theory of Mind Test demonstrates various false belief tests to assess the theory of mind in young children.

Theory of Mind and Social Intelligence

This awareness of the existence of mind is part of social intelligence and the ability to recognize that others can think differently about situations. It helps us to be self-conscious or aware that others can think of us in different ways, and it helps us to be able to be understanding or empathic toward others. This developing social intelligence helps us to anticipate and predict the actions of others (even though these predictions are sometimes inaccurate). The awareness of the mental states of others is important for communication and social skills. A child who demonstrates this skill is able to anticipate the needs of others.

Impaired Theory of Mind in Individuals with Autism

People with autism or an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically show an impaired ability to recognize other people’s minds. Under the DSM-5,  autism  is characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction across multiple contexts, as well as restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. These deficits are present in early childhood, typically before age three, and lead to clinically significant functional impairment. Symptoms may include lack of social or emotional reciprocity, stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language, and persistent preoccupation with unusual objects.

About half of parents of children with ASD notice their child’s unusual behaviors by age 18 months, and about four-fifths notice by age 24 months, but often a diagnosis comes later, and individual cases vary significantly. Typical early signs of autism include:

• No babbling by 12 months.
• No gesturing (pointing, waving, etc.) by 12 months.
• No single words by 16 months.
• No two-word (spontaneous, not just echolalic) phrases by 24 months.
• Loss of any language or social skills, at any age.

Children with ASD experience difficulties with explaining and predicting other people’s behavior, which leads to problems in social communication and interaction. Children who are diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder usually develop the theory of mind more slowly than other children and continue to have difficulties with it throughout their lives.

For testing whether someone lacks the theory of mind, the  Sally-Anne  test is performed. The child sees the following story: Sally and Anne are playing. Sally puts her ball into a basket and leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne moves the ball from the basket to the box. Now Sally returns. The question is: where will Sally look for her ball? The test is passed if the child correctly assumes that Sally will look in the basket. The test is failed if the child thinks that Sally will look in the box. Children younger than four and older children with autism will generally say that Sally will look in the box.

Ally-Anne Test

Video 3.6.7.  Sally-Anne test  demonstration with a young child.

As with the sensorimotor stage, researchers are discovering that preoperational children are more cognitively capable than Piaget proposed. Donaldson (1978), Bower and Wishart (1972), Chandler, Fritz, and Hala (1989), and Gelman and Ebeling (1989) all concluded that children around the ages of 3 and 4 are not as egocentric as Piaget suggested. Researchers have shown that the difficulties children have with some of Piaget’s classic experiments largely result from a lack of understanding of the researcher’s questions. When researchers take pains to ensure that children understand these tasks, preoperational learners show that they can take the perspective of another; that is, they can begin to imagine another’s viewpoint. Researchers such as Gelman (1972) and Bijstra, van Geert, and Jackson (1989) have shown that operations such as conservation of liquids can be performed by preoperational children. Waxman and Gelman (1986) report that children as young as 4 can understand class inclusion.

Current research on children’s cognitive abilities during the preoperational period suggests two conclusions: (1) Piaget may have underestimated what some children can do during the preoperational stage; and (2) in order to exhibit more and varied abilities at this stage, researchers must first eliminate distractions, give clues, and ensure that children understand their directions. While children’s thinking is still largely dominated by what they see at this time, they can be taught to be less egocentric (Bee, 1995).

The Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

As children continue through elementary school, they become able to represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically. Their rules of thinking still seem very basic by adult standards, and usually operate unconsciously. However, these rules allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore, to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same,” but may struggle to make these processes explicit.

This simple principle helps children to understand some arithmetic tasks, such as in adding or subtracting zero from a number, as well as to do certain classroom science experiments, such as ones involving judgments of the amounts of liquids when mixed. Piaget called this period the  concrete operational stage  because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events. They are not yet able, however, to operate (or think) systematically about representations of objects or events. Manipulating representations is a more abstract skill that develops later, during adolescence.

Reversibility

Concrete operational thinking differs from preoperational thinking in two ways, each of which renders children more skilled as students. One difference is  reversibility , or the ability to think about the steps of a process in any order. Imagine a simple science experiment, for example, such as one that explores why objects sink or float by having a child place an assortment of objects in a basin of water. Both the preoperational and concrete operational child can recall and describe the steps in this experiment, but only the concrete operational child can recall them in any order. This skill is beneficial on any task involving multiple steps—a common feature of tasks in the classroom. In teaching new vocabulary from a story, for another example, a teacher might tell students: “First make a list of words in the story that you do not know, then find and write down their definitions, and finally get a friend to test you on your list.” These directions involve repeatedly remembering to move back and forth between a second step and a first—a task that concrete operational students—and most adults—find easy, but that preoperational children often forget to do or find confusing. If the younger children are to do this task reliably, they may need external prompts, such as having the teacher remind them periodically to go back to the story to look for more unknown words.

The other new feature of thinking during the concrete operational stage is the child’s ability to  decenter or focus on more than one feature of a problem at a time. There are hints of decentration in preschool children’s dramatic play, which requires being aware on two levels at once—for example, knowing that a banana can be both a banana and a ‘telephone.’ However, the decentration of the concrete operational stage is more deliberate and conscious than preschoolers’ make-believe. Now the child can attend to two things at once quite purposely. Suppose you give students a sheet with an assortment of subtraction problems on it, and ask them to do this: “Find all of the problems that involve two-digit subtraction and that involve borrowing from the next column. Circle and solve only those problems.” Following these instructions is quite possible for a concrete operational student (as long as they have been listening!) because the student can attend to the two subtasks simultaneously—finding the two-digit problems and identifying which actually involve borrowing. (Whether the student knows how to “borrow” however, is a separate question.)

Implications for Teachers

Elementary school learners are far better problem solvers than preschoolers. They can arrange objects in order; sequence numbers properly; classify objects by color, size, or shape; understand rules for both mathematics and classroom behavior; think about both the past and the future. Nevertheless, concrete operational learners cannot perform these operations with things they cannot see or touch. In other words, their logic works only in concrete situations. Their mental operations are not yet ready for the realm of abstract ideas. One way to illustrate this is to show an 8-year-old three dolls of ascending height whose names are Elleni, Carlos, and Aster. Show the child that Aster is taller than Carlos, and that Carlos is taller than Elleni, and the child will easily figure out that Aster is taller than Elleni. However, present only a verbal description of the three dolls, and the child will have great difficulty determining the height of the first doll relative to the third doll. Thus K through 4 teachers should teach using concrete, hands-on activities that provide examples of more general rules and concepts. The accompanying box, Teaching Concrete Operational Learners, gives some specific examples.

In real classroom tasks, reversibility and decentration often happen together. A well-known example of joint presence is Piaget’s experiments with  conservation , the belief that an amount or quantity stays the same even if it changes apparent size or shape (Piaget, 2001; Matthews, 1998). Imagine two identical balls made of clay. Any child, whether preoperational or concrete operational, will agree that the two indeed have the same amount of clay in them simply because they look the same. However, if you squish one ball into a long, thin ‘hot dog,’ the preoperational child is likely to say that the amount of that ball has changed—either because it is longer or because it is thinner, but at any rate, because it now looks different. The concrete operational child will not make this mistake, thanks to new cognitive skills of reversibility and decentration. For them, the amount is the same because “you could squish it back into a ball again” (reversibility) and because “it may be longer, but it is also thinner” (decentration). Piaget would say the concrete operational child “has conservation of quantity.”

The classroom examples described above also involve reversibility and decentration. As already mentioned, the vocabulary activity described earlier requires reversibility (going back and forth between identifying words and looking up their meanings), but it can also be construed as an example of decentration (keeping in mind two tasks at once—word identification and dictionary search). Moreover, as mentioned, the arithmetic activity requires decentration (looking for problems that meet two criteria and also solving them), but it can also be construed as an example of reversibility (going back and forth between subtasks, as with the vocabulary activity). Either way, the development of concrete operational skills supports students in doing many basic academic tasks; in a sense, they make ordinary schoolwork possible

Researchers have confirmed Piaget’s conclusions about the sequence and timing at which children acquire the various concrete operations and have shown that children between the ages of 7 and 11 rarely exhibit deductive logic but are adept at inductive reasoning (Tomlinson-Keasey, Eisert, Kalle, Hardy-Brown, & Keasey, 1978). However, there is much debate about what causes these changes. Piaget emphasized that children, particularly at this stage, act as amateur scientists and discover the rules of operations largely on their own, using the functions of organization and adaptation. He said little about the contributions of social influences, such as peers and culture, to cognitive development. We will explore this perspective shortly when we present the social nature of learning as formulated by Lev Vygotsky, an influential Russian developmentalist.

The Formal Operational Stage (11+ years)

During the formal operational stage, adolescents can understand abstract principles which have no physical reference. They can now contemplate such abstract constructs as beauty, love, freedom, and morality. The adolescent is no longer limited by what can be directly seen or heard. Additionally, while younger children solve problems through trial and error, adolescents demonstrate hypothetical-deductive reasoning , which is developing hypotheses based on what might logically occur . They can think about all the possibilities in a situation beforehand, and then test them systematically (Crain, 2005). Now they can engage in true scientific thinking. Formal operational thinking also involves accepting hypothetical situations. Adolescents understand the concept of transitivity , which means that a relationship between two elements is carried over to other elements logically related to the first two , such as if A<B and B<C, then A<C (Thomas, 1979). For example, when asked: If Maria is shorter than Alicia and Alicia is shorter than Caitlyn, who is the shortest? Adolescents can answer the question correctly as they understand the transitivity involved.

Video 3.6.8. Formal Operational Stage explains some of the cognitive development consistent with formal operational thought.

Abstract and Hypothetical thinking

One of the major premises of formal operational thought is the capacity to think of possibility, not just reality. Adolescents’ thinking is less bound to concrete events than that of children; they can contemplate possibilities outside the realm of what currently exists. One manifestation of the adolescent’s increased facility with thinking about possibilities is the improvement of skill in  deductive reasoning (also called top-down reasoning) ,  which leads to the development of  hypothetical thinking . This development provides the ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action, and provide alternative explanations of events. It also makes adolescents more skilled debaters, as they can reason against a friend’s or parent’s assumptions. Adolescents also develop a more sophisticated understanding of probability.

This appearance of more systematic, abstract thinking allows adolescents to comprehend the sorts of higher-order abstract logic inherent in puns, proverbs, metaphors, and analogies. Their increased facility permits them to appreciate how language can be used to convey multiple messages, such as satire, metaphor, and sarcasm (children younger than age nine often cannot comprehend sarcasm at all). This change also permits the application of advanced reasoning and logical processes to social and ideological matters such as interpersonal relationships, politics, philosophy, religion, morality, friendship, faith, fairness, and honesty.

Deductive Reasoning

Video 3.6.9. Deductive Reasoning demonstrates a Piagetian task that presents the child with a hypothetical situation and asks that they deduce what happens given this scenario. The first child is an elementary school-aged child. The second is an adolescent. You can see how these two are able to use hypothetical information differently to make predictions about what will happen next.

Intuitive and Analytic Thinking

Piaget emphasized the sequence of thought throughout four stages. Others suggest that thinking does not develop in sequence, but instead, that advanced logic in adolescence may be influenced by intuition. Cognitive psychologists often refer to intuitive and analytic thought as the  dual-process model , the notion that humans have two distinct networks for processing information (Kuhn, 2013.)  Intuitive thought  is automatic, unconscious, and fast, and it is more experiential and emotional.

In contrast,  analytic thought  is deliberate, conscious, and rational (logical). While these systems interact, they are distinct (Kuhn, 2013). Intuitive thought is easier, quicker, and more commonly used in everyday life. As discussed in the adolescent brain development section, the discrepancy between the maturation of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex may make teens more prone to emotional, intuitive thinking than adults. As adolescents develop, they gain in logic/analytic thinking ability and sometimes regress, with social context, education, and experiences becoming significant influences. Simply put, being ‘smarter’ as measured by an intelligence test does not advance cognition as much as having more experience, in school and life (Klaczynski & Felmban, 2014).

Relativistic Thinking

Adolescents are more likely to engage in  relativistic thinking —in other words, they are more likely to question others’ assertions and less likely to accept information as absolute truth. Through experience outside the family circle, they learn that rules they were taught as absolute are actually relativistic. They begin to differentiate between rules crafted from common sense (don’t touch a hot stove) and those that are based on culturally relative standards (codes of etiquette). This understanding can lead to a period of questioning authority in all domains.

Risk-taking

Because most injuries sustained by adolescents are related to risky behavior (alcohol consumption and drug use, reckless or distracted driving, and unprotected sex), a great deal of research has been done on the cognitive and emotional processes underlying adolescent risk-taking. In addressing this question, it is important to distinguish whether adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behaviors (prevalence), whether they make risk-related decisions similarly or differently than adults (cognitive processing perspective), or whether they use the same processes but value different things and thus arrive at different conclusions. The  behavioral decision-making theory  proposes that adolescents and adults both weigh the potential rewards and consequences of an action. However, research has shown that adolescents seem to give more weight to rewards, particularly social rewards, than do adults. Adolescents value social warmth and friendship, and their hormones and brains are more attuned to those values than to long-term consequences (Crone & Dahl, 2012).

Some have argued that there may be evolutionary benefits to an increased propensity for risk-taking in adolescence. For example, without a willingness to take risks, teenagers would not have the motivation or confidence necessary to leave their family of origin. In addition, from a population perspective, there is an advantage to having a group of individuals willing to take more risks and try new methods, counterbalancing the more conservative elements more typical of the received knowledge held by older adults.

 Implications for Teachers

School is the main contributor to guiding students towards formal operational thought. With students at this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-fact) problems: “What if the world had never discovered oil?” or “What if the first European explorers had settled first in California instead of on the East Coast of the United States?” To answer such questions, students must use hypothetical reasoning, meaning that they must manipulate ideas that vary in several ways at once and do so entirely in their minds.

The hypothetical reasoning that concerned Piaget primarily involved scientific problems. His studies of formal operational thinking, therefore, often look like problems that middle or high school teachers pose in science classes. In one problem, for example, a young person is presented with a simple pendulum, to which different amounts of weight can be hung (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The experimenter asks: “What determines how fast the pendulum swings: the length of the string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance that it is pulled to the side?” The young person is not allowed to solve this problem by trial-and-error with the materials themselves but must reason a way to the solution mentally. To do so systematically, he or she must imagine varying each factor separately, while also imagining the other factors that are held constant. This kind of thinking requires the facility to manipulate mental representations of the relevant objects and actions—precisely the skill that defines formal operations.

As you might suspect, students with an ability to think hypothetically have an advantage in many kinds of schoolwork: by definition, they require relatively few “props” to solve problems. In this sense, they can, in principle, be more self-directed than students who rely only on concrete operations—certainly a desirable quality in the opinion of most teachers. Note, though, that formal operational thinking is desirable but not sufficient for school success, and that it is far from being the only way that students achieve educational success. Formal thinking skills do not ensure that a student is motivated or well-behaved, for example, nor does it guarantee other desirable skills. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is really about a particular kind of formal thinking, the kind needed to solve scientific problems and devise scientific experiments. Since many people do not usually deal with such problems in the ordinary course of their lives, it should be no surprise that research finds that many people never achieve or use formal thinking fully or consistently, or that they use it only in selected areas with which they are very familiar (Case & Okomato, 1996). For teachers, the limitations of Piaget’s ideas suggest a need for additional theories about development—ones that focus more directly on the social and interpersonal issues of childhood and adolescence.

Most current research in formal operations focuses on three questions: (1) Do all children reach formal operations? (2) Are young children capable of abstract reasoning? and (3) Are there any higher stages of intellectual development? (Bee, 1995; Berk, 1993; Shaffer, 1993). Do all children reach formal operations?

Try giving the following test to some of your friends:

Premise 1: If there is a knife, then there is a fork.

Premise 2: There is not a knife. Question: Is there a fork?

The correct answer to this question is “maybe.” The wrong answer is “no.” However, 40 to 60 percent of college students fail formal operational problems, such as this one (Keating, 1979). Why? It appears that much of formal operational thought is situation-specific. In other words, although college students and adults are capable of hypothetico-deductive reasoning, they tend to be better at it in the fields with which they are familiar. Thus physics majors are better able to demonstrate formal operations when dealing with physics problems than are psychology majors, who, in turn, are better at abstract reasoning in their discipline than are English majors, and so on (DeLisi & Staudt, 1980). Are young children capable of abstract reasoning? Research indicates that concrete operational children can be taught abstract reasoning. For example, they can be taught how to solve propositions, such as the knife-and-fork task. Furthermore, training improves such performance (Hawkins, Pea, Glick, & Scribner, 1984). These training effects, however, are transitory. Specific training in propositional thinking lasts longer and generalizes more readily to new tasks when the trainees are in the formal operational stage (Greenbowe et al., 1981). Are there higher stages of intellectual development?

Beyond Formal Operational Thought: Postformal Thought

Although Piaget asserts that the formal operations stage represents the apex of cognitive thought, Patricia Arlin (1975, 1977) disagrees. She believes that great thinkers like Einstein, Freud, and Piaget operate in a higher cognitive dimension in which they reconceptualize existing knowledge and reformulate it to come up with unique ways of thinking about the world. She calls this the problem-finding stage of cognitive development.

The hallmark of this type of thinking is the ability to think abstractly or to consider possibilities and ideas about circumstances never directly experienced. Thinking abstractly is only one characteristic of adult thought, however, if you compare a 15-year-old with someone in their late 30s, you would probably find that the latter considers not only what is possible but also what is likely. Why the change? The adult has gained experience and understands why possibilities do not always become realities. They learn to base decisions on what is realistic and practical, not idealistic, and can make adaptive choices. Adults are also not as influenced by what others think. This advanced type of thinking is referred to as postformal thought (Sinnott, 1998).

In addition to moving toward more practical considerations, thinking in early adulthood may also become more flexible and balanced. Abstract ideas that the adolescent believes in firmly may become standards by which the adult evaluates reality. Adolescents tend to think in dichotomies ; ideas are true or false; good or bad; there is no middle ground . However, with experience, the adult comes to recognize that there are some right and some wrong in each position, some good or some bad in a policy or approach, some truth and some falsity in a particular idea. This ability to bring together salient aspects of two opposing viewpoints or positions is referred to as dialectical thought and is considered one of the most advanced aspects of postformal thinking (Basseches, 1984). Such thinking is more realistic because very few positions, ideas, situations, or people are entirely right or wrong. So, for example, parents who were considered angels or devils by the adolescent eventually become just people with strengths and weaknesses, endearing qualities, and faults to the adult.

Video 3.6.10. Perry’s Stages of Intellectual Development explains post-formal stages of cognitive development in adulthood.

Does Everyone Reach Formal Operational or Postformal Thought?

Formal operational thought is influenced by experience and education. Most people attain some degree of formal operational thinking but use formal operations primarily in the areas of their strongest interest (Crain, 2005).  Even those that can use formal or postformal thought, do not regularly demonstrate it. Moreover, in small villages and tribal communities, it is barely used at all. A possible explanation is that an individual’s thinking has not been sufficiently challenged to demonstrate formal operational thought in all areas.

Some adults lead lives in which they are not challenged to think abstractly about their world. Many adults do not receive any formal education and are not taught to think abstractly about situations they have never experienced. Further, they are also not exposed to conceptual tools used to analyze hypothetical situations formally. Those who do think abstractly, in fact, may be able to do so more easily in some subjects than others. For example, psychology majors may be able to think abstractly about psychology, but be unable to use abstract reasoning in physics or chemistry. Abstract reasoning in a particular field requires a knowledge base that we might not have in all areas. Consequently, our ability to think abstractly depends to a large extent on our experiences.

Candela Citations

• Psychological Constructivism . Authored by : Nicole Arduini-Van Hoose. Provided by : Hudson Valley Community College. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Adolescent Psychology. Authored by : Nicole Arduini-Van Hoose. Provided by : Hudson Valley Community College. Retrieved from : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/adolescent. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Educational Psychology. Authored by : Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Provided by : The Saylor Foundation. Retrieved from : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/educationalpsychology. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Educational Psychology. Authored by : Borich. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Lifespan Development. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Retrieved from : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-lifespandevelopment. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Semantic Networks and Spreading Activation. Authored by : Carole Yue. Provided by : Khan Academy. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/ig-SVifJUKw. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Schemas, Assimilation, and Accommodation. Authored by : Carole Yue. Provided by : Khan Academy. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/xoAUMmZ0pzc. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development. Authored by : Carole Yue. Provided by : Khan Academy . Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/Jt3-PIC2nCs. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Formal Operational Stage . Provided by : Udacity. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/hvq7tq2fx1Y. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• Perry's Stages of Intellectual Development. Provided by : Student Success Space. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/MbsqNn8O79o. License : All Rights Reserved
• Egocentrism. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/OinqFgsIbh0. License : All Rights Reserved
• Conservation Task. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/YtLEWVu815o. License : All Rights Reserved
• Deductive Reasoning. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/YJyuy4B2aKU. License : All Rights Reserved
• Sally-Anne Test. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/QjkTQtggLH4. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• The Theory of Mind Test. Provided by : The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from : https://youtu.be/YGSj2zY2OEM. License : All Rights Reserved

Educational Psychology Copyright © 2020 by Nicole Arduini-Van Hoose is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Chapter 3: Student Development

Cognitive development: the theory of jean piaget.

Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget . Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become able to think logically and scientifically. Because his theory is especially popular among educators, we focus on it in this chapter.

Piaget was a psychological constructivist : in his view, learning proceeded by the interplay of assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term developmental change . The long-term developments are really the main focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory.

After observing children closely, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence. By stages he meant a sequence of thinking patterns with four key features:

• They always happen in the same order.
• No stage is ever skipped.
• Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
• Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.

Basically this is the “staircase” model of development mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Piaget proposed four major stages of cognitive development, and called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence, (2) preoperational thinking, (3) concrete operational thinking, and (4) formal operational thinking. Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

The sensorimotor stage: birth to age 2

In Piaget’s theory, the sensorimotor stage is first, and is defined as the period when infants “think” by means of their senses and motor actions. As every new parent will attest, infants continually touch, manipulate, look, listen to, and even bite and chew objects. According to Piaget, these actions allow them to learn about the world and are crucial to their early cognitive development.

The infant’s actions allow the child to represent (or construct simple concepts of) objects and events. A toy animal may be just a confusing array of sensations at first, but by looking, feeling, and manipulating it repeatedly, the child gradually organizes her sensations and actions into a stable concept, toy animal . The representation acquires a permanence lacking in the individual experiences of the object, which are constantly changing. Because the representation is stable, the child “knows,” or at least believes, that toy animal exists even if the actual toy animal is temporarily out of sight. Piaget called this sense of stability object permanence , a belief that objects exist whether or not they are actually present. It is a major achievement of sensorimotor development, and marks a qualitative transformation in how older infants (24 months) think about experience compared to younger infants (6 months).

During much of infancy, of course, a child can only barely talk, so sensorimotor development initially happens without the support of language. It might therefore seem hard to know what infants are thinking, but Piaget devised several simple, but clever experiments to get around their lack of language, and that suggest that infants do indeed represent objects even without being able to talk (Piaget, 1952). In one, for example, he simply hid an object (like a toy animal) under a blanket. He found that doing so consistently prompts older infants (18–24 months) to search for the object, but fails to prompt younger infants (less than six months) to do so. (You can try this experiment yourself if you happen to have access to young infant.) “Something” motivates the search by the older infant even without the benefit of much language, and the “something” is presumed to be a permanent concept or representation of the object.

The preoperational stage: age 2 to 7

In the preoperational stage , children use their new ability to represent objects in a wide variety of activities, but they do not yet do it in ways that are organized or fully logical. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of cognition is dramatic play , the improvised make-believe of preschool children. If you have ever had responsibility for children of this age, you have likely witnessed such play. Ashley holds a plastic banana to her ear and says: “Hello, Mom? Can you be sure to bring me my baby doll? OK!” Then she hangs up the banana and pours tea for Jeremy into an invisible cup. Jeremy giggles at the sight of all of this and exclaims: “Rinnng! Oh Ashley, the phone is ringing again! You better answer it.” And on it goes.

In a way, children immersed in make-believe seem “mentally insane,” in that they do not think realistically. But they are not truly insane because they have not really taken leave of their senses. At some level, Ashley and Jeremy always know that the banana is still a banana and not really a telephone; they are merely representing it as a telephone. They are thinking on two levels at once—one imaginative and the other realistic. This dual processing of experience makes dramatic play an early example of metacognition , or reflecting on and monitoring of thinking itself. Metacognition is a highly desirable skill for success in school, one that teachers often encourage (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; Paley, 2005). Partly for this reason, teachers of young children (preschool, kindergarten, and even first or second grade) often make time and space in their classrooms for dramatic play, and sometimes even participate in it themselves to help develop the play further.

The concrete operational stage: age 7 to 11

As children continue into elementary school, they become able to represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically. Their rules of thinking still seem very basic by adult standards and usually operate unconsciously, but they allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.” This simple principle helps children to understand certain arithmetic tasks, such as in adding or subtracting zero from a number, as well as to do certain classroom science experiments, such as ones involving judgments of the amounts of liquids when mixed. Piaget called this period the concrete operational stage because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events. They are not yet able, however, to operate (or think) systematically about representations of objects or events. Manipulating representations is a more abstract skill that develops later, during adolescence.

Concrete operational thinking differs from preoperational thinking in two ways, each of which renders children more skilled as students. One difference is reversibility , or the ability to think about the steps of a process in any order. Imagine a simple science experiment, for example, such as one that explores why objects sink or float by having a child place an assortment of objects in a basin of water. Both the preoperational and concrete operational child can recall and describe the steps in this experiment, but only the concrete operational child can recall them in any order . This skill is very helpful on any task involving multiple steps—a common feature of tasks in the classroom. In teaching new vocabulary from a story, for another example, a teacher might tell students: “First make a list of words in the story that you do not know, then find and write down their definitions, and finally get a friend to test you on your list.” These directions involve repeatedly remembering to move back and forth between a second step and a first—a task that concrete operational students—and most adults—find easy, but that preoperational children often forget to do or find confusing. If the younger children are to do this task reliably, they may need external prompts, such as having the teacher remind them periodically to go back to the story to look for more unknown words

The other new feature of thinking during the concrete operational stage is the child’s ability to decenter , or focus on more than one feature of a problem at a time. There are hints of decentration in preschool children’s dramatic play, which requires being aware on two levels at once—knowing that a banana can be both a banana and a “telephone.” But the decentration of the concrete operational stage is more deliberate and conscious than preschoolers’ make-believe. Now the child can attend to two things at once quite purposely. Suppose you give students a sheet with an assortment of subtraction problems on it, and ask them to do this: “Find all of the problems that involve two-digit subtraction and that involve borrowing from the next column. Circle and solve only those problems.” Following these instructions is quite possible for a concrete operational student (as long as they have been listening!) because the student can attend to the two subtasks simultaneously—finding the two-digit problems and identifying which actually involve borrowing. (Whether the student actually knows how to “borrow” however, is a separate question.)

In real classroom tasks, reversibility and decentration often happen together. A well-known example of joint presence is Piaget’s experiments with conservation , the belief that an amount or quantity stays the same even if it changes apparent size or shape (Piaget, 2001; Matthews, 1998). Imagine two identical balls made of clay. Any child, whether preoperational or concrete operational, will agree that the two indeed have the same amount of clay in them simply because they look the same. But if you now squish one ball into a long, thin “hot dog,” the preoperational child is likely to say that the amount of that ball has changed—either because it is longer or because it is thinner, but at any rate because it now looks different. The concrete operational child will not make this mistake, thanks to new cognitive skills of reversibility and decentration: for him or her, the amount is the same because “you could squish it back into a ball again” (reversibility) and because “it may be longer, but it is also thinner” (decentration). Piaget would say the concrete operational child “has conservation of quantity.”

The classroom examples described above also involve reversibility and decentration. As already mentioned, the vocabulary activity described earlier requires reversibility (going back and forth between identifying words and looking up their meanings); but it can also be construed as an example of decentration (keeping in mind two tasks at once—word identification and dictionary search). And as mentioned, the arithmetic activity requires decentration (looking for problems that meet two criteria and also solving them), but it can also be construed as an example of reversibility (going back and forth between subtasks, as with the vocabulary activity). Either way, the development of concrete operational skills support students in doing many basic academic tasks; in a sense they make ordinary schoolwork possible

The formal operational stage: age 11 and beyond

In the last of the Piagetian stages, the child becomes able to reason not only about tangible objects and events, but also about hypothetical or abstract ones. Hence it has the name formal operational stage —the period when the individual can “operate” on “forms” or representations. With students at this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-fact) problems: “What if the world had never discovered oil?” or “What if the first European explorers had settled first in California instead of on the East Coast of the United States?” To answer such questions, students must use hypothetical reasoning , meaning that they must manipulate ideas that vary in several ways at once, and do so entirely in their minds

The hypothetical reasoning that concerned Piaget primarily involved scientific problems. His studies of formal operational thinking therefore often look like problems that middle or high school teachers pose in science classes. In one problem, for example, a young person is presented with a simple pendulum, to which different amounts of weight can be hung (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The experimenter asks: “What determines how fast the pendulum swings: the length of the string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance that it is pulled to the side?” The young person is not allowed to solve this problem by trial-and-error with the materials themselves, but must reason a way to the solution mentally. To do so systematically, he or she must imagine varying each factor separately, while also imagining the other factors that are held constant. This kind of thinking requires facility at manipulating mental representations of the relevant objects and actions—precisely the skill that defines formal operations.

As you might suspect, students with an ability to think hypothetically have an advantage in many kinds of school work: by definition, they require relatively few “props” to solve problems. In this sense they can in principle be more self-directed than students who rely only on concrete operations—certainly a desirable quality in the opinion of most teachers. Note, though, that formal operational thinking is desirable but not sufficient for school success, and that it is far from being the only way that students achieve educational success. Formal thinking skills do not insure that a student is motivated or well-behaved, for example, nor does it guarantee other desirable skills, such as ability at sports, music, or art. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is really about a particular kind of formal thinking, the kind needed to solve scientific problems and devise scientific experiments. Since many people do not normally deal with such problems in the normal course of their lives, it should be no surprise that research finds that many people never achieve or use formal thinking fully or consistently, or that they use it only in selected areas with which they are very familiar (Case & Okomato, 1996). For teachers, the limitations of Piaget’s ideas suggest a need for additional theories about development—ones that focus more directly on the social and interpersonal issues of childhood and adolescence. The next sections describe some of these.

Bredekamp, S. & Copple, C. (1997). Developmentally appropriate practice, Revised edition. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Case, R. & Okamoto, Y. (1996). The role of central conceptual structures in children’s thought . Chicago: Society for Research on Child Development.

Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence: An essay on the growth of formal operational structures . New York: Basic Books.

Matthews, G. (1998). The philosophy of childhood . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Paley, V. (2005). A child’s work: The importance of fantasy play . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children . New York: International Universities Press.

Piaget, J. (2001). The psychology of intelligence . Oxford, UK: Routledge

• Educational Psychology. Authored by : Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Located at : https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=153 . License : CC BY: Attribution

What is Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development?

Discover who Jean Piaget was and learn how his profound theories still shape the way we understand human cognitive development from infancy to adulthood.

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Many people assume that babies are just tiny, playful adults who are not yet molded by the pressures of society or the traumas of growing up. While there is some truth to this, babies and children view the world differently than adults; they lack fundamental logical capabilities to make sense of the world as we do. 

Jean Piaget dedicated his life to spelling out how children develop through different stages of rational and mental ability. 

In the rest of this post, we’ll go over the work of Piaget and the stages of cognitive development.

What is the Piaget Theory?

The Piaget Theory is a comprehensive framework that explains the nature and development of human intelligence, particularly in children. Psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that cognitive development occurs through a series of stages, each characterized by different abilities, thought processes, and modes of understanding the world.

His theory primarily focuses on children’s intellectual and cognitive growth, although some of its principles have also been applied to adults.

Who was Jean Piaget?

Jean Piaget, born in 1896, was a Swiss psychologist who dedicated his life to understanding how children process the world and learn. Through in-depth experiments and interviews with children, he deduced that humans tend to perceive and understand the world in four discrete stages of development.

Piaget’s work made a massive impact on the field of psychology as well as our understanding of best education practices. While some critics push back on his theories and techniques, and thinking has evolved since his death several decades ago, Piaget undeniably left a lasting impact.

Basic concepts of Piaget’s theory

Piaget’s long standing contribution to psychology was his idea that children go through four distinct stages of development. He called the stages sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. We’ll dive into more specifics in the next section.

Piaget also developed the concepts of “assimilation” and “accommodation.”

Assimilation is when you fit new information into how you see the world (what he called your “schemas”).

For example, imagine a child with a pet cat. If they say a puppy prancing about, the child might log that animal as another four-legged animal and call it a cat. The child is assimilating this new information (the dog) into their schema for a four-legged pet (a cat).

Accommodation , on the other hand, is when you change your viewpoint to fit in new information.

When the same child learns that the new animal is a dog, not a cat, they accommodate this further information by adjusting their ‘schema’ of four-legged pets to include dogs.

Examples of assimilation and accommodation

As the cat-dog example above illustrates, humans assimilate and accommodate 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537095/ as early as infancy. We continue these processes in more complex ways as adults.

For example, a promoted adult may assimilate this information into their working model: “Hard work = success.” 

But they see less hardworking people all around them getting promoted left and right. In that case, they may accommodate this new information and adjust their schema to something like “success = hard work + networking.” 

And maybe if they continue to accommodate new information, they may develop a more accurate model like “success = hard work + networking + strategy + mindset + privilege + luck.”

On the note of success, one essential part of strategic thinking is setting the right goals. Check out this guide if you’d like to learn scientific ways to improve your goal-setting.

How To Set Better Goals Using Science

Do you set the same goals over and over again? If you’re not achieving your goals – it’s not your fault! Let me show you the science-based goal-setting framework to help you achieve your biggest goals.

Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget proposed that cognitive development occurs through four distinct stages from infancy to adulthood: 

• Sensorimotor stage: Learning through sensory experiences, 0-2 years
• Preoperational stage: Symbolic thought, lack of logic, 2-7 years
• Concrete operational stage: Logical thought, concrete contexts, 7-11 years
• Formal operational stage: Abstract reasoning and problem-solving, 12+ years

Each stage is characterized by different ways of thinking and understanding the world.

Though these stages aren’t completely rigid, different kids might progress through them at different rates, and some children might show characteristics of more than one stage at a time. They are a helpful framework for understanding how cognitive abilities typically develop.

Let’s explore each one more thoroughly.

Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)

During the sensorimotor stage 2 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-lifespandevelopment/chapter/piaget-and-the-sensorimotor-stage/ , infants and toddlers learn about the world through their sensory experiences and motor activities, hence the name “sensorimotor.” They explore and interact with their environment using their senses and physical actions.

Characteristics and behaviors of the sensorimotor stage

• Sensory exploration. Infants learn about the world in their first months of age and experiment with their five senses.
• Primary circular reactions. Babies enjoy interacting with their bodies, where they may suck their thumbs or kick their legs.
• Secondary circular reactions. Babies discover pleasure in interacting with objects outside of their bodies. For example, they may find joy in squeezing their bottle and doing it continuously. 
• Object permanence. Infants’ understanding of the world is limited to what they immediately perceive—they don’t yet understand that things continue to exist even when out of sight. This is why peekaboo is so fun for little kids—when your face is gone, they assume you are gone!
• Cause and effect. Children at this stage also begin to understand that their actions can cause things in their environment to happen, which is a fundamental part of developing problem-solving skills. For example, they learn that shaking a rattle will produce noise. Or that crying might get them another baby snack!
• Goal-directed behavior is when children exhibit intentionality in their actions to achieve specific outcomes, like moving a shoe out of the way to reach a toy.

Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)

The preoperational stage lasts from around 2 to 7 years of age. During this stage, kids use words and symbols to make sense of everything. It’s like they’ve got a little “life dictionary” they’re filling in. But they’re still pretty wrapped up in their own point of view and can find it tricky to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. 

Characteristics and behaviors of the preoperational stage

• Egocentrism: Younger children struggle to see a situation from another person’s point of view. For example, they might believe that if they’re scared of the dark, everyone else must be too.
• Symbolic play: They can use objects, actions, or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas—like using a banana as a telephone during play. This points to the beginning of abstract thinking. If a child draws a picture 3 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2314677/ of their family, some features may be more symbolic than literal; maybe the most significant people in the drawing are the most important.
• Lack of conservation: This is when children struggle to understand that the quantity of something doesn’t change when the shape or appearance changes. For instance, they may believe that a tall, thin glass holds more juice than a short, wide one, even if the amount of juice is the same.
• Animism: Children often assign life-like qualities to inanimate objects, like believing a teddy bear has feelings.
• Centration: Children tend to focus on one aspect of a situation or object, ignoring others. For instance, if a child has one giant cookie and sees an adult has two big cookies, the child might be upset; but if the child’s cookie is then broken up into two smaller cookies, they might think they have just as much cookie as the adult because they are focusing solely on the number of cookies and neglecting the size of cookies.

Here’s an interesting (and cute) video of a child displaying centration and a lack of conservation.

Concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years)

The third stage of Piaget’s theory is the concrete operational stage, which typically occurs between 7 to 11 years of age. Children develop logic and concrete reasoning skills during this stage but still struggle with abstract concepts and hypothetical problems.

Characteristics and behaviors of the concrete operational stage

• Conservation: Children understand the concept of conservation, or that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape or arrangement. For example, they would know that the amount of clay remains constant, whether rolled into a ball or squished into a pancake.
• Classification:  This refers to the ability to categorize objects or situations based on common characteristics like color, shape, or type. They could categorize animals into subgroups like birds, mammals, and reptiles or understand that a red apple and a green apple can be grouped because they are both apples.
• Seriation: This refers to the ability to sort objects or situations according to a characteristic, such as size, value, or volume. For example, a child could line up sticks from shortest to longest.
• Reversibility refers to the ability to follow a line of reasoning back to its starting point. For example, they can understand that if you subtract a number from a sum, you can add the same number back to get the original sum again.

Formal operational stage (12 years and up)

The fourth and final stage in Piaget’s theory is the formal operational stage, which starts around 12 and continues into adulthood. In this stage, individuals think more logically about abstract concepts and hypothetical situations.

Characteristics and behaviors of the formal operational stage

• Abstract thought: Individuals can think about abstract concepts like justice, freedom, or love and ponder philosophical or hypothetical questions. They’re no longer limited to concrete, tangible concepts.
• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: Individuals can consider hypothetical situations and reason logically about them. They can also solve problems systematically, considering all possible solutions before settling on the best one.
• Future orientation: Adolescents start to think about future possibilities and consequences, allowing them to plan steps to reach a goal or consider the potential outcomes of various decisions.
• Metacognition: This is the ability to think about thinking. Individuals can reflect on their thought processes, strategies, and perspectives here.
• Complex problem solving: With the ability to understand abstract concepts and hypothesize, adults can solve more complex problems (like how to pay rent each month).

The Significance of Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s theory gives us a solid framework for understanding how children’s thinking changes as they grow. It’s not just educators who rely on his insights; psychologists and parents find them valuable, too. Consider it a helpful guide on how your child’s brain develops from infancy through adulthood.

Piaget’s impact on education 

• Paying attention to the child’s development: Piaget said, “Hey, kids need to learn in ways that match where their brains are at.” Meaning, trying to teach them stuff they’re not ready for? It’s not going to work. So keep an eye on what your child seems ready to learn, and go from there.
• Active learning: According to Piaget, kids aren’t sponges just soaking up info; they learn best when active and engaged. Think of it as learning by exploring, not just by listening. Hands-on activities? A win.
• Process learning:  Piaget was about how kids solve problems, not just whether they get the correct answer. It’s not just about the endgame—how they get there is important too. So when your kid is figuring stuff out, the process matters as much as getting it “right.”
• Don’t rush the process: Piaget also remarked that American culture tends to try to speed up learning and development 4 https://www.princeton.edu/~yael/NIPSWorkshop/SteinAbstract.pdf . But Piaget saw the stages as having their own natural pace and encouraged resisting the impulse to outrun our natural pace of learning.

Piaget’s impact on psychology

• Quantifiable impact: Piaget is widely regarded as one of the giants of the psychological community. He ranks second 5 https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/jean-piaget in number of professional journal citations (after Sigmund Freud) and fourth in number of citations in intro psychology textbooks (after Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura).
• Clinical method: In his work, he pioneered the Clinical Method 6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6646116_The_Early_Evolution_of_Jean_Piaget’s_Clinical_Method technique. In this flexible and incisive method, he’d interview children to understand their thoughts about the world and their cognitive capacities. 
• Constructivism: Piaget’s work supported the idea that individuals actively build 7 https://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf their understanding of the world through their experiences and interactions with their environment. If you encounter a new situation, you either assimilate it into your current model of how the world works or adjust your current model to accommodate the latest information. 
• Genetic epistemology: This psychological jargon asks, “How do we come to know the things we know?” Piaget thought it was not just about what we’re born with or what people tell us. It’s more like we build our understanding through our own experiences. Sure, we come into the world with some built-in reactions—like a baby gripping your finger if you put it in their hand. But that’s just the starting point.
• According to Piaget, the real learning happens when we interact with our environment. So, your kid isn’t just learning from you or their teacher; they’re also learning from playing in the park, messing around with building blocks, or even arguing with a friend.

Piaget’s Theory: Applying it in Real-Life

Piaget’s theory has had a significant influence not just in the field of psychology but also in practical domains such as education and parenting. Let’s explore how an understanding of Piaget’s stages of a child’s cognitive development can help support their cognitive growth.

Tailor your parenting method accordingly.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has significantly contributed to the education 8 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED182349.pdf field. It has helped shape educational practices and policies around the globe by providing insights into how children think and learn at different ages. This is vital information for teachers and parents alike.

Here are a few ways that understanding Piaget could help a parent understand what’s going on in their kids’ brains at different ages:

• When your kiddos are little: During those adorable toddler and preschool years (which align with the sensorimotor and preoperational stages), your kids are like tiny explorers, soaking up the world through their senses. Think hands-on play, fun visuals, and interactive games to help them grasp new ideas. You’re their first teacher, so feel free to go out with playdough, building blocks, or even simple cooking activities.
• For the 7-11 crowd: As your children start to think more logically (concrete operational stage), this is a great time to introduce them to more complicated tasks that involve some real-world items. You can use anything from coins to teach them basic math to fun day trips that sneak in some learning about history or science.
• Navigating the teen years: When your kids hit the teen phase, they’ve reached Piaget’s formal operational stage, which means they can handle abstract thinking and hypothetical situations. Dinner table debates, challenging books, and thought-provoking movies can be excellent ways to get them to flex their mental muscles. Please encourage them to share their opinions, debate ideas, and dig deep into topics; they’re ready for it!

Understanding these stages can give you a kind of “parenting cheat sheet” to help your children learn and grow at each phase of their lives.

If you are a parent or caregiver, here’s a science-backed guide on parenting.

Real-life examples of Piaget’s theory in action

Understanding Piaget’s theory can help us recognize its application in daily life. 

For example, a toddler in the sensorimotor stage might search for a toy hidden under a blanket, demonstrating their grasp of object permanence. Or here’s an example of a baby getting their mind blown by balls disappearing and reappearing.

A child in the preoperational stage might insist that their sibling, who has a taller slice of cake, has more cake than they do—even if they both have half—because they cannot understand the concept of conservation.

A concrete operational child could demonstrate their understanding of reversibility if they see a room get painted from white to blue. Even once the room is entirely blue, the child could understand that the room could be turned back to white again.

A teenager in the formal operational stage might ponder the future consequences of their actions, exhibiting their ability to think about hypothetical situations.

Criticisms and Alternative Perspectives to Piaget’s Theory

While Piaget’s theory has been profoundly influential and continues to contribute to our understanding of child development, it has also been the subject of various criticisms. Other psychologists have proposed alternative theories, and later research has led to changes in Piaget’s original ideas.

Flawed methodology

Some people criticize how Piaget went about his experiments, especially regarding how he found participants 5 https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/jean-piaget for his studies and how many children he studied. Criticism that he didn’t consider any statistical measures other than age. There is further criticism that his book The Origins of Intelligence in Children was based only on tests of his three children.

Scope of Intelligence

Piaget’s theories assume that intelligence develops as one coherent whole. But as Dr. J. Roy Hopkins 5 https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/jean-piaget points out, many consider intelligence modularly. In other words, we each possess a network of different types of intelligence that evolve at their rate and not just as one singular mass.

In a similar vein, all of the tests that Piaget used were scientific and rational. While this provides valuable insight, it needs to provide a comprehensive scope of the development of the human mind. How might a child develop creatively? Musically? Athletically?

The model stops short.

As Dr. Hopkins also shares, it’s limiting that Piaget’s model maxes out at age 12. While 12-year-olds can conduct complex reasoning, it is surprising to assume that no additional types of intelligence develop from 13 onward. Any adult reader can likely reflect on their past few years or decades and find straightforward ways in which their intellectual capacity has grown.

Underestimating children’s capacity

One criticism of Piaget’s theory is that it may underestimate children’s cognitive abilities. Some researchers have suggested that children can understand concepts at earlier ages with proper support and instruction than Piaget proposed.

Questioning universality

Another criticism is that Piaget’s stages may not be as clearly defined or universally applicable as he suggested. Cognitive development can vary significantly among children; some might not fit neatly into Piaget’s stages. Culture, education, and social environment can also influence the pace and nature of development.

Furthermore, some researchers argue that Piaget’s theory overly focuses on individual cognition and does not pay enough attention to cognitive development’s social and cultural context.

Alternative theories of cognitive development

Several psychologists have proposed alternative theories of cognitive development. 

Lev Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, emphasized the social and cultural context in which learning occurs. He proposed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development , suggesting that learning is most effective when tasks are slightly beyond a child’s current ability level and are supported by more knowledgeable individuals.

Another influential theory is the information processing theory 9 https://lo.unisa.edu.au/mod/book/view.php?id=610988&chapterid=120209 , which compares the human mind to a computer. This theory suggests that a person takes in information and stores it as sensory storage, transfers it to short-term memory, and then either forgets it or transfers it to long-term memory. If this chain is broken at any point (for example, if there’s too much happening in the short-term memory to convert to long-term), then the learning does not occur.

Evolution and expansion of Piaget’s theory by other psychologists

Despite the criticisms, many psychologists agree that Piaget significantly contributed to our understanding of cognitive development. His theory has been expanded and refined rather than discarded.

For instance, Neo-Piagetian 10 https://opentextbooks.concordia.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/4-13-neo-piagetians/#:~:text=Neo%2DPiagetians%20propose%20that%20working,complex%20thinking%20and%20reasoning%20skills. theories incorporate more recent findings about cognitive processes like memory and attention, and they propose that cognitive development involves the gradual expansion of the amount of information that individuals can process simultaneously.

While Piaget’s theory has limitations and has been criticized, it has had a profound impact on psychology and education and continues to be a valuable tool for understanding cognitive development.

Jean Piaget and His History

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss psychologist who pioneered child development. He dedicated his career to profoundly understanding how knowledge grew throughout childhood. Piaget believed that children play an active role in growing their understanding and learning by doing, playing, and engaging.

Piaget’s interest began in animals. At 11 years old, he published a paper 11 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Piaget on albino sparrows. Over the next four years, he wrote scientific papers on mollusks that caught the attention of the European zoologist community.

He studied zoology and philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel in 1918, then studied psychology, eventually becoming a professor of child psychology at the University of Geneva in 1929 until he died in 1980.

While in Paris in 1919, Piaget first started to study children with a reading test he created; he realized that children of different ages tended to make other errors. This sewed the seeds for his further studies of how children think and eventually led to his four-stage model proposing a biological unfolding of human learning.

His work was revolutionary at its time, challenging the idea that children were less competent thinkers than adults. Instead, Piaget suggested that children think differently than adults. This fundamental shift in understanding has profoundly influenced psychology, education, and beyond, shaping how we think about intelligence, learning, and childhood.

Frequently Asked Questions About Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s theory is a framework for understanding how humans, especially children, develop intellectually from infancy to adulthood. It posits four distinct stages of cognitive development—sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational—each characterized by specific thought patterns and behaviors.

Piaget’s theory is important because it offers a foundational understanding of how cognitive abilities develop across different stages of life. This knowledge guides psychology and education, helping design age-appropriate learning strategies and fostering a deeper understanding of human cognitive development.

Piaget’s theory influences current practice by shaping educational methods and parenting practices. It underscores the importance of experiential and active learning, encourages educators to present age-appropriate challenges, and helps parents understand their children’s cognitive abilities at different stages.

Piaget’s theory helps teachers by providing a roadmap for cognitive development, enabling them to tailor their teaching strategies according to the cognitive stage of their students. It emphasizes the significance of hands-on learning experiences and helps teachers present new concepts that match their students’ cognitive maturity.

Piaget’s theory can be applied to education by informing curriculum design and teaching strategies. For instance, younger students might benefit from hands-on, sensory-based learning experiences. In contrast, older students can handle more abstract concepts and hypothetical situations, reflecting the cognitive abilities of the respective stages.

Recap of Jean Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development revolutionized our understanding of how humans develop cognitively from infancy to adulthood. 

Here’s a brief review of the basics.

Children go through four stages of cognitive development:

• Sensorimotor from newborn babies to 2 years, a young infant will learn about the world through their senses and motor activities, developing a sense of object permanence and understanding that actions can affect the environment.
• Preoperational from 2 to 7, children start using symbolic thinking to understand the world but struggle with logical reasoning and understanding other people’s perspectives.  
• Concrete operational from 7 to 11, where children begin to think logically about concrete events and develop an understanding of concepts like conservation, reversibility, and cause-and-effect relationships.
• Formal operational from 12 onward, marked by the development of abstract thought and the ability to think logically about hypothetical situations, reason deductively, and plan for the future.

Play is one of the most effective ways for children to learn and develop at each stage. In each stage, we develop cognitively through the following:

• Building schemas are cognitive models of how the world works.
• Assimilation, where we interpret new knowledge and information into our existing schemas
• Accommodation: We build new schemas when new information doesn’t fit into our current schemas.

If you’d like to learn more about educating children in other ways, you might enjoy this article on teaching social skills to kids.

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Jean Piaget Biography (1896-1980)

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

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• Career and Theories
• Contributions
• Influence on Psychology

Jean Piaget Quotes

Frequently asked questions.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and genetic epistemologist. You may have heard of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, for which he is famous. This theory looks at how children develop intellectually throughout the course of childhood.

At a Glance

Jean Piaget helped shape our foundational knowledge of childhood cognitive development. His theories have influenced not just the field of developmental psychology, but also other fields, including sociology, education, and more.

Overview of Piaget's Life and Work

Prior to Piaget's theory, children were often thought of simply as mini-adults. Instead, Piaget suggested that the way children think is fundamentally different from the way that adults think.

Piaget's theory had a tremendous influence on the emergence of developmental psychology as a distinctive subfield within psychology and contributed greatly to the field of education. He is also credited as a pioneer of the constructivist theory , which suggests that people actively construct their knowledge of the world based on the interaction between their ideas and experiences.

In a 2002 survey of 1,725 American Psychological Society members, Piaget was named the second most influential psychologist of the 20th century.

Best Known For

• Theory of cognitive development
• Developing the term "genetic epistemology" (the study of the origins of knowledge)

Biography of Piaget's Life

Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9, 1896, and began showing an interest in the natural sciences at a very early age.

By the time he was 11, Piaget had already started his career as a researcher by writing a short paper on an albino sparrow.

Piaget continued to study the natural sciences and received his doctorate in zoology from the University of Neuchâtel in 1918. During this time, he published two essays that provided a foundation for his future thoughts and theories.

While his early career consisted of work in the natural sciences, during the 1920s he began to move toward work as a psychologist.

Personal Life

Piaget married Valentine Châtenay in 1923 and the couple went on to have three children. Piaget's observations of his own children served as the basis for many of his later theories.

Later Years

In 1925, Piaget returned to the University of Neuchâtel as a professor of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. From 1929 to 1967, he served as the Director of the International Bureau of Education in Geneva. He also taught at the University of Geneva.

Piaget founded the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in 1955. He died in 1980 and was buried in Geneva.

Piaget Biographies

There have been numerous biographies written about Piaget's life, including "Conversations With Jean Piaget " by Jean-Claude Bringuier (1980) and "Jean Piaget, the Man and His Ideas" by Richard Evans (1973).

Piaget also wrote his autobiography for a chapter in "History of Psychology in Autobiography," volume 4, published in 1952.

Piaget's Career and Theories

Piaget had several ideas or theories about cognitive development throughout his career.

Intellectual Development

Piaget developed an interest in psychoanalysis and spent a year working at a boys' institution created by Alfred Binet . Binet is known as the developer of the world's first intelligence test, and Piaget took part in scoring these assessments.

Roots of Knowledge

Piaget identified himself as a genetic epistemologist. In his paper Genetic Epistemology, Piaget explained, "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the origin, nature, extent, and limits of human knowledge. Piaget was interested not only in the nature of thought but also in how it develops and how genetics impact this process.

His early work with Binet's intelligence tests led Piaget to conclude that children think differently than adults. While this is a widely accepted notion today, it was considered revolutionary at the time. It was this observation that inspired his interest in understanding how knowledge grows throughout childhood.

Piaget suggested that children sort the knowledge they acquire through their experiences and interactions into groupings known as schemas . When new information is acquired, it can either be assimilated into existing schemas or accommodated through revising an existing schema or creating an entirely new category of information.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Today, Jean Piaget is best known for his research on children's cognitive development. Piaget studied the intellectual development of his own three children and created a theory that described the stages that children pass through in the development of intelligence and formal thought processes.

The four stages of Piaget's theory are as follows:

• Sensorimotor stage : The first stage of development lasts from birth to approximately age 2. At this point in development, children know the world primarily through their senses and movements.
• Preoperational stage : The second stage of development lasts from the ages of 2 to 7 and is characterized by the development of language and the emergence of symbolic play.
• Concrete operational stage : The third stage of cognitive development lasts from the age of 7 to approximately age 11. At this point, logical thought emerges, but children still struggle with abstract and theoretical thinking.
• Formal operational stage : In the fourth and final stage of cognitive development, lasting from age 12 and into adulthood, children become much more adept at abstract thought and deductive reasoning.

Additional Reading

For further exploration of Piaget's ideas, consider reading some of the source texts. The following are a few of Piaget's best-known works.

• "Origins of Intelligence in the Child," 1936
• "Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood," 1945
• "Main Trends in Psychology." 1970
• "Genetic Epistemology," 1970
• "Memory and intelligence," 1973

Piaget's Contributions to Psychology

Piaget contributed to psychology in various ways. He provided support for the idea that children think differently than adults and his research identified several important milestones in the mental development of children. His work also generated interest in cognitive and developmental psychology.

Piaget's theories are widely studied today by students of both psychology and education. In the case of the latter, he once said, "The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done."

Piaget's Influence on Psychology

Piaget's theories continue to be studied in the areas of psychology, sociology, education, and genetics. His work contributed to our understanding of the cognitive development of children. Piaget helped demonstrate that childhood is a unique and important period of human development.

In their 2005 text, "The Science of False Memory," authors C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna wrote of Piaget's influence: "In the course of a long and hugely prolific career, he contributed important scholarly work to fields as diverse as the philosophy of science, linguistics, education, sociology, and evolutionary biology. Above all, however, he was the developmental psychologist of the 20th century.

For two decades, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, Piagetian theory and Piaget's research findings dominated developmental psychology worldwide, much as Freud's ideas had dominated abnormal psychology a generation before. Almost single-handedly, he shifted the focus of developmental research away from its traditional concerns with social and emotional development and toward cognitive development."

Influence on Psychologists

Piaget's work influenced other notable psychologists including Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg .

• Howard Gardner : Gardner developed the theory of multiple intelligences in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike Piaget, Gardner believed that there are various types of intelligence vs. a single type of intelligence of which people have greater or lesser amounts. Gardner cited Piaget as greatly influencing his work, as he sought to prove Piaget's theory wrong.
• Robert Sternberg : Similar to Gardner, Sternberg's work uses classical theories of intelligence like Piaget's, but contradicts them. Sternberg is best-known for his triarchic theory of intelligence in which he posits there are three types of intelligence: practical, creative, and analytical. According to Sternberg, IQ tests only measure analytic intelligence, which doesn't give a complete picture of someone's intelligence.

Influence on Education

Piaget's work continues to influence education. He advocated for the following principles, which are still often used in classrooms:

• Discovery learning : This emphasizes the idea that children should be given the freedom to explore and discover new information on their own. A learning environment should also provide courses such as music, dance, and art.
• Problem-solving : Piaget believed that children should be taught by solving problems; in addition, teachers should pay attention to how a child arrives at a correct answer.
• Stage-based teaching : Since each child falls into a different stage of cognitive development (and children progress through the stages in their own time), Piaget believed it was important that the learning environment reflects which stage a child is in.

Here is a selection of some of Jean Piaget's most famous quotes.

On Genetic Epistemology

"What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

"The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between the progress made in the logical and rational organization of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes. With that hypothesis, the most fruitful, most obvious field of study would be the reconstituting of human history—the history of human thinking in prehistoric man. Unfortunately, we are not very well informed in the psychology of primitive man, but there are children all around us, and it is in studying children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth."

On Cognitive Development

"Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate."

On Education

"Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves."

On Intelligence

"Furthermore, intelligence itself does not consist of an isolated and sharply differentiated class of cognitive processes. It is not, properly speaking, one form of structuring among others; it is the form of equilibrium towards which all the structures arise out of perception, habit and elementary sensorimotor mechanisms tend."

Piaget is known for his theory of cognitive development that first introduced the notion that children think differently than adults, which was a new way of thinking at the time. He is also known for creating the term "genetic epistemology," which refers to the study of knowledge development.

Children begin to develop language during the preoperational stage, according to Piaget's theory. This is the second stage of development and begins when the child is around 2 years of age and lasts until they are roughly 7.

Piaget defined egocentrism as a mindset that "vivifies the external world and materialises the internal world." Put simply, it is having a greater focus on one's own thoughts and feelings than on the thoughts and feelings of others.

Piaget theorized that egocentrism developed between the stages of autistic thought (thought that is undirected and symbolic) and scientific thought (thought that is more logical and socialized)—which is roughly between the ages of 3 and 7.

Piaget's cognitive development theory changed the way we look at child development—namely, that children have different thought processes than adults. His contributions greatly influenced future developmental theories within the psychology field while also impacting other fields as well, such as education, sociology, and genetics.

Larcher V. Children are not small adults: Significance of biological and cognitive development in medical practice . Handbook Philos Med. 2015. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-8706-2_16-1

University of Kentucky. Study ranks the top 20th century psychologists .

Piaget J. Genetic epistemology . Am Behav Sci . 1970;13(3):459-480. doi:10.1177/000276427001300320

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Piagetian theory . American Psychological Association.

Valsiner J, Molenaar PCM, Lyra MCDP, Chaudhary N, eds. Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences . Springer New York.

Brainerd CJ, Reyna VF. The Science of False Memory . Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154054.001.0001

Shearer B. Multiple intelligences in teaching and education: Lessons learned from neuroscience .  J Intell . 2018;6(3):38. doi:10.3390/jintelligence6030038

Sternberg RJ. Intelligence .  Dialogues Clin Neurosci . 2012;14(1):19-27. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2012.14.1/rsternberg

R, Madanagopal D. Piaget’s theory and stages of cognitive development- An overview . SJAMS. 2020;8(9):2152-2157. doi:10.36347/sjams.2020.v08i09.034

Peterson, Thomas.  Epistemology and the Predicates of Education: Building Upon a Process Theory of Learning . United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2019.

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Genetic epistemology . American Psychological Association.

Kesselring T, Muller U. The concept of egocentrism in the context of Piaget's theory . New Ideas Psychol . 2011;29(3):327-45. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.008

Jean Piaget Society. About Jean Piaget .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Explained

Cognitive development is studied in the field of psychology and neuroscience. It focuses on the development of various cognitive processes, such as thinking, learning, and processing. In your classroom, you must have seen that not every child got the first rank because every child has their own learning abilities and has different cognitive skills. The process of cognitive development in children was explained in a well-organized and systematic way by the renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget was deeply focused on knowing that why children of different age groups make different kinds of errors while solving similar problems. He believed that children made different errors because children’s thinking abilities are different from that of adults due to their cognitive developments. Piaget’s study had a great impact on the early education of children, and his study inspired many other psychologists to work in the areas of cognitive development.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget is known for his works in the field of cognitive development of children. He was born in Switzerland on 9 August 1896, and he died on 16 September 1980. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a medieval literature professor at the “University of Neuchâtel.” Jean Piaget was a child psychology professor at Geneva University until 1929, and then he became the director of studies at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, Switzerland. Piaget did his schooling at Neuchâtel Latin high school, and he had a great interest in biology. At the age of 11, he published his first ‘paper’ (consisting of a summary of sixty scientific books and hundreds of articles) on the ‘albino sparrow.’ He further pursued his studies in biology, and in 1918, he received his doctorate for his work on a thesis related to mollusks. Earlier, he was trained in natural science and interested in epistemology that eventually developed his interest in the study of cognitive development. He was fascinated by the development of the children’s knowledge and how children learn about what is wrong and what is right. To develop his theory of cognitive development, he started observing the behavior of children including his own children (Jaqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent). In fact, many of his intelligence and language development theories are the results of his deep observations on his own children, from their infancy to adolescence. After deeply observing the children’s behavior, he divided the stages of cognitive development into four stages, i.e., Sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage, these are discussed below in this article. Jean Piaget’s other publications have also received great attention that includes “The origins of intelligence (1952),” “The child’s conception of physical causality (1927),” and “The moral judgment of the child (1932).”

Key Concepts of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

Jean Piaget introduced some important concepts and ideas in his theory of cognitive development. These concepts help to understand the learning and growth process of the children and give a deep insight into their cognitive developments.

The term schema was first used by Frederic Bartlett, a British psychologist, in his learning theory, but it became popular due to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. A schema is a structure of cognitive concepts that helps us organize and interpret a vast amount of information by relating it with the previously stored information or knowledge, or simply, we can say that a schema is our background knowledge or experiences about a particular concept or event. According to Piaget, schemas can be modified or changed as we encounter various new things in our everyday life, so our experiences changes, and the newly gathered information adds up into the previously stored information, which modifies or changes the existing schemas. For example, when a child encounters an animal for the first time, say a dog, he develops a schema that an animal (dog) has four legs and one tail, but when he/she encounters a cow and observes and gathers new information like the shape and size of the cow, and how it looks different than the dog, the previously existing ‘animal schema’ of the child gets modified, and the child labels it as “cow” rather than a “dog.” Schemas are very useful for learning new concepts as they make it easier to interpret the new information. There exist various types of schemas, such as person schemas, object schemas, social schemes, event schemas, and self-schemas.

Assimilation

Assimilation is defined as the cognitive process of interpreting new information by relating it with the already present schemas. Whenever you encounter any new information, you observe, process, and interpret this new piece of information according to the previously stored schemas in your brain. For example, in the above example, seeing a cow and labeling it under the animal schema is an assimilation process as a child has a previously-stored schema that an animal has four legs and one tail; however, the process of assimilation is subjective as every child has their own way of learning new things, which is based on their previous learnings.

Accommodation

Accommodation is defined as the process of modifying the schemas on encounter with the new information, it is different from assimilation in the fact that the schemas are modified according to the newly gathered information instead of the pre-existing knowledge. Accommodation means that a child looks at the situation from a broader perspective instead of just relating it to their existing beliefs. For example, imagine your best friend who has always been kind, helpful, and polite to you, and then one day, you see your best friend trying to spoil your painting, how would you interpret this new behavior of your best friend? If you interpret this by using the assimilation process, then you might ignore your best friend’s new behavior and will still consider her as your best friend; however, if you interpret this by using the accommodation process, you may come out with a different attribute for your friend, and there are possibilities that he/she may not remain your best friend. So, assimilation and accommodation are two different ways of interpreting the new information.

Equilibration

According to the cognitive development theory of Piaget, the learning processes of the children involve maintaining the balance between the process of assimilation and the process of accommodation, and this balancing mechanism is known as equilibration. Both assimilation and accommodation are important parts of the learning process because some kind of information is added to our pre-existing schemas through the assimilation process, while other kinds of information change our pre-existing schemas or develop new schemas through the accommodation processes, a good balance between the assimilation and accommodation helps the children improve their thinking pattern and understand any new information or event in a good way. The learning process of children involves that they try to learn or interpret new information by relating it to the existing information (assimilation), and if some information doesn’t relate to their pre-existing information, they make some changes to their pre-existing schemas to fit in the new information (accommodation), and finally, they adjust or change the existing schemas to understand the new information (equilibration). Equilibration is the main factor that describes the difference in the learning abilities of children.

Four Stages of Cognitive Development

According to Jean Piaget, children understand things differently from adults not because they know less than adults; it’s just because their way of thinking about a particular task or event is different from adults. While investigating the children’s cognitive levels, Piaget observed that at certain points in a child’s life, the assimilation process takes precedence, while at other times, both accommodation and equilibration take precedence, and these levels of domination of various processes at different stages of life are almost similar with every child. Piaget believed that the thinking and reasoning abilities were different at different stages of their lives and divided cognitive development into four stages. According to his theory, every child passes through the sequence of these four stages and accomplishes cognitive tasks related to each stage, and then the child enters into the next stage of cognitive development. Let us discuss each stage in detail.

1. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 years)

Sensorimotor is the first stage of cognitive development, it starts from the birth of the child and lasts for about two years. As the name of this stage suggests, infants and toddlers use their senses to understand their surroundings. In the sensorimotor stage, the child acquires experience or knowledge through their reflexes, motor abilities, or other sensorimotor skills. The cognitive development during this stage occurs for a short period of time, but the growth and learning during this stage are very sudden. Object permanence (The ability of the child to understand that objects still exist even if they are not directly seen or heard) is an important cognitive development that is achieved during this stage. This stage is divided into the following sub-stages.

Every child is born with the abilities of inborn reflexes like suckling, looking, and hearing. It involves responding to certain voices and looking towards them, opening of the mouth, looking towards colorful items, and closing the hand when you touch their palm. This stage lasts for around 0-1 month.

Primary Circular Reactions

In this period, the child works on their own actions, which act as stimuli to them, and they repeatedly respond to these actions. For example, when they suck their thumbs, it feels good to them, and they repeat this action again and again. This stage lasts for around 1-4 months.

Secondary Circular Reactions

In this stage, the child starts to focus on their surrounding world and starts repeating actions that bring changes to their surroundings. For example, when the child squeezes a toy that makes a sound, the child feels amused listening to that sound, and he/she will squeeze the toy repeatedly. Turning the lights on and off, again and again, is also a secondary circular reaction. During this period, the vision-prehension (to grasp) coordination improves, and the child voluntarily starts grasping objects. This stage lasts for around 4-8 months.

Coordination of Secondary Reactions

This stage primarily involves the development of eye-hand coordination. According to Piaget, this is a very important stage of cognitive development, he called this stage “First Proper Intelligence” because, during this period, the child starts planning the steps to meet some objectives, i.e., goal orientation begins. For example, they try to reach towards their toys or food. Another milestone of cognitive development, i.e., object permanence is achieved in this period, If you hide their toy from their sight, they won’t think that their particular toy does not exist, instead, they may try to find their lost toy. This stage lasts for around 8 to 12 months.

Tertiary Circular Reactions

In this period, the child attempts to achieve their objectives, and he tries, again and again, to achieve it, even after committing mistakes. For example, if the child wants his favorite toy that is placed above the table, but he/she can’t reach it, the child tries to throw some things on that toy so that the toy falls from the table, and he/she can finally play with that. Piaget describes children at this stage as “young scientists” as they conduct pseudo-experiments to achieve their goals through different methods. During this stage, children enjoy listening to or making different sounds like hitting tabla and throwing utensils. This stage lasts for about 12 to 24 months.

Early Representational Thoughts

This stage marks the end of the sensorimotor stage and the beginning of the proportional stage, and it lasts for around 18 to 24 months. During this period, the child can retain the images of the particular person or thing in their mind for a longer period of time after the encounter with that person or the thing. Development of the mental representation is largely observed in this period, and the child starts using various mental combinations to solve basic problems. For example, putting the food plate down to open the door. The child also learns to imitate and pretend in this stage.

2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

The preoperational stage begins around the age of 2 years and lasts up to around 7 years. During this stage, the children learn to speak. They learn to represent the objects using words and images and start thinking symbolically (symbolic thinking is the ability of the child to think about the events or objects that are not present in their surrounding environment). The children start understanding the events of past and future, for example, if the mother is going to the office, then the child starts crying as he/she remembers that the mother will come late, the child stays away from heights as he remembers that he fell down from the table. In the preoperational stage, children find it difficult to understand others’ points of view, and egocentrism is observed in them as they do not understand the perspective of others and see things from his/her own point of view, and they start thinking that they are always right. During this period, children do not fully understand the concepts of logic, and they often struggle to understand the mentally manipulated information and the idea of constancy. For example, if the researcher pours an equal quantity of water in two glasses of the same capacities, and one glass is taller than the other, and he/she asks the child to choose one glass. The preoperational child is more likely to choose the taller glass because the child thinks that it has more water than the other glass, though the quantity of water in both glasses is the same.

This image shows that the Preoperational child thinks that the taller glass has more water than the wider glass. However, the quantity of water is the same in both glasses.

During this stage, children are often seen indulging in the activities of dramatic plays and symbolic games, this mainly involves manipulating the symbols such as papers as plates, a cardboard box as a table, and a banana as a mobile. All these activities of children may be considered absurd to general people, and they may term children’s activities unrealistic; however, according to children, all their activities are realistic, and they consider a paper still as a paper and not a plate. During this stage, they think about the events from two perspectives, i.e., imaginative as well as realistically, which represents the development of metacognition; it refers to the ability of an individual to be aware of their cognitive processes and the patterns behind their thoughts.

3. Concrete Operations Stage (7-12 years)

This stage begins around the age of 7 and lasts up to around 12 years of age. The term ‘operations’ in the concrete operations stage refers to the development of various logical operations to solve problems. The child learns to manipulate various symbols by using logic. During this period, children start observing things or events in a more flexible and logical way. They start following some basic rules unconsciously. For example, the child now understands that the amount of things remains the same if we do not add or remove anything from it, which enables them to do simple arithmetical calculations like subtraction and additions. At the end of this period, their ability to understand various mental operations increases, but they struggle to understand hypothetical things and abstract concepts, and as per adults’ standards, their logical skills are still basic during this period. The egocentrism that is mainly found in the preoperational stage starts disappearing during this stage as children become conscious that their actions may affect other people’s views towards them. The main qualities that develop during this period in the children are discussed below.

The concrete operational children are good at inductive logical thinking; inductive logic involves making out a generalized principle or rule about any concept or event from a specific observation or experience, i.e., some specific conclusions are drawn from the broad data. For example, “Henry is a professor. Henry has grey hair. Therefore, all professors are grey-haired.” Although all the statements are true, the conclusion is not necessarily true in inductive logic.

Another important feature that children now understand is that some qualities of certain objects do not change upon altering that objects in some way. For example, a paper does not change its identity if we tear that into different pieces, it will still remain a paper.

Arrangement

Children during this period start demonstrating the skills of organizing different items in a methodical way according to their length, width, shape, size, or color. If the researcher gives the child at the concrete operations stage of development marbles of different colors and asks them to arrange them and put them in the jar, then the children are more likely to add the same colored marbles in one jar.

Conservation

In this period, the development of the conservation process is observed in the children; conservation means that children understand that the quantity of the object or liquid remains the same even if their appearance has been changed. As we discussed in the above example that a preoperational child fails to understand that both the taller glass and the broader glass have the same amount of juice, but the concrete operations child can easily understand that both the glasses have an equal amount of juice.

Reversibility

During the concrete operations stage, the child shows an important development in understanding the reversibility process, i.e., they now recognize that it is possible to regain the original condition of some objects after it has been changed. For example, if the favorite football of the child gets deflated, then the child understands that its original shape can be regained by filling air into it. Another example of the reversibility process is that if the mother pours the milk into the glass from the bottle and gives it to the preoperational child, then the child will think that the milk in the glass is not the same as it was in the bottle, and he/she may cry to get the milk in the bottle. However, the concrete operational child understands the reversibility, and he/she knows that the milk remains unchanged if it is poured into the glass from the bottle. They also use reversibility in basic mathematical operations such as if we add 3 to 7, then the result would be 10, and we can again get 7,  if we subtract 3 from 10, i.e., 7+3=10, and 10-3=7.

4. Formal Operational Stage (12 years to adulthood)

The formal operational stage is the last stage of Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory. It starts from around 12 years of age and lasts up to adolescence. It is called formal operations because the children can now “operate” (think) about various representations or “forms,” i.e., the abstract and hypothetical thinking of the child develops at this stage. The improved hypothetical thinking helps them understand the experiments and concepts related to science and mathematics. Children, at this stage, start thinking about various philosophical, moral, social, and ethical concepts that require abstract reasoning. Let’s discuss some important qualities that develop in children during this stage.

During this period, the development of deductive logic is observed in children; deductive logic involves deducing a specific conclusion from a hypothesis or a generalized principle. Let’s understand it with an argument, “All grey-haired men are professors. Harry is a grey-haired man. Therefore, Harry is a professor.” The deductive conclusion will be logical and true if the statements are true.

Abstract Thinking

The development of abstract thinking is observed during this period, children begin to think about every situation not only from their past experiences but also from different perspectives like causes and consequences of the situation, and other possible outcomes. Counterfactual thinking is observed at this stage that mainly involves thinking about “what-if” situations. For example, “what if aliens landed on earth?” or “what if humans can fly like birds in the sky?” Piaget conducted a study called “Third eye problem, in this study, children of different age groups were asked if they have an extra eye then where they would like to put that eye? In response, children belonging to the concrete operations stage said that they would like to place the third eye on their forehead, but the children belonging to the formal operational stage said that it will be more useful to place the third eye on the hand as it will give the wider view in every direction.

Problem Solving Approach

The problem solving skills of the children are highly developed during this stage. The children become able to do complex tasks and systematic planning. Piaget had designed various tests to study the thinking of children during the formal operations stage, and one of the main tests was a ‘Pendulum task (Piaget & Bärbel Inheldar, 1958).’ In this experiment, the children were asked to determine what factor is more responsible for the speed of the swing of the pendulum; Is it the length of the string, the weight suspended to the string, or the strength with which the string is pulled? Participants were asked to solve this problem in their minds rather than calculating it in the notebook. To solve this mentally, the participants had to imagine all three-factors (length of string, suspended weight, the strength of the push) individually while considering other factors constant. Formal operations children were able to solve this mentally, which proved their ability to solve complex experimental situations by manipulating various outcomes or variables mentally.

Influence of Piaget’s Theory in Educational Sector

Jean Piaget never related his cognitive theory with the education of the children, but researchers studied this theory and explained that some features of Piaget’s theory are very useful in improving the teaching and learning in schools. In fact, Piaget’s theory played a crucial role in developing various educational policies. For example, in 1996, the famous publication “Plowden report” related to the primary education system; a study conducted by the UK government was strongly based on the concepts of Piaget’s theory. One of the important features of Jean Piaget’s study that is very helpful in the educational sector is that children learn better if they actively explore and do experiments on their own rather than just reading the theory about concepts, this idea transformed the curriculum of primary schools in the UK and boosted the idea of ‘discovery learning’ among children.

Berk (2001) outlined the important teaching implications that are drawn from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. These are briefly discussed below.

• The teacher should always focus on the thinking process of the children that how the child has derived the conclusions of the problem, rather than just checking the validity of the answer. The thinking pattern of the child helps the teacher understand the level of cognitive skills of the child, and he/she can vary their teaching style as per their cognitive levels of learning.
• The children should be encouraged to participate in various educational activities and discover new concepts and knowledge by interacting with the environment, instead of mugging up the theoretical concepts. The children understand better if they practically learn new concepts or ideas.
• Teachers should de-emphasize the concept of forcing children to think like adults. Piaget said that there were adverse impacts on children of teaching them the concepts that they were not ready (cognitive developed) to understand.
• Teachers should understand that every child is unique and have different levels of cognitive skills. The performance of the children should never be compared with the other peers belonging to the same age group, instead, their development should be analyzed from their own previous records.

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Jean Piagets theory of Cognitive Development

June 11, 2021

Explore Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, focusing on intellectual development and its impact on developmental psychology.

Main, P (2021, June 11). Jean Piagets theory of Cognitive Development. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/jean-piagets-theory-of-cognitive-development-and-active-classrooms

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.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is based on the idea that children go through four stages of development, each with their own unique characteristics and abilities. The first stage, the sensorimotor stage, occurs from birth to around two years old and is characterized by the child's understanding of the world through sensory experiences and motor actions.

The second stage, the preoperational stage, occurs from around two to seven years old and is characterized by the child's ability to use symbols to represent objects and events. The third stage, the concrete operational stage, occurs from around seven to twelve years old and is characterized by the child's ability to think logically about concrete objects and events. Finally, the fourth stage, the formal operational stage, occurs from around twelve years old and is characterized by the child's ability to think abstractly and reason hypothetically.

Who exactly was Jean Piaget?

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His early life was marked by an intense curiosity and passion for the natural world, leading him to publish his first scientific paper on mollusks at the age of 10. After finishing high school, Piaget initially pursued studies in natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel, where he earned his doctorate in zoology. However, his academic interests soon shifted to psychology, driven by a fascination with the development of human knowledge and cognition.

During World War I, Piaget worked as an army doctor, an experience that broadened his understanding of human behavior under stress and change. After the war, he studied psychology and philosophy in Zurich and Paris, where he worked with prominent psychologists such as Alfred Binet at the Binet Institute. This period marked the beginning of his deep dive into child development and experimental psychology.

In 1923, Piaget married Valentine Châtenay, and together they had three children. Observing their development provided Piaget with invaluable insights that formed the foundation of his theories on cognitive development. By the age of 30, Piaget had published his first significant work, "The Language and Thought of the Child," which established his reputation as a leading thinker in developmental psychology.

Piaget's career was distinguished by his association with several prestigious institutions. He held professorships at the University of Geneva and the University of Lausanne and collaborated with many international scholars. His major works, published by leading academic presses such as Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, include "The Origins of Intelligence in Children" and "The Construction of Reality in the Child."

Piaget's contributions to developmental psychology are profound. He introduced the concept of stage theory, proposing that children move through distinct stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. His research into the mental structures underlying these stages has significantly influenced educational practices and the understanding of child development. He also explored how children actively construct their understanding of the world through processes that involve assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

In addition to his theoretical work, Piaget was a proponent of active learning, advocating that children learn best through interaction with their environment rather than passive reception of information. His insights into language development , logical thinking, and the unique ways preoperational children perceive the world have become foundational in both psychology and education.

Piaget founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva and was honored with numerous accolades throughout his career. His legacy continues through the Jean Piaget Society, an organization dedicated to advancing research in developmental psychology and promoting his ideas.

Jean Piaget passed away on September 16, 1980, but his influence endures. His pioneering work on cognitive development and the stages of development remains a cornerstone of scientific knowledge in psychology, shaping how we understand the growth of human intelligence and learning.

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:

Sensorimotor stage (Object permanence)

From birth to 18-24 months

The infants use their actions and senses to explore and learn about their surrounding environment.

During this stage, children develop object permanence , which means they understand that objects continue to exist even when they can't see them. This is a crucial milestone in cognitive development as it allows children to start forming mental representations of the world around them. As they progress through the following stages, they will continue to build on this foundation of knowledge, ultimately developing more complex cognitive abilities.

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 realise 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 .

Pre-operational stage (Symbolic thought)

From 2 to 7 years

The pre-operational stage is a crucial period in children's cognitive development. During this stage, children's thinking is not yet logical or concrete, and they struggle with concepts like cause and effect. They also have difficulty understanding other people's perspectives, which is why their thinking is egocentric. Additionally, their reasoning is based on intuition rather than logic, which can lead to errors in judgement. Despite these limitations, children in the pre-operational stage are still capable of incredible growth and learning , and it's important for parents and educators to provide them with the support and guidance they need to thrive.

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 (centred on their own world view) and intuitive (based on children's subjective judgements about events).

Concrete operational stage (Logical thought)

7 to 11 years

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).

Another key characteristic of the Concrete Operational Stage is the development of deductive reasoning. Children at this stage can use logic to draw conclusions and solve problems . They are able to understand that if A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C. This type of reasoning allows them to understand more complex concepts and ideas, setting them up for success in their academic and personal lives.

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.

Formal operational stage (Symbolic reasoning)

Age 12 and above

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. During this stage, adolescents can understand abstract concepts . They are able to follow any specific kind of argument without thinking about any particular examples.

During the Formal Operational Stage, children begin to develop the ability to think abstractly and use symbolic reasoning. This means they can think beyond concrete, physical objects and concepts and start to understand more complex and abstract ideas. They can solve hypothetical problems and understand metaphors, analogies, and other abstract concepts. This stage typically occurs between the ages of 11 and 16, but can vary depending on the individual child's development.

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?

In the realm of child development and cognition, theories often intersect, each providing a unique lens to understand the intricate processes that govern a child's growth. Renowned psychologists like Jean Piaget have made significant contributions, laying the foundation for further exploration. The following table outlines several prominent psychologists and their theories, highlighting the synergies with Piaget's ideas. The intertwined nature of these theories underscores the multifaceted nature of cognitive development, painting a comprehensive picture of how children learn, adapt, and evolve.

1. Lev Vygotsky: A Russian psychologist, Vygotsky proposed the Sociocultural Theory , emphasizing the significant influence of social interaction on cognitive development. His ideas resonate with Piaget's in the sense that both underscore the importance of active engagement in learning.

However, Vygotsky places a stronger emphasis on social factors in shaping cognitive schemas.

2. Erik Erikson: Erikson's theory of psychosocial development aligns with Piaget's ideas in its stage-based approach. While Piaget focuses on cognitive development, Erikson provides a broader view of social and emotional development, complementing the understanding of a child's evolving abilities.

3. Lawrence Kohlberg: Known for his stages of moral development , Kohlberg's work parallels Piaget's understanding of how children progress through distinct stages. Both theories underscore the idea that children's abilities and understanding evolve with time and experience.

4. Urie Bronfenbrenner: Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory provides a macro view of child development, considering the interplay of various environmental systems. This theory can be seen as complementary to Piaget's focus on the individual child's cognitive growth, adding a broader perspective on the environmental factors influencing this development.

5. Albert Bandura: Bandura's Social Learning Theory posits that children learn by observing and imitating others. This theory aligns with Piaget's emphasis on active engagement in learning, but adds a social aspect to the learning process, complementing Piaget's focus on individual exploration and discovery.

6. Howard Gardner: Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences proposes that there are multiple ways to be intelligent, going beyond the traditional IQ concept. His theory doesn't directly align with Piaget's work, but offers a different lens to view cognitive abilities of children, thereby enriching our understanding of child 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.

Educational Implications of Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory

Although, later researchers have demonstrated how Piaget's theory is applicable for learning and teaching but Piaget (1952) does not clearly relate his theory to learning.

Piaget was very influential in creating teaching practices and educational policy. For instance, in 1966 a primary education review by the UK government was based upon Piaget’s theory. Also, the outcome of this review provided the foundation for publishing Plowden report (1967).

Discovery learning – the concept that children learn best through actively exploring and doing - was viewed as central to the primary school curriculum transformation.

Piaget believes that children must not be taught certain concepts until reaching the appropriate cognitive development stage. Also, accommodation and assimilation are requirements of an active learner only, because problem-solving skills must only be discovered they cannot be taught. The learning inside the classrooms must be student-centred and performed via active discovery learning . The primary role of an instructor is to facilitate learning, rather than direct teaching. Hence, teachers need to ensure the following practices within the classroom:

• Pay more attention to the learning process , rather than focusing on the end product of it.
• Use active teaching involving reconstructing or rediscovering "truths." (See Universal Thinking Framework ).
• Use individual and collaborative activities (to allow children to learn from one another, see our blog post on dialogic pedagogy ).
• Devise situations that offer useful problems , and develop disequilibrium in children (see this post on critical thinking ).
• Assess a child's development level so appropriate tasks can be created.

Here are a list of potential activities thatare designed to align with the cognitive abilities typical of each developmental stage according to Piaget's theory.

The Lasting Impact of Piaget’s Research on Modern Psychology

Jean Piaget's contributions to the field of psychology have had profound and lasting implications for those working in child development. His pioneering work in cognitive development has provided a framework that informs educational practices, child psychology, and the broader scientific community. Here are seven of the most significant implications of Piaget’s work for professionals in child development roles:

• Piaget’s stage-based model, detailing the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages, helps professionals identify and understand key developmental milestones in children . This knowledge is crucial for creating appropriate learning and intervention strategies.
• By emphasizing the concept of schemas, Piaget’s work guides educators in designing learning experiences that align with children’s cognitive development . This ensures that educational content is both accessible and challenging for different age groups.
• Piaget’s constructivist approach, which advocates for active, hands-on learning , encourages educators to create environments that support exploration and discovery. This approach helps children develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Insights into the cognitive processes of preoperational children inform the development of teaching methods that are specifically tailored to young learners. This knowledge helps educators foster cognitive growth effectively.
• Piaget’s observational techniques and experimental psychology methods set a high standard for research in child development. These methodologies continue to inform contemporary studies, ensuring rigorous and insightful research outcomes.
• Educational curricula worldwide have integrated Piagetian principles, promoting practices that support the natural cognitive development of children. This ensures that educational systems nurture students’ intellectual growth effectively.
• The Jean Piaget Society and other organizations dedicated to his legacy provide ongoing professional development opportunities. These platforms help educators and child development professionals stay informed about the latest research and best practices in the field.

Piaget’s legacy extends beyond theoretical contributions, offering practical guidance that helps those in child development roles enhance their practice, support children’s learning, and contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge in developmental psychology.

Critical Evaluation of Piaget's Theory

Piaget’s ideas have enormous influence on developmental psychology . His theories changed methods of teaching and changed people's perceptions about a child’s world.

Piaget (1936) was the foremost psychologist whose ideas enhanced people's understanding of cognitive development . His concepts have been of practical use in communicating with and understanding children, specially in the field of education ( Discovery Learning ).

Piaget 's main contributions include thorough observational studies of cognition in children , stage theory of children's cognitive development , and a series of ingenious but simple tests to evaluate multiple cognitive abilities .

Do stages really exist? Critiques of Formal Operation Thinking believe that the final stage of formal operations does not provide correct explanation of cognitive development . Not every person is capable of abstract reasoning and many adults do not even reach level of formal operations. For instance, Dasen (1994) mentioned that only less than half of adults ever reach the stage of formal operation. Maybe they are not distinct stages? Piaget was extremely focused on the universal stages of biological maturation and cognitive development that he failed to address the effect of culture and social setting on cognitive development .

A contemporary of Piaget, Vygotsky argued that social interaction is essential for cognitive development. Vygotsky believes that a child's learning always takes place in a social context involving co-operation of someone more knowledgeable (MKO). This kind od social interaction offers language opportunities and according to Vygotksy language provides the basis of thought.

Hughes (1975) believes that Piaget underestimated children's abilities as his tests were frequently unclear and hard to understand. Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1966) were against the concept of schema. Behaviorism also disapproves Piaget’s schema theory as it is an internal phenomenon which cannot be observed directly. Due to this, they would claim schema cannot be measured objectively.

Further Reading on Jean Piagets Theories

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development has profoundly influenced the field of developmental psychology, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding how children develop cognitive structures and mental stages. His work on human development, including his four stages of cognitive growth, has been widely discussed and critiqued in academic literature. Below are five key studies exploring Piaget's theory, each providing insights into different aspects of his work and its implications for education and developmental psychology .

1. Barrouillet, P. (2015). Theories of cognitive development: From Piaget to today . Developmental Review, 38, 1-12.

Summary : This study revisits Piaget's cognitive developmental theory and examines its evolution over the past four decades. It highlights how contemporary developmental psychology has built upon and diverged from Piaget’s original constructs, particularly in understanding cognitive structures and human development.

2. Sidik, F. (2020). Actualization of Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory in Learning. JURNAL PAJAR (Pendidikan dan Pengajaran).

Summary : This article explores the application of Piaget's theory in modern educational settings, emphasizing the importance of aligning teaching methods with students' developmental stages. It underscores the theory’s influence on effective educational practices and the understanding of child development.

3. Xiao, Y. (2001). Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory and its Inspirations on Teaching. Journal of Changsha University of Electric Power.

Summary : Xiao’s paper discusses the practical applications of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development in classroom teaching. It provides examples of how educators can design lesson content and methodologies that align with students' cognitive stages, enhancing their learning experiences.

4. Sanghvi, P. (2020). Piaget's theory of cognitive development: A review. International Journal of Modern Humanities, 7, 90-96.

Summary : Sanghvi provides a comprehensive review of Piaget's theory, detailing the four cognitive stages and their characteristics. The article also critiques Piaget’s contributions to developmental psychology and discusses their educational implications, particularly for understanding cognitive structures.

5. Ghazi, S., Khan, U., Shahzada, G., & Ullah, K. (2014). Formal Operational Stage of Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory: An Implication in Learning Mathematics. Journal of Educational Research, 17, 71.

Summary : This study examines the application of Piaget's formal operational stage in teaching mathematics. It highlights how understanding cognitive stages can improve instructional strategies and enhance students' problem-solving and scientific inquiry skills, thus bridging knowledge gaps in math education.

These studies collectively emphasize the enduring relevance of Piaget’s theory in educational psychology, providing valuable insights into how his ideas can be applied to improve teaching and learning processes.

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Classroom Practice

Early insights into Piaget’s cognitive development model through the lens of the Technologies curriculum

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• Published: 07 June 2024

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• Milorad Cerovac   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3400-5323 1 &
• Therese Keane   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1939-7955 1  

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Piaget’s theory of stage structure is synonymous with discussions involving cognitive development. As with any theoretical model, researchers inevitably and rightly seek to affirm and/or contest the elements of the model presented. In this comparative study, students’ performance across three hands-on engineering tasks for two distinct student cohort groups were investigated including young primary school students (aged 8 to 10) in Piaget’s concrete operations; and older secondary school students (aged 15 to 18) in Piaget’s formal operations stage of cognitive development. The purpose was to gain an insight into Piaget’s stage structure from the perspective of the compulsory national Technologies curriculum in Australia, of which engineering is a core subject. The senior students outperformed their younger peers on all three tasks (simple, complicated and complex), with differences in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities increasing, as the task complexity increased. Although there is very limited evidence linking practical technological subjects and Piaget’s cognitive development model, the findings were consistent with respect to students’ abstract thinking capabilities and their cognitive development.

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Introduction

Abstraction, and the related term of spatial inferential reasoning, are arguably central to developing innovation capabilities that are considered critical to a country’s future prosperity (Nadelson & Seifert, 2017 ; Stewart, 2017 ). Within this paper, abstraction refers to an individual’s ability to form a general mental idea for a possible solution to a Technologies problem (Falkner et al., 2014 ; Seemann et al., 2019 ). Related to abstraction is spatial inferential reasoning, which refers to the individual’s ability to draw upon their prior knowledge, and visualise how the component parts will interact, transforming the original mental idea into a three-dimensional form (Seemann et al., 2019 ). While testing regimes such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tend to focus on student performance in literacy, numeracy and science, spatial abilities are largely overlooked (Bleazby, 2015 ; Çakiroğlu & Çevik, 2022 ). Given government and business rhetoric around the urgency of developing innovation capabilities in Australia, the national Technologies curriculum learning area is considered pivotal to achieving this objective (National Research Council, 2007 ; Office of the Chief Scientist, 2014 ; Stewart, 2017 ). As such, increased attention on developing the skills of abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning is needed, in particular, providing teachers with evidence-based research that will allow them to better tailor classroom learning activities in the Technologies curriculum to align with students’ cognitive development.

Both abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning are cognitive capabilities that develop over time. Piaget’s cognitive development model, which has captured the development of human cognition from birth to adulthood, remains a critical area of educational research, with considerable effort already expended in analysing the work of Piaget and students’ cognitive performances across subject/learning areas and developmental age. While children’s ability to think improves with developmental age, at the concrete operations stage (7 to 11/12 years of age) the main limitation is their inability to think in abstractions (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958 ). This ability to think about abstract possibilities is a key characteristic of students in the formal operations stage (from ages 11/12 to adulthood) of cognitive development (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958 ).

There however remains a lack of research in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning. The importance of abstraction and spatial abilities research is noted by Peterson et al. ( 2020 ), who argue students’ spatial abilities are a reliable predictor of student achievement and success in the STEM domain. Students with high spatial ability are considered to be an “important human-capital resource for developing scientific technological advances” (Kell et al., 2013 , p. 1835). Not surprisingly, spatial skills are seen as necessary in the STEM disciplines, however, they can have a much broader impact on other learning areas through developing knowledge and creative thought more generally (Kell et al., 2013 ).

Much of what is learnt through the Technologies curriculum area is through hands-on problem-solving, which aligns with Dewey’s ( 1997 ) view of progressive education theory and his belief in the role of hands-on learning as a means of developing students as problem solvers. Dewey’s advocacy of learning by doing was a belief shared by Papert ( 1993 ) and his constructionist approach to teaching and learning. The notion of learning by doing places a load on students’ cognitive abilities, such as imagining potential ideas/solutions in their mind (abstraction), communicating these abstract ideas to peers, and being able to make inferences when working on novel problems (Seemann et al., 2019 ).

In this study, we aimed to understand the effect of developmental age on abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning through the lens of teaching Technologies, with the following two research questions:

RQ1. How does student performance vary with task complexity across the two distinct developmental age groups of students in the capabilities of abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning?

RQ2. How do students initially approach a complex hands-on task? That is, do the students plan first, or launch straight into building?

The purpose of this paper is not to provide an extensive investigation on abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning. Rather, the intention is to offer some early insight into the differences in students’ abilities to approach and undertake hands-on problem-solving tasks of varying complexity, individually and collaboratively. Central to this purpose, is developing a comparison of students’ abilities to abstract and infer, across the two latter stages of Piaget’s cognitive development model: concrete operations, and formal operations.

Literature review

Cognition, which refers to knowledge and associated inferential processes, such as conceptualisation, interpretation, thinking, and reasoning (Moshman, 2013 ) has been a focal point of substantial research across curriculum learning areas. Both abstraction and inference making are cognitive capabilities which develop with age. As such, any discussion around cognitive development would at the very least include the work of Piaget, given his theoretical stage structure model has had an immeasurable influence on education (Bidell & Fischer, 1994 ; Erneling, 2014 ; Lourenço & Machado, 1996 ; Schneider & Näslund, 1992 ). Despite the substantial research undertaken, there remains gaps in the literature when discussing abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning in the Technologies curriculum learning area, of which engineering is a core subject.

Abstraction (abstract thinking) has been traditionally regarded as an “ability that emerges relatively late in children’s thinking development” (Van Oers & Poland, 2012 , p.123). Whether or not this is also the case in the Technologies curriculum learning area, and one that specifically could be observed in students engaged with practical hands-on problem-solving tasks, remains unclear. Reasoning can be described as “a process of thinking systematically and logically to obtain a conclusion or proof” (Jumiarsih et al., 2020 , p. 2), and inference making involving the action of going beyond the raw data/facts (Moshman, 2013 ). When applied to the Australian Technologies curriculum, inference making would equate to students going beyond the individual pre-assembled components of an engineering model, to abstracting and inferring how those individual components work together as part of an engineered system. Having a clear understanding of where students are at in their cognitive development is therefore a necessity for teachers, to ensure they constantly challenge students in the classroom through implementing appropriate tasks that offer the right level of complexity.

At any year level in a school, the cognitive ability levels of students, from least advanced to most advanced, can span by as much as five to six years (Freedberg et al., 2019 ; Gonski et al., 2018 ). Developmental expectations of students are therefore a critical consideration for teachers if they are to deliver appropriate and effective learning outcomes. Setting a task with an expectation that is beyond the cognitive ability of students is likely to result in the teacher spending significant portion of class time labouring on knowledge and skills that should be attempted later in a student’s development stage.

Accordant with Piaget’s ( 1972 ) cognitive development model, a child’s intellectual development moves through a recognisable set of four stages, which are characterised by different thinking processes. For instance, in the concrete operations stage (7 to 11/12 years of age) children can think logically about objects but struggle to think in abstractions. Hence, these children are dependent on what they see, hear, and feel, and if given a three-dimensional (3D) model to replicate (e.g. a windmill structure), they (concrete thinkers) would require a complete set of instructions to successfully build a replica model. As children continue their development, they are likely to display more sophisticated cognitive abilities, such as abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning (Burgoon et al., 2013 ). For instance, this could manifest in students being able to think about abstract possibilities, such as visualising the missing components in a partially completed 3D tactile engineering model (e.g. tower crane), or reasoning that a solar panel could act as an on/off switch, as part of a simple steering mechanism (e.g. steerable boat). Thinking about abstract possibilities, such as a solar panel acting as an on/off switch, are typical of children operating in Piaget’s ( 1972 ) formal operations stage.

Considerable attention has been given to Piaget’s theoretical model across a range of curriculum learning areas. For instance, Susac et al. ( 2014 ) in their investigation on student preparedness in learning algebra, found that younger students used concrete strategies such as trial and error substitution to solve algebraic equations compared to their older peers who used rules-based (abstract) strategies. Metz ( 1995 , p. 120) in her critique, supported the view that primary school science classes should place a focus on hands-on activities as students are “concrete thinkers whose reasoning [abilities are] tied to concrete objects”. Firoozalizadeh et al., ( 2020 , p. 25) argued that Persian-speaking students demonstrated the ability to “comprehend abstract concepts at about 5 years of age”, which was contrary to Piaget’s cognitive development model and his belief that abstract thought occurred later in a child’s life.

Some researchers, such as Firoozalizadeh et al. ( 2020 ), questioned the universality of Piaget’s cognitive development model, an issue previously noted by Bidell and Fischer ( 1994 ) who argued that Piaget’s stage structure did not account for some of the variability observed in children. Differences observed in students cognitive thinking, including concrete and abstract thinking, was dependent on the subject area, content and the nature of the tasks given to students (Bidell & Fischer, 1994 ; Jamison, 1977 ). For example, a 13-year-old student may struggle to think abstractly during an algebraic problem-solving task in Mathematics yet could excel in abstract thinking when working on the designing and building of an engineering structure as part of a Technologies class.

Furthermore, Chiappetta ( 1976 ) recognised the complexity of applying Piaget’s cognitive development model, having found frequent instances where students who demonstrate formal operational thinking on Piagetian tasks function at the concrete operational level in science. Gopnik ( 2012 ) also observed that contrary to Piaget’s view, pre-schoolers (as young as 2) demonstrated aspects of abstract reasoning during experimentation which included simple inductive processes. Furthermore, the US-based National Research Council ( 2007 , p. 53) had previously noted that contrary to the prevailing view that considered young students as “being concrete and simplistic thinkers”, young students were capable of thinking in both concrete and abstract modes. Other researchers, such as Papert ( 1993 ), a contemporary of Piaget’s, accepted the distinction between the two stages of concrete operations and formal operations. However, Papert ( 1993 ) argued that technology such as computers, could move the boundary that separated the two stages and their modes of thinking. Similarly, Uttal et al. ( 2013 ) provide evidence that targeted skills training can help facilitate the development of abstract spatial abilities.

Notwithstanding the complexity of Piaget’s cognitive development model, the mechanisms by which children’s knowledge and understanding is formed and transformed within set contexts remains unacknowledged (Ackermann, 1996 ). Increasingly, research in developmental psychology indicates that cognitive development is “not a smooth, incremental progression from concrete to abstract” modes of thinking (Ackermann, 1996 , p. 26).

This research does not intend on contributing to the understanding of the continuum of cognitive development as suggested by Piaget. However, it does strive to offer the perspective of the authors belief that students’ abilities in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning will align with Piaget’s model for the concrete and formal operations stages, through a comparative case study of junior students aged 8 to 10 (concrete) and senior students aged 15 to 18 (formal). A comparison of the junior and senior student cohort groups is shown in Table  1 .

Methodology

A comparative case study methodology was adopted, involving two metropolitan schools, one primary (Foundation to Year 6, ages 4/5 to 11/12) and the other secondary (Years 7 to 12, ages 12/13 to 17/18). Thirty-six students from two different stages, concrete operations and formal operations, of Piaget’s cognitive development model (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958 ), participated in the study which focused on abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning in the context of students solving one of three hands-on engineering tasks.

The research instruments

The research instruments used in this study consisted of three hands-on engineering tasks of varying complexity. Each task required students to build a 3D tactile model: simple windmill; complicated tower crane; or complex steerable boat. Each student or student group was assigned to only one task. The resources used were presented to the student participants, as follows:

Simple kit comprised of interconnecting plastic parts similar to LEGO ® . The kit contained a precise number of parts to construct a windmill model, with a full set of pictorial instructions.

Complicated kit comprised of interconnecting plastic parts similar to LEGO ® . The kit contained more parts than necessary to construct a functioning tower crane model, with several steps removed from the set of pictorial instructions.

Complex kit comprised of an assortment of parts, allowing students to make alternate design decisions, such as choice of motors (low speed vs high speed), energy sources (battery packs vs solar panels), and propeller systems (three-blade traditional boat vs two-blade airboat). However, one key part (i.e. the pontoon element) was not included in the kit but was visible to the students. No build instructions were provided to the students, however, the solution to be built was described in the form of a design brief. Figure  1 shows the complex kit of parts and the pontoon element that students could use as part of their boat’s design.

The complex kit of parts (left) and plastic bottles which could be used as the pontoon element (right)

For the complex steerable boat task, at least one solution existed which would satisfy the three design criteria outlined in the design brief, of having a boat that would float, be powered by electricity, and was steerable. Making the boat steerable could be achieved by using the solar panels instead of the battery packs as an energy source; this was one of the design decisions that students would need to make to deliver a successful model for the complex task.

A summary of the three tasks given to the student participants is shown in Table  2 .

Times assigned to each of the three tasks were based on data collected from a pilot study which allowed validation of the research instruments and task assessment rubrics.

Prior to the students commencing the construction of their model, a script was read. This ensured that each student and student group received a consistent message on the nature of the task, and the expectations. The script was written by the researchers and presented to students describing the nature of the task and the protocols for interacting with the resources provided as part of the model building process.

Participants

School A provided 24 junior students aged 8 to 10, and School B provided 12 senior students aged 15 to 18. Both schools were in a similar geographical area, designated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics ( 2023 ) as being in the top 20% of most advantaged suburbs in Australia, which assisted in mitigating the risk of introducing the confounding variable of socio-economic status of schools and students in this research. A summary of the participant schools is shown in Table  3 .

As each of the three tasks (Table  2 ) were to be completed individually and in groups of three students, there was a requirement to recruit 12 students from each distinct cohort group. This study received approval by the university’s Ethics Committee. Student participation was voluntary, and they could withdraw at any time without providing reasons.

The 36 students formed the four cases upon which this research was based (Table  4 ). Each student was initially randomly assigned to work either individually, or in a group by the researchers. Next, each student or group was randomly assigned to either a simple, complicated or complex hands-on engineering task to complete. Observations and audio-visual recordings were made of the students as they worked on their assigned hands-on problem-solving tasks: to determine the nature of any problems they were experiencing during their model construction (e.g. incorrect positioning of the plastic inter-connecting elements for the simple and complicated tasks); whether or not the kit of parts for the complex task was checked prior to building their model; whether or not any planning and/or designing occurred for the complex task; and if any inferences were made during the complex task construction (e.g. plastic bottles can provide the pontoon element for a boat to float; solar panels can be used to help steer the boat).

Each model built was assessed on its quality. The quality score indicated how accurate students were in delivering their solution, in the form of a working model, to the problem (simple, complicated, complex) assigned to them. The quality score was determined using a rubric developed by the authors to assess each model for its accuracy. The use of a rubric in this study is considered appropriate, as measuring cognitive abilities such as abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning, are considered difficult to achieve (Çakiroğlu & Çevik, 2022 ). The use of a rubric also aligned with the assessment approaches commonly used by teachers. The argument posited by the authors is that if a student had built a perfectly functioning windmill (simple task) or tower crane (complicated task), then logically that student must have been able to:

Accurately translate the 2D pictorial images (provided as part of the instructions) into the corresponding 3D tactile form for both the simple and complicated tasks; and/or

Visualise a mental image of the missing steps for the complicated task.

Hence, the students would have demonstrated their ability to operate in the abstract world. A carefully designed rubric should therefore have the potential to act as an indicator of student ability to abstract and infer. The rubrics used for the simple and complicated tasks are shown in Fig.  2 . These rubrics could therefore provide a comparative measure of a student’s ability to abstract and infer (Çakiroğlu & Çevik, 2022 ). For the complex task, a rubric was created, however, an additional measure that captured the number of inferences that students were required to construct a steerable boat that could float and was powered by electricity was needed.

Rubrics used for the simple and complicated tasks

For the simple and complicated tasks an additional performance measure, percent model completed, was calculated. The percent model completed was calculated as follows:

The total number of plastic inter-connecting elements used by the student(s) was determined at the conclusion of the build, by disassembling each model and counting the number of individual plastic elements that had been used. This disassembling occurred after each model had been photographed from multiple angles and once the quality score was determined. This method of determining the percent of the model completed was only used with the simple and complicated models, as both these models consisted of a fixed number of elements (see Table  2 ) required to construct a fully functioning model. The percent of the model completed was intended on providing a measure of the students’ fluency (i.e. speed) in completing a task.

As the simple model had a low cognitive load, the difference in the ability of junior students compared to senior students to abstract was small, as indicated by the differences in model quality score. While all students (junior and senior) struggled to complete the simple task in the allotted 20-minutes, the senior students did slightly better on the quality of their model, as determined by the rubric used to assess each model. The models produced by the junior and senior students are shown in Fig.  3 , with the quality score calculated and percent model completed also included for comparison.

Junior and senior student models for the simple task

Four complicated tower crane models were built by the junior students (one individual and three groups), and two by the senior students (one individual and one group). These are shown in Fig.  4 and Fig.  5 along with the quality score and percent model completed.

Junior student models for the complicated task

Senior student models for the complicated task

With several steps removed from the complicated task’s pictorial instructions, a moderate cognitive load was placed on students to visualise in their minds, the missing steps and how the component parts in the missing steps were connected. These were reflected in lower quality scores and percent model completion by the junior students. All attempts by the junior students to build a working tower crane were unsuccessful. In contrast, the senior student group successfully completed construction of their model tower crane, including the key aspect of this study, which was the successful visualisation of the missing steps. The senior student, working individually, while unable to complete his model in the time allotted, was able to successfully visualise/imagine the missing steps.

The difficulty experienced by the junior students on the complicated task, due to the increase in cognitive load required of the students, can be noted in the following segment of conversation which captured the feelings of student S17 from Junior Group 4, nearing the end of their allotted 30-minute build period:

“I thought I am good at building LEGO. I build so many LEGOs in my home. I build the LEGO friends. I build two of them and I did great. But I can’t do this. I’m not sure what to do right now. With my LEGO, every page is in a book.”

For the high cognitive load task, at the end of their allocated 40-minute build time, none of the junior students were able to make the necessary inferences to advance their complex steerable boat models to the state of addressing all three key design criteria (i.e. boat must float, be powered by electricity, and be steerable). The result for the junior students was an inference making score of 0 from 3 with their models (Fig.  6 ).

Junior student models for the complex task

In contrast, the senior students were more successful in demonstrating their ability to abstract and infer on the high cognitive load task. The senior student models are shown in Fig.  7 .

Senior student models for the complex task, including novel design ideas/solutions

A summary of student performance across all three tasks of varying complexity is shown in Table  5 , for both student individuals and student groups.

The authors in this study sought to understand Piaget’s cognitive development model from the perspective of spatial hands-on problem-solving tasks in the engineering subject area of the Technologies curriculum. This study’s objective is embodied in the first research question: How does student performance vary with task complexity across the two distinct developmental age groups of students in the capabilities of abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning? While differences in ability to abstract and infer between the junior and senior students were not initially evident with the low cognitive load simple task, the rubric developed provided a discernible relative measure of abstraction and inference making (Fig.  8 ). Despite the simple nature of the windmill task and a full set of instructions provided, there remained a cognitive requirement, albeit low, for students to translate the 2D images to a 3D tactile form. The small difference in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning for the simple task, with older students performing better than the younger students, was observed for the individual and group cases. The need to constantly move between the 2D pictorial and 3D tactile worlds had placed a cognitive load, especially on the students’ working memory which not unexpectedly resulted in older students being more fluent (or quicker) in correctly manipulating the component parts of their engineering model, than their younger peers. Moving back-and-forth between the 2D pictorial instructions and 3D tactile model also led to the occasional mistakes being introduced in the students’ models, with senior students being quicker to identify and fix their mistake/s. These observations, with the quality score calculated for each student and student group, suggests that the older students (aged 15 to 18) outperformed their younger peers (aged 8 to 10) in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning.

Divergence in the quality score (abstraction capability) of students’ model building efforts

Differences in student performance (ability to abstract and infer) increased with the complicated task, which had a moderate cognitive load compared to the simple model (Fig.  8 ). These observed differences in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning were evident across all cases, students working individually and in groups of three, with senior students demonstrating higher levels of abstraction and inference making, than their younger peers. The use of the two measures, quality score (which measured the accuracy of the models produced) and percent completed (which provided a measure of students’ fluency in understanding the problem and being able to manipulate the resources to create a completed artefact), provided evidence of differences in students’ cognitive abilities in undertaking hands-on problem-solving tasks in the Australian national Technologies curriculum. The senior students’ greater fluency in processing the information presented in the form of 2D pictorial instructions compared to the junior students, was evident when fixing mistakes introduced during the 2D (pictorial images) to 3D (tactile model) translation process.

The greater fluency observed with the senior students in the simple and complicated hands-on engineering tasks mirrored the research observations in text comprehension and language fluency observed by Kolić-Vehovec et al. ( 2010 ). When given a hands-on task, the senior students were able to complete construction more quickly than the junior students. This was particularly evident when observing students undertake the complicated tower crane task and the younger students were unable to visualise/imagine the missing elements required to bridge the gap in the provided instructions for the complicated model.

The observations of student performance in the simple and complicated problem-solving tasks were consistent with those of Demetriou et al. ( 2002 ) and their findings that information processing was more efficient in older adolescent students (aged 16) compared to those in early childhood (aged 8). The perfect score for senior group 2 (students S31, S32, S33) and the near-perfect score for senior student S26 reflected their ability to successfully imagine and correctly infer the missing steps for the complicated tower crane model. While the senior group completed the model’s construction, the senior student working on his own ran out of time (96% of model completed), however, he was still successful in visualising and re-constructing those parts of the model for which the steps had been removed.

The senior students’ success in visualising in their minds the missing steps, and then translating those missing steps from an abstraction to a 3D tactile form, indicated a more sophisticated ability to process information in working memory. Arguably, the ability to take the imagined solution in their mind and successfully transpose that mental visualisation into the 3D tactile world is only present in Piaget’s ( 1972 ) final stage of cognitive development, which he termed, formal operations . This therefore suggests that the senior students in this research were operating within Piaget’s formal operations stage.

If junior students (aged 8–10) were operating in the concrete stage of Piaget’s cognitive development model as suggested by the researchers, then the ability to re-create the missing steps in their minds for the complicated task, from the perspective of Piaget’s ( 1972 ) theory of cognitive development, would be beyond them. This appeared to be the case based on these junior student participants, and one that was summed up by S17’s comment, “every page is in a book”, when referring to the missing steps. S17’s remark attempted to explain the difficulty that her group was experiencing in trying to visualise in their mind, the missing elements needed to bridge the gap created by the missing steps in the pictorial instructions provided for the complicated task. This observation therefore appeared to affirm Piaget’s cognitive development model, with this junior group (aged 8 to 10) unable to create the abstractions in their minds and make the inferences necessary, that would allow them to successfully complete their tower crane model. Similar struggles with imagining the missing steps were experienced by all the junior students, individually and as a group of three. The junior students therefore appeared to be operating in the concrete stage of cognitive development, as per Piaget’s theoretical model.

The difference in students’ ability to abstract and infer was most pronounced with the complex task. With no solution provided, other than being described in a design brief, a higher cognitive load was placed on students to abstract and infer, so as to produce a model boat that would float, be powered by electricity, and was steerable. To successfully advance from the resources given to the students, to the point of having a final working model as per the design brief, the students were required to make at least three key inferences. With the complex task the junior students were unable to meet any of the three design criteria, with no consideration given to how the pontoon element (i.e. plastic bottles), located nearby, could be used to keep their boat afloat. There was no attention given to developing a strategy, planning, or coming up with potential designs. All junior students, working individually and collaboratively, launched straight into building their model, with no initial examination of what component parts they had been given to address the three design criteria.

A methodical approach is generally considered key to successful problem-solving (Gilad & Loeb, 1983 ; Russo, 2016 ), as is the use of design sketches when commencing the problem-solving process (Genyea, 1983 ). Unlike the junior students, the senior students were systematic in examining what parts were included in the complex build kit provided, and in sketching preliminary designs for their model boat. In the cases of working individually and collaboratively, the senior students looked beyond their worktable to help solve the criterion of buoyancy. Both the senior student working individually, and the senior student group noticed the plastic bottles (pontoon element) positioned to the side of their workspace. They made clear inferences that the plastic bottles could be used to provide buoyancy. While senior group 3 (students S34, S35, S36) made a total of two inferences (buoyancy and novel connection from energy source to propulsion system), the senior student S27 made the minimum three key inferences in addressing the design criteria and producing a perfect score for the quality of their steerable boat model.

Of the three design criteria, the requirement of building a boat which was steerable, presented the students with the hardest challenge. However, this criterion could be addressed by using the method taken by senior student S27, who drew upon her prior knowledge of Physics and how solar panels function. By changing the light intensity shining on a solar panel, S27 had successfully inferred that the solar panel could act as an on/off switch to control a motorised rudder. The light shining on the solar panel could be adjusted from some maximum value (i.e. switch ‘on’) and the motorised rudder moving, to a minimum value (i.e. switch ‘off’) ceasing the rudder’s motion. The final artefacts presented by the senior students, including the novel working solutions for the complex task, are shown in Fig.  7 .

We are now well-placed to provide meaningful insight to addressing the two research questions posed. Firstly, as task complexity increased, differences in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities of the two student groups became more pronounced, with the senior students aged 15 to 18 performing better than their younger peers aged 8 to 10. These results aligned with Piaget’s cognitive development model from the perspective of hands-on engineering problems in the Technologies curriculum, with the younger students operating within the concrete operations stage and the senior students within the formal operations stage of cognitive development. Based on our study and the research instruments used, the case studies appeared to demonstrate that the junior students aged 8 to 10 appeared to be lacking in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities, compared to their older peers (aged 15 to 18).

Secondly, the lack of a systematic approach to problem-solving further undermined the junior students problem-solving capabilities. This was evident in each instance of the junior students undertaking the complex task, as they immediately launched into building their model boat, without any thought given to planning and designing. Unlike the junior students, the senior students initially looked at each component provided in their kit of parts as part of an initial ‘stocktake’, to determine possible approaches to problem-solving. Furthermore, both the senior student individual and senior student group spent the initial part of their build time to create a potential design of their model, using the pencil and paper included in the kit of parts. Planning and designing were features of a systematic problem-solving approach used by the senior students, which were missing from the junior students’ repertoire of strategies. Given that Piaget’s formal operations stage is noted for students demonstrating a more systematic approach to problem-solving (Emick & Welsh, 2005 ), the senior students’ (formal operations stage) higher level of performance compared to the junior students (concrete operations stage) was not unexpected. Having a methodical, systematic problem-solving approach, in contrast to an approach that is based on trial and error, is a characteristic of the formal operations stage of Piaget’s cognitive development model.

Notwithstanding the limited number of students in this case study, the aim of this research was to provide a preliminary insight into student divergence (based on age) in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning performance with engineering task complexity. Figure  8 shows this divergence as a comparison between those students in a developmental age group that places them in Piaget’s concrete operations stage (aged 8–10) versus those students in a developmental age group that places them in Piaget’s formal operations stage (aged 15–18).

Limitations and future research

To minimise the impact of this research on schools, the tasks developed for the purpose of eliciting students’ abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities presented a challenge. One full set of observations required a minimum of 12 student participants (3 × individual tasks and 3 × group tasks), with the tasks developed and the times allocated to the completion of each engineering problem-solving task allowing a full set of observations to be completed within one school day.

Developing the tasks to meet the constraint of completing one full cycle within one school day was further complicated by the young age of the junior students, which eliminated many tools for safety reasons. For instance, to overcome the safety issues for the complex task and meet the 40-minute build time allocated, several components were pre-assembled, such as the motors, solar panels, and battery packs.

Future studies would look at a larger group of participants to collect and synthesise conclusions that are statistically significant. A larger number of participants would explore abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities of students across both low and high socio-economic regions. Given that determining the socio-economic status is a complex concept, the Australian Bureau of Statistics ( 2023 ) and its decile rating system, can be used to identify those regions that are of low socio-economic status and of high socio-economic status.

Additionally, students’ working memory appeared to be noticeably different between the junior and senior student participants. This difference raises an intriguing question around the role played by working memory on hands-on engineering problem-solving tasks, especially on those tasks requiring students to alternate between working within the 2D (visual/pictorial) world and 3D (tactile) world.

The two capabilities of abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning within the context of the Technologies curriculum were hypothesised to align with Piaget’s cognitive development model. That is, an observable difference in abstraction and inferential reasoning should exist between those students in Piaget’s concrete operations stage, compared to those in Piaget’s formal operations stage of development. Credence to this hypothesis was given in a review of the research literature and the assertion that abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning are recognised cognitive functions that improve with developmental age. The findings of this study support the perspective that the cognitive capabilities (i.e. abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning) within the context of practical hands-on engineering problem-solving tasks, could be understood through Piaget’s cognitive development model. From this study two key conclusions can be argued, and which address the central research questions. Firstly, the younger students (aged 8 to 10) experienced a deterioration in their ability to problem solve hands-on engineering tasks as the level of task complexity increased. These younger students lacked the level of accuracy of their model construction, were slower (i.e. less fluent) and struggled to make inferences across both the complicated and complex hands-on tasks, compared to their senior peers. The difference in abstract thinking was noted even on the low cognitive load simple windmill task. Despite their familiarity with building LEGO ® models, the younger students were slower in their ability to reconstruct the 3D tactile components/model structure from the 2D visual images provided. The rubrics designed to assess the quality of the windmill (simple) and tower crane (complicated) models provided a useful method of measuring students’ relative cognitive performance of abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning. The audio-visual recordings complemented the rubric for the complex task by identifying explicit inferences made by students on the complex task, which could not otherwise be captured in the final assessed model.

The lower performance of the younger students relative to their older peers was further compromised by the lack of any observable systematic strategy of planning and designing. While senior students placed a value on thinking before building, which included analysing each part within the complex kit provided, and how the parts might be used, against the design criteria provided, the junior students jumped straight into building. There was no obvious systematic approach adopted by the younger students. These observations suggest that within the practical technological subjects, such as engineering, the appearance of students’ abstract thinking capabilities aligns with the predictions made by Piaget’s cognitive development model. That is, the younger students aged 8 to 10 (in the concrete operations stage of development) were outperformed in the ability of thinking in abstractions by their older peers aged 15 to 18 (in the formal operations stage of Piaget’s model) when given a hands-on engineering task to problem solve. Whereas the senior students appeared to value the importance of apportioning time to planning and designing as part of a systematic approach to problem-solving, planning and designing were absent from the approach used by the junior students. As a systematic approach to problem-solving is argued to be a characteristic of individuals operating in Piaget’s formal operations stage of cognitive development, this study suggests that a student’s developmental age does influence their ability to abstract and infer in accordance with Piaget’s cognitive development model.

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Cerovac, M., Keane, T. Early insights into Piaget’s cognitive development model through the lens of the Technologies curriculum. Int J Technol Des Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-024-09906-5

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Sociocultural Theory 

The work of Lev Vygotsky (1934, 1978) has become the foundation of much research and theory in cognitive development over the past several decades, particularly what has become known as sociocultural theory.

Vygotsky’s theory comprises concepts such as culture-specific tools, private speech, and the zone of proximal development.

Vygotsky believed cognitive development is influenced by cultural and social factors. He emphasized the role of social interaction in the development of mental abilities e.g., speech and reasoning in children.

Vygotsky strongly believed that community plays a central role in the process of “making meaning.”

Cognitive development is a socially mediated process in which children acquire cultural values, beliefs, and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society.

The more knowledgeable other (MKO) is someone who has a higher level of ability or greater understanding than the learner regarding a particular task, process, or concept.

The MKO can be a teacher, parent, coach, or even a peer who provides guidance and modeling to enable the child to learn skills within their zone of proximal development (the gap between what a child can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance).

The interactions with more knowledgeable others significantly increase not only the quantity of information and the number of skills a child develops, but also affects the development of higher-order mental functions such as formal reasoning. Vygotsky argued that higher mental abilities could only develop through interaction with more advanced others.

According to Vygotsky, adults in society foster children’s cognitive development by engaging them in challenging and meaningful activities. Adults convey to children how their culture interprets and responds to the world.

They show the meaning they attach to objects, events, and experiences. They provide the child with what to think (the knowledge) and how to think (the processes, the tools to think with).

Vygotsky’s theory encourages collaborative and cooperative learning between children and teachers or peers. Scaffolding and reciprocal teaching are effective educational strategies based on Vygotsky’s ideas.

Scaffolding involves the teacher providing support structures to help students master skills just beyond their current level. In reciprocal teaching, teachers and students take turns leading discussions using strategies like summarizing and clarifying. Both scaffolding and reciprocal teaching emphasize the shared construction of knowledge, in line with Vygotsky’s views.

Vygotsky highlighted the importance of language in cognitive development. Inner speech is used for mental reasoning, and external speech is used to converse with others.

These operations occur separately. Indeed, before age two, a child employs words socially; they possess no internal language.

Once thought and language merge, however, the social language is internalized and assists the child with their reasoning. Thus, the social environment is ingrained within the child’s learning.

Effects of Culture

Vygotsky emphasized the role of the social environment in the child’s cognitive development.

Vygotsky claimed that infants are born with the basic abilities for intellectual development called “elementary mental functions” (Piaget focuses on motor reflexes and sensory abilities). These develop throughout the first two years of life due to direct environmental contact.

Elementary mental functions include –

o Attention o Sensation o Perception o Memory

Eventually, through interaction within the sociocultural environment, these are developed into more sophisticated and effective mental processes, which Vygotsky refers to as “higher mental functions.”

Tools of intellectual adaptation

Each culture provides its children with tools of intellectual adaptation that allow them to use basic mental functions more effectively/adaptively.

Tools of intellectual adaptation is Vygotsky’s term for methods of thinking and problem-solving strategies that children internalize through social interactions with the more knowledgeable members of society.

For example, memory in young children is limited by biological factors. However, culture determines the type of memory strategy we develop.

For example, in Western culture, children learn note-taking to aid memory, but in pre-literate societies, other strategies must be developed, such as tying knots in a string to remember, carrying pebbles, or repeating the names of ancestors until large numbers can be repeated.

Vygotsky, therefore, sees cognitive functions, even those carried out alone, as affected by the beliefs, values, and tools of intellectual adaptation of the culture in which a person develops and, therefore, socio-culturally determined.

Therefore, intellectual adaptation tools vary from culture to culture – as in the memory example.

Social Influences on Cognitive Development

Like Piaget, Vygotsky believes that young children are curious and actively involved in their own learning and discovering and developing new understandings/schema .

However, Vygotsky emphasized social contributions to the development process, whereas Piaget emphasized self-initiated discovery.

According to Vygotsky (1978), much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful tutor. The tutor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child.

Vygotsky refers to this as cooperative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor (often the parent or teacher) and then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate their performance.

Shaffer (1996) gives the example of a young girl given her first jigsaw. Alone, she performs poorly in attempting to solve the puzzle. The father then sits with her and describes or demonstrates some basic strategies, such as finding all the corner/edge pieces, and provides a couple of pieces for the child to put together herself, and offers encouragement when she does so.

As the child becomes more competent, the father allows the child to work more independently. According to Vygotsky, this social interaction involving cooperative or collaborative dialogue promotes cognitive development.

To understand Vygotsky’s theories on cognitive development, one must understand two of the main principles of Vygotsky’s work: the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

More Knowledgeable Other

The more knowledgeable other (MKO) is somewhat self-explanatory; it refers to someone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, concerning a particular task, process, or concept.

Although the implication is that the MKO is a teacher or an older adult, this is not necessarily the case. Often, a child’s peers or an adult’s children may be the individuals with more knowledge or experience.

For example, who is more likely to know more about the newest teenage music groups, how to win at the most recent PlayStation game, or how to correctly perform the newest dance craze – a child or their parents?

In fact, the MKO need not be a person at all. To support employees in their learning process, some companies are now using electronic performance support systems.

Electronic tutors have also been used in educational settings to facilitate and guide students through learning. The key to MKOs is that they must have (or be programmed with) more knowledge about the topic being learned than the learner does.

Zone of Proximal Development

The concept of the more knowledgeable other relates to the second important principle of Vygotsky’s work, the zone of proximal development .

This important concept relates to the difference between what a child can achieve independently and what a child can achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner.

Vygotsky consequently focuses much more closely on social interaction as an aid to learning, arguing that, left alone, children will develop – but not to their full potential.

He refers to the gap between actual and potential learning as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) – and argues that it is only through collaboration with adults and other learners that this gap can be bridged.

The zone of proximal development is the gap between the level of actual development, what the child can do on his own, and the level of potential development, what a child can do with the assistance of more advanced and competent individuals.

Social interaction, therefore, supports the child’s cognitive development in the ZPD, leading to a higher level of reasoning. It is generally believed that social dialogues have two important features.

The first is intersubjectivity, where two individuals who might have different understandings of a task, arrive at a shared understanding by adjusting to the perspective of the other.

The second feature is referred to as scaffolding. Adults may begin with direct instruction, but as children’s mastery of a task increases, so the adult tends to withdraw their own contributions in recognition of the child’s increasing success.

For example, the child could not solve the jigsaw puzzle (in the example above) by itself and would have taken a long time to do so (if at all), but was able to solve it following interaction with the father, and has developed competence at this skill that will be applied to future jigsaws.

ZPD is the zone where instruction is the most beneficial, as it is when the task is just beyond the individual’s capabilities. To learn, we must be presented with tasks just out of our ability range. Challenging tasks promote maximum cognitive growth.

As a result of shared dialogues with more knowledgeable others, who provide hints, instructions, and encouragement, the child can internalize the ‘how to do it’ part of the task as part of their inner or private speech. The child can then use this on later occasions when they tackle a similar task on their own.

Vygotsky (1978) sees the Zone of Proximal Development as the area where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be given – allowing the child to develop skills they will then use on their own – developing higher mental functions.

Vygotsky also views peer interaction as an effective way of developing skills and strategies.  He suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers – within the zone of proximal development.

Evidence for Vygotsky and the ZPD

Freund (1990) conducted a study in which children had to decide which items of furniture should be placed in particular areas of a doll’s house.

Some children were allowed to play with their mother in a similar situation before they attempted it alone (zone of proximal development) while others were allowed to work on this by themselves (Piaget’s discovery learning).

Freund found that those who had previously worked with their mother (ZPD) showed the greatest improvement compared with their first attempt at the task.

The conclusion is that guided learning within the ZPD led to greater understanding/performance than working alone (discovery learning).

Vygotsky and Language

Vygotsky believed that language develops from social interactions for communication purposes. Vygotsky viewed language as man’s greatest tool for communicating with the outside world.

According to Vygotsky (1962), language plays two critical roles in cognitive development:

• It is the main means by which adults transmit information to children.
• Language itself becomes a very powerful tool for intellectual adaptation.

Vygotsky (1987) differentiates between three forms of language:

• Social speech, which is external communication used to talk to others (typical from the age of two);
• Private speech (typical from the age of three) which is directed to the self and serves an intellectual function;
• Private speech goes underground , diminishing in audibility as it takes on a self-regulating function and is transformed into silent inner speech (typical from the age of seven).

For Vygotsky, thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age.

At this point, speech and thought become interdependent: thought becomes verbal, and speech becomes representational.

As children develop mental representation, particularly the skill of language, they start to communicate with themselves in much the same way as they would communicate with others.

When this happens, children’s monologues are internalized to become inner speech. The internalization of language is important as it drives cognitive development.

“Inner speech is not the interiour aspect of external speech – it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words dies as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.” (Vygotsky, 1962: p. 149)

Private Speech

Vygotsky (1987) was the first psychologist to document the importance of private speech.

He considered private speech as the transition point between social and inner speech, the moment in development where language and thought unite to constitute verbal thinking.

Thus, in Vygotsky’s view, private speech was the earliest manifestation of inner speech. Indeed, private speech is more similar (in form and function) to inner speech than social speech.

Private speech is “typically defined, in contrast to social speech, as speech addressed to the self (not to others) for the purpose of self-regulation (rather than communication).” (Diaz, 1992, p.62)

Private speech is overt, audible, and observable, often seen in children who talk to themselves while problem-solving.

Conversely, inner speech is covert or hidden because it happens internally. It is the silent, internal dialogue that adults often engage in while thinking or problem-solving.

In contrast to Piaget’s (1959) notion of private speech representing a developmental dead-end, Vygotsky (1934, 1987) viewed private speech as:

“A revolution in development which is triggered when preverbal thought and preintellectual language come together to create fundamentally new forms of mental functioning.” (Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005: p. 1)

In addition to disagreeing on the functional significance of private speech, Vygotsky and Piaget also offered opposing views on the developmental course of private speech and the environmental circumstances in which it occurs most often (Berk & Garvin, 1984).

Through private speech, children collaborate with themselves, in the same way a more knowledgeable other (e.g., adults) collaborate with them to achieve a given function.

Vygotsky sees “private speech” as a means for children to plan activities and strategies, aiding their development. Private speech is the use of language for self-regulation of behavior.

Therefore, language accelerates thinking/understanding ( Jerome Bruner also views language in this way). Vygotsky believed that children who engage in large amounts of private speech are more socially competent than children who do not use it extensively.

Vygotsky (1987) notes that private speech does not merely accompany a child’s activity but acts as a tool the developing child uses to facilitate cognitive processes, such as overcoming task obstacles, and enhancing imagination, thinking, and conscious awareness.

Children use private speech most often during intermediate difficulty tasks because they attempt to self-regulate by verbally planning and organizing their thoughts (Winsler et al., 2007).

The frequency and content of private speech correlate with behavior or performance. For example, private speech appears functionally related to cognitive performance: It appears at times of difficulty with a task.

For example, tasks related to executive function (Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005), problem-solving tasks (Behrend et al., 1992), and schoolwork in both language (Berk & Landau, 1993), and mathematics (Ostad & Sorensen, 2007).

Berk (1986) provided empirical support for the notion of private speech. She found that most private speech exhibited by children serves to describe or guide the child’s actions.

Berk also discovered that children engaged in private speech more often when working alone on challenging tasks and when their teacher was not immediately available to help them.

Furthermore, Berk also found that private speech develops similarly in all children regardless of cultural background.

There is also evidence (Behrend et al., 1992) that those children who displayed the characteristic whispering and lip movements associated with private speech when faced with a difficult task were generally more attentive and successful than their ‘quieter’ classmates.

Vygotsky (1987) proposed that private speech is a product of an individual’s social environment. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that there exist high positive correlations between rates of social interaction and private speech in children.

Children raised in cognitively and linguistically stimulating environments (situations more frequently observed in higher socioeconomic status families) start using and internalizing private speech faster than children from less privileged backgrounds.

Indeed, children raised in environments characterized by low verbal and social exchanges exhibit delays in private speech development.

Children’s use of private speech diminishes as they grow older and follows a curvilinear trend. This is due to changes in ontogenetic development whereby children can internalize language (through inner speech) to self-regulate their behavior (Vygotsky, 1987).

For example, research has shown that children’s private speech usually peaks at 3–4 years of age, decreases at 6–7, and gradually fades out to be mostly internalized by age 10 (Diaz, 1992).

Vygotsky proposed that private speech diminishes and disappears with age not because it becomes socialized, as Piaget suggested, but because it goes underground to constitute inner speech or verbal thought” (Frauenglass & Diaz, 1985).

Educational Implications

Vygotsky’s approach to child development is a form of social constructivism , based on the idea that cognitive functions are the products of social interactions.

Social constructivism posits that knowledge is constructed and learning occurs through social interactions within a cultural and historical context.

Vygotsky emphasized the collaborative nature of learning by constructing knowledge through social negotiation. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context.

Vygotsky believed everything is learned on two levels. First, through interaction with others, then integrated into the individual’s mental structure.

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals. (Vygotsky, 1978, p.57)

Teaching styles grounded in constructivism represent a deliberate shift from traditional, didactic, memory-oriented transmission models (Cannella & Reiff, 1994) to a more student-centered approach.

Traditionally, schools have failed to foster environments where students actively participate in their own and their peers’ education. Vygotsky’s theory, however, calls for both the teacher and students to assume non-traditional roles as they engage in collaborative learning.

Rather than having a teacher impose their understanding onto students for future recitation, the teacher should co-create meaning with students in a manner that allows learners to take ownership (Hausfather, 1996).

For instance, a student and teacher might start a task with varying levels of expertise and understanding. As they adapt to each other’s perspective, the teacher must articulate their insights in a way that the student can comprehend, leading the student to a fuller understanding of the task or concept.

The student can then internalize the task’s operational aspect (“how to do it”) into their inner speech or private dialogue. Vygotsky referred to this reciprocal understanding and adjustment process as intersubjectivity.”

Because Vygotsky asserts that cognitive change occurs within the zone of proximal development, instruction would be designed to reach a developmental level just above the student’s current developmental level.

Vygotsky proclaims, “learning which is oriented toward developmental levels that have already been reached is ineffective from the viewpoint of the child’s overall development. It does not aim for a new stage of the developmental process but rather lags behind this process” (Vygotsky, 1978).

Appropriation is necessary for cognitive development within the zone of proximal development. Individuals participating in peer collaboration or guided teacher instruction must share the same focus to access the zone of proximal development.

“Joint attention and shared problem solving is needed to create a process of cognitive, social, and emotional interchange” (Hausfather,1996).

Furthermore, it is essential that the partners be on different developmental levels and the higher-level partner be aware of the lower’s level. If this does not occur or one partner dominates, the interaction is less successful (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather, 1996).

Vygotsky’s theories also feed into the current interest in collaborative learning, suggesting that group members should have different levels of ability so more advanced peers can help less advanced members operate within their ZPD.

Scaffolding and reciprocal teaching are effective strategies to access the zone of proximal development.

Reciprocal Teaching

A contemporary educational application of Vygotsky’s theory is “reciprocal teaching,” used to improve students” ability to learn from text.

In this method, teachers and students collaborate in learning and practicing four key skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The teacher’s role in the process is reduced over time.

Reciprocal teaching allows for the creation of a dialogue between students and teachers. This two-way communication becomes an instructional strategy by encouraging students to go beyond answering questions and engage in the discourse (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather, 1996).

A study conducted by Brown and Palincsar (1989) demonstrated the Vygotskian approach with reciprocal teaching methods in their successful program to teach reading strategies.

The teacher and students alternated turns leading small group discussions on a reading. After modeling four reading strategies, students began to assume the teaching role.

The results showed significant gains over other instructional strategies (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather,1996).

Cognitively Guided Instruction is another strategy to implement Vygotsky’s theory. This strategy involves the teacher and students exploring math problems and then sharing their problem-solving strategies in an open dialogue (Hausfather,1996).

Based on Vygotsky’s theory, the physical classroom would provide clustered desks or tables and workspace for peer instruction, collaboration, and small-group instruction. Learning becomes a reciprocal experience for the students and teacher.

Like the environment, the instructional design of the material to be learned would be structured to promote and encourage student interaction and collaboration. Thus the classroom becomes a community of learning.

Scaffolding

Also, Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development on learners is relevant to instructional concepts such as “scaffolding” and “apprenticeship,” in which a teacher or more advanced peer helps to structure or arrange a task so that a novice can work on it successfully.

A teacher’s role is to identify each individual’s current level of development and provide them with opportunities to cross their ZPD.

A crucial element in this process is the use of what later became known as scaffolding; the way in which the teacher provides students with frameworks and experiences which encourage them to extend their existing schemata and incorporate new skills, competencies, and understandings.

Scaffolding describes the conditions that support the child’s learning, to move from what they already know to new knowledge and abilities.

Scaffolding requires the teacher to allow students to extend their current skills and knowledge.

During scaffolding, the support offered by an adult (or more knowledgeable other) gradually decreases as the child becomes more skilled in the task.

As the adult withdraws their help, the child assumes more of the strategic planning and eventually gains competence to master similar problems without a teacher’s aid or a more knowledgeable peer.

It is important to note that this is more than simply instruction; learning experiences must be presented in such a way as to actively challenge existing mental structures and provide frameworks for learning.

Five ways in which an adult can “scaffold” a child’s learning:

• Engaging the child’s interest
• Maintaining the child’s interest in the task e.g., avoiding distraction and providing clear instructions on how to start the task.
• Keeping the child’s frustration under control e.g., by supportive interactions, adapting instructions according to where the child is struggling.
• Emphasizing the important features of the task
• Demonstrating the task: showing the child how to do the task in simple, clear steps.

As the child progresses through the ZPD, the necessary scaffolding level declines from 5 to 1.

The teacher must engage students’ interests, simplify tasks to be manageable, and motivate students to pursue the instructional goal.

In addition, the teacher must look for discrepancies between students” efforts and the solution, control for frustration and risk, and model an idealized version of the act (Hausfather, 1996).

Challenges to Traditional Teaching Methods

Vygotsky’s social development theory challenges traditional teaching methods. Historically, schools have been organized around recitation teaching.

The teacher disseminates knowledge to be memorized by the students, who in turn recite the information to the teacher (Hausfather,1996).

However, the studies described above offer empirical evidence that learning based on the social development theory facilitates cognitive development over other instructional strategies.

The structure of our schools does not reflect the rapid changes our society is experiencing. The introduction and integration of computer technology in society has tremendously increased the opportunities for social interaction.

Therefore, the social context for learning is transforming as well. Whereas collaboration and peer instruction were once only possible in shared physical space, learning relationships can now be formed from distances through cyberspace.

Computer technology is a cultural tool that students can use to meditate and internalize their learning. Recent research suggests changing the learning contexts with technology is a powerful learning activity (Crawford, 1996).

If schools continue to resist structural change, students will be ill-prepared for the world they will live.

Critical Evaluation

Vygotsky’s work has not received the same level of intense scrutiny that Piaget’s has, partly due to the time-consuming process of translating Vygotsky’s work from Russian.

Also, Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective does not provide as many specific hypotheses to test as Piaget’s theory, making refutation difficult, if not impossible.

Perhaps the main criticism of Vygotsky’s work concerns the assumption that it is relevant to all cultures. Rogoff (1990) dismisses the idea that Vygotsky’s ideas are culturally universal and instead states that scaffolding- heavily dependent on verbal instruction – may not be equally useful in all cultures for all types of learning.

Indeed, in some instances, observation and practice may be more effective ways of learning certain skills.

There is much emphasis on social interaction and culture, but many other aspects of development are neglected, such as the importance of emotional factors, e.g., the joys of success and the disappointments and frustration of failure act as motivation for learning.

Vygotsky overemphasized socio-cultural factors at the expense of biological influences on cognitive development. This theory cannot explain why cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage ) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological process of maturation.

Vygotky’s theory has been applied successfully to education. Scaffolding has been shown to be an effective way of teaching (Freund, 1990), and based on this theory, teachers are trained to guide children from what they can do to the next step in their learning through careful scaffolding.

Collaborative work is also used in the classroom, mixing children of different levels of ability to make use of reciprocal / peer teaching.

Vygotsky vs. Piaget

Unlike Piaget’s notion that children’s cognitive development must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued, “learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function” (1978, p. 90).  In other words, social learning precedes (i.e., come before) development.

Vygotsky’s theory differs from that of Piaget in several important ways:

Vygotsky places more emphasis on culture affecting cognitive development.

Unlike Piaget, who emphasized universal cognitive change (i.e., all children would go through the same sequence of cognitive development regardless of their cultural experiences), Vygotsky leads us to expect variable development depending on cultural diversity. 

This contradicts Piaget’s view of universal stages of development (Vygotsky does not refer to stages like Piaget does).

Hence, Vygotsky assumes cognitive development varies across cultures, whereas Piaget states cognitive development is mostly universal across cultures.

Vygotsky places considerably more emphasis on social factors contributing to cognitive development.

• Vygotsky states the importance of cultural and social context for learning. Cognitive development stems from social interactions from guided learning within the zone of proximal development as children and their partners co-construct knowledge. In contrast, Piaget maintains that cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct knowledge.
• For Vygotsky, the environment in which children grow up will influence how they think and what they think about. The importance of scaffolding and language may differ for all cultures. Rogoff (1990) emphasizes the importance of observation and practice in pre-industrial societies (e.g., learning to use a canoe among Micronesian Islanders).

Vygotsky places more (and different) emphasis on the role of language in cognitive development.

According to Piaget , language depends on thought for its development (i.e., thought comes before language). For Vygotsky, thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age, producing verbal thought (inner speech).

In Piaget’s theory, egocentric (or private) speech gradually disappears as children develop truly social speech, in which they monitor and adapt what they say to others.

Vygotsky disagreed with this view, arguing that as language helps children to think about and control their behavior, it is an important foundation for complex cognitive skills.

As children age, this self-directed speech becomes silent (or private) speech, referring to the inner dialogues we have with ourselves as we plan and carry out activities.

For Vygotsky, cognitive development results from an internalization of language.

According to Vygotsky, adults are an important source of cognitive development.

Adults transmit their culture’s tools of intellectual adaptation that children internalize.

In contrast, Piaget emphasizes the importance of peers, as peer interaction promotes social perspective-taking.

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Further Reading

What is vygotsky’s theory.

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development was founded on social interaction. According to Vygotsky, much of what children acquire in their understanding of the world is the product of collaboration.

How is Vygotsky’s theory applied in teaching and learning?

Vygotsky’s theory has profound implications for classroom learning. Teachers guide, support, and encourage children, yet also help them to develop problem-solving strategies that can be generalized to other situations.

Children learn best not when they are isolated, but when they interact with others, particularly more knowledgeable others who can provide the guidance and encouragement to master new skills.

What was Vygotsky’s best know concept?

Lev Vygotsky was a seminal Russian psychologist best known for his sociocultural theory. He constructed the idea of a zone of proximal development ,  which are those tasks which are too difficult for a child to solve alone but s/he can accomplish with the help of adults or more skilled peers.

Vygotsky has developed a sociocultural approach to cognitive development. He developed his theories at around the same time as  Jean Piaget  was starting to develop his ideas (1920’s and 30″s), but he died at the age of 38, and so his theories are incomplete – although some of his writings are still being translated from Russian.

Like Piaget, Vygotsky could be described as a  constructivist , in that he was interested in knowledge acquisition as a cumulative event – with new experiences and understandings incorporated into existing cognitive frameworks.

However, while Piaget’s theory is structural (arguing that physiological stages govern development), Vygotsky denies the existence of any guiding framework independent of culture and context.

No single principle (such as Piaget’s equilibration) can account for development. Individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social and cultural context within which it is embedded. Higher mental processes in the individual have their origin in social processes.

What is Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory?

Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory is often referred to as the Sociocultural Theory.

Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory posits that social interaction is fundamental to cognitive development. Vygotsky emphasized the influence of cultural and social contexts on learning, claiming that knowledge is constructed through social collaboration.

His most known concept, the Zone of Proximal Development, refers to the difference between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance.