4 stages of child development: 4 Stages of Cognitive Development & Theory

4 Stages of Cognitive Development & Theory

Have you ever experienced the following?

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
• References

Who Was Jean Piaget in Psychology?

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:

1. Naturalistic observation of play and conversation between children (including his own)
2. 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.

Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

Piaget argued that children’s cognitive development occurs in stages (Papalia & Feldman, 2011).

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)

1. The Sensorimotor Stage

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.

2. The Preoperational Stage

At the end of the sensorimotor stage, children start to use mental abstractions.

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.

3. The Concrete Operational Stage

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).

4. The Formal Operational Stage

At the age of 11, children enter the formal operational stage.

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 vs Erikson’s

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.

5 Important Concepts in Piaget’s Work

Several concepts are pivotal to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

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

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:

1. Assimilating new information
2. Accommodating new information by updating their cognitive schemas

By achieving equilibrium, children learn new information.

Applications in Education (+3 Classroom Games)

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:

1. Practice games
2. Symbolic games
3. 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.

PositivePsychology.com’s Relevant Resources

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.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.

A Take-Home Message

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

1. Use simple, age-appropriate examples.
2. Explain concepts simply, considering the limitations of each cognitive stage.
3. 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.

Piaget Cognitive Stages of Development

Written by Rick Ansorge

In this Article

• What Are the Piaget Stages of Development?
• Sensorimotor Stage
• Preoperational Stage
• Concrete Operational Stage
• Formal Operational Stage
• Concepts of Piaget’s Stages of Development
• Using Piaget’s Stages of Development

What Are the Piaget Stages of Development?

Piaget’s stages of development are part of a theory about the phases of normal intellectual development, from infancy through adulthood. This includes thought, judgment, and knowledge. The stages were named after psychologist and developmental biologist Jean Piaget, who recorded the intellectual development and abilities of infants, children, and teens.

Piaget’s four stages of intellectual (or cognitive) development are:

• Sensorimotor. Birth through ages 18-24 months
• Preoperational. Toddlerhood (18-24 months) through early childhood (age 7)
• Concrete operational. Ages 7 to 11
• Formal operational. Adolescence through adulthood

Piaget acknowledged that some children may pass through the stages at different ages than the averages noted above. He also said some children may show characteristics of more than one stage at a given time.

But he insisted that:

• Cognitive development always follows this sequence.
• Stages cannot be skipped.
• Each stage is marked by new intellectual abilities and a more complex understanding of the world.

Piaget’s 1936 theory broke new ground because he found that children’s brains work in very different ways than adults’. Before his theory, many believed that children were not yet capable of thinking as well as grown-ups.

Some experts disagree with his idea of stages. Instead, they see development as continuous. Another criticism is that Piaget didn’t consider how a child’s culture and social environment affect their development.

Sensorimotor Stage

During the early stages, according to Piaget, infants are only aware of what is right in front of them. They focus on what they see, what they are doing, and physical interactions with their immediate environment.

Because they don’t yet know how things react, they’re constantly experimenting. They shake or throw things, put things in their mouth, and learn about the world through trial and error. The later stages include goal-oriented behavior that leads to a desired result.

Between ages 7 and 9 months, infants begin to realize that an object exists even though they can no longer see it. This important milestone — known as object permanence — is a sign that memory is developing.

After infants start crawling, standing, and walking, their increased physical mobility leads to more cognitive development. Near the end of the sensorimotor stage (18-24 months), infants reach another important milestone — early language development, a sign that they are developing some symbolic abilities.

Preoperational Stage

During this stage (toddler through age 7), young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future, and engage in make-believe.

But their thinking is based on intuition and still not completely logical. They cannot yet grasp more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

Concrete Operational Stage

At this time, elementary-age and preadolescent children — ages 7 to 11 — show logical, concrete reasoning.

Children’s thinking becomes less focused on themselves. They’re increasingly aware of external events. They begin to realize that their own thoughts and feelings are unique and may not be shared by others or may not even be part of reality.

But during this stage, most children still can’t think abstractly or hypothetically.

Formal Operational Stage

Adolescents who reach this fourth stage of intellectual development — usually at age 11-plus — are able to use symbols related to abstract concepts, such as algebra and science. They can think about things in systematic ways, come up with theories, and consider possibilities. They also can ponder abstract relationships and concepts such as justice.

Although Piaget believed in lifelong intellectual growth, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development. He also said that continued intellectual development in adults depends on the buildup of knowledge.

Concepts of Piaget’s Stages of Development

Along with the stages of development, Piaget’s theory has several other main concepts.

Schemas are thought processes that are essentially building blocks of knowledge. A baby, for example, knows that it must make a sucking motion to eat. That’s a schema.

Assimilation is how you use your existing schemas to interpret a new situation or object. For example, a child seeing a skunk for the first time might call it a cat.

Accommodation is what happens when you change a schema, or create a new one, to fit new information you learn. The child accommodates when they understand that not all furry, four-legged creatures are cats.

Equilibrium happens when you’re able to use assimilation to fit in most of the new information you learn. So you’re not constantly adding new schemas.

Using Piaget’s Stages of Development

Piaget’s theory has influenced education and parenting. Here are some practical ways teachers and parents can put his ideas to work:

• Remember that kids often learn best by doing things, rather than hearing about them. Learning to solve problems isn’t something that can be taught. It must be discovered.
• The process of learning is as important (or more so) than the end result.
• Don’t try to teach a child something they aren’t ready to learn. According to Piaget’s stages, kids must master one level before they move on to the next.
• Kids learn as much from each other as from parents or teachers. Give them projects to do together, as well as individual tasks.

What Are They and How Are They Used?

Who was Piaget and what are his stages of development?

Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist who studied children in the early 20th century. His theory of intellectual or cognitive development, published in 1936, is still used today in some branches of education and psychology. It focuses on children, from birth through adolescence, and characterizes different stages of development, including:

• language
• morals
• memory
• reasoning

Piaget made several assumptions about children while developing his theory:

• Children build their own knowledge based on their experiences.
• Children learn things on their own without influence from adults or older children.
• Children are motivated to learn by nature. They don’t need rewards as motivation.

There are four stages in all:

• sensorimotor stage
• preoperational stage
• concrete operational stage
• formal operational stage

The stages cover a range of ages from birth to 2 years old to young adulthood.

Piaget’s stages are age-specific and marked by important characteristics of thought processes. They also include goals children should achieve as they move through a given stage.

There are a variety of terms Piaget used in his theory to explain cognitive development and how it’s achieved at different stages.

Schema is a term he used to represent the building blocks of knowledge. You may think of schemas as different index cards inside the brain. Each one informs the individual on how to react to new information or situations.

For example, picture a person visiting the grocery store to buy milk. In this event, the schema is a mentally stored pattern of behavior that can be applied to this situation. The person remembers how to go through the aisles, find the milk, select the preferred kind, and then pay at the register. Whenever the person is tasked with getting milk, this particular “script” or schema is recalled from memory.

Other important terms:

• Assimilation is using an existing schema and applying it to a new situation or object.
• Accommodation is changing approaches when an existing schema doesn’t work in a particular situation.
• Equilibration is the driving force that moves all development forward. Piaget didn’t believe that development progressed steadily. Instead, it moved in leaps and bounds according to experiences.

How can caregivers use schemas?

Parents and teachers can help build a child’s various schemas to promote learning and development throughout the stages. This can be achieved by giving children plenty of exposure to the outside world. Being exposed to a variety of learning-by-doing experiences from a young age may help build up those internal index cards. Then, as children get older, it’s about broadening the experiences and applying them to new, even hypothetical, situations.

So, how exactly can Piaget’s stages be applied to education? At the root, it’s about recognizing the stage a child is currently in and catering to that developmental level.

Teachers and parents can help by providing children with different experiences or ways to explore and experiment with their environments. It’s through these experiences that children may gain understandings of different concepts in a hands-on way.

For young children entering preschool and kindergarten, Piaget’s theories align more with play-based school programs, or environments where kids are offered opportunities for trial and error, and interaction with the real world.

Piaget’s philosophy can be incorporated into any education program.

Examples include:

• Providing chances for trial and error. Focus on the process of learning versus the end result.
• Providing children with visual aids and other props, like models, to illustrate different ideas and concepts.
• Using real-life examples to paint complex ideas, like word problems in math.
• Providing chances to classify or group information. Outlines and hierarchies are good examples and allow kids to build new ideas from previous knowledge.
• Offering problems that necessitate analytical or logical thinking. Brain teasers can be used as a tool in this instance.

You can also help your child throughout the stages by catering to their specific learning style at the time:

Sensorimotor

• Use real objects in play activities.
• Connect play to the five senses.
• Implement routines for the youngest children. They are predictable and may be highly useful with developing communication.

Preoperational

• Children learn best by doing. Allow them to actively interact with a variety of things in their environments, including books, people, games, and objects.
• Ask questions while children are engaged in daily routines and allow them to come up with their own ideas.
• Point out new things and encourage children to question you about those things.

Concrete operational

• Create timelines, three dimensional models, science experiments, and other ways to manipulate abstract concepts.
• Use brain teasers and riddles to foster analytical thinking.
• Focus on open-ended questioning.

Formal operational

• Offer step-by-step explanations of concepts and utilize charts and other visual aids.
• Explore hypothetical situations. You may relate them to current events or social issues.
• Broaden concepts whenever possible. For example, if talking about the Civil War, discuss other issues that have divided the country since that time.

There are some criticisms of Piaget’s stages. In particular, researchers in the 1960s and 1970s argued that Piaget may have underestimated children’s abilities by using confusing terms and particularly difficult tasks in his observations. In other studies, children have been successful with demonstrating knowledge of certain concepts or skills when they were presented in a simpler way.

Piaget’s theory also expects children of a certain stage to primarily be at that stage across the board with all tasks presented to them. Other researchers uncovered that there is a range of abilities with cognitive tasks. In other words, some children may excel or struggle in one area over another.

Piaget’s theory also explains that trying to teach children particularly advanced concepts would be unsuccessful. Yet in some cases, children may be able to learn advanced ideas even with brief instruction. Children may be more adaptable and competent than Piaget’s stages give them credit for.

Last, Piaget primarily examined white, middle-class children from developed countries in his work. As a result, his findings may be skewed to this subset of people, and may not apply as directly to other groups or locations.

Lev Vygotsky developed his theory on child development at the same time Piaget was developing his own theory. Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children develop through stages. Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed that learning and development were tied to social interactions and culture. Whereas Piaget believed that children learn through doing, Vygotsky believed that they learn through being shown.

Maria Montessori shared some ideas with Piaget, including how children move through stages. Their theories are similar until children reach age 3. In school, Montessori classrooms are more child-directed. Piaget classrooms are more teacher-directed with a focus on routine, though there is flexibility and opportunity for child-directed activities.

Jean Piaget’s work has helped people understand how knowledge is developed at different stages of childhood, starting at birth. His philosophy is still used in prekindergarten through 12th grade classrooms today. Understanding the different stages may help you better understand your own child and assist their learning development.

The 4 stages and tips for each

Piaget’s stages of development is a theory about how children learn as they grow up. It includes four distinct stages, each with different milestones and skills.

Jean Piaget was a renowned psychologist and cognitive theorist in the 20th century who focused on child development. His theories came from observing children and recording their development.

He brought attention to the idea that children are not just small adults, and he argued that the way they think is fundamentally different.

Piaget believed that children act as “little scientists,” exploring their environment to gain understanding. He thought that children do this naturally, without any adult intervention. He put forth the idea of distinct developmental stages through which children learn language, memory, and reasoning.

This article explains Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, key concepts, and how people can use them to help children learn and develop.

The following table outlines Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development:

Babies from birth to 2 years of age use their senses and bodily movements to understand the world around them, which is why this stage is known as the sensorimotor stage.

A newborn’s first method of communication is through basic reflex actions such as sucking, flailing their arms, or shaking their head. They use their five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing to explore their surroundings and their body.

Infants gather information about these experiences, learning how different things make them feel. They also learn to tell the difference between people, objects, textures, and sights.

During this stage, children also start to understand the concept of cause and effect. They begin to remember that certain actions will have a specific outcome and use this to plan their actions in advance.

At around 6 months, they will begin to understand object permanence. This means the child knows that objects continue to exist even if they can no longer see, hear, or feel them.

When a child has object permanence, it means they can now form a mental image, or representation, of an object instead of only reacting to experiences in their immediate environment.

Examples

Certain behaviors can indicate that a child has developed some of the key skills from this stage. For example, a child who understands cause and effect may intentionally shake a rattle to make a noise or cry in order to gain attention.

A child who understands object permanence will:

• know their caregiver is still there when playing games such as Peek-A-Boo
• know a toy still exists even if it is hidden under a blanket
• understand they or their surroundings are still there even if they cover their eyes

During this stage, children build on object permanence and continue to develop abstract mental processes. This means they can think about things beyond the physical world, such as things that happened in the past.

They also imagine and think symbolically, and they begin to display this ability through their language and behavior.

The five key behaviors children display during this period are:

• Imitation: Children can now mimic another person’s actions, even if the individual they are modeling is no longer in front of them.
• Symbolic play: Children begin assigning characteristics or symbols to objects. They can project the properties of one object onto another. For example, they may pretend a stick is a sword.
• Drawing: Imitation and symbolic play are both essential elements of drawing. It begins as meaningless scribbles and progresses to more accurate representations of objects and people.
• Mental imagery: Children start to visualize a wide range of things in their mind. They may ask the names of objects frequently to establish associations between words and objects.
• Verbal evocation of events: This means children can use words to describe and represent past events, people, or items.

The primary function of speech at this age is to externalize thinking, rather than for communication. Children may talk in a stream of consciousness and develop more sophisticated language skills as they move through this stage.

Piaget believed that children remain egocentric throughout the preoperational stage. This means they cannot understand that other people think in different ways to them or that events that take place are not always related to them.

Examples

Some examples a child is at the preoperational stage include:

• imitating the way someone talks or moves even when they are not in the room
• drawing people and objects from their own life but understanding they are only representations
• pretending a stick is a sword or that a broom is a horse during play
• imagining that they are a superhero or someone they admire
• inventing an imaginary friend

Piaget theorized that at this stage, children further develop and master abstract thought and become less egocentric. They can now understand that events do not always relate to them and that others have different points of view.

Children also become able to apply logical, concrete rules to physical objects. However, they cannot yet do the same thing for abstract concepts.

The concrete operational phase centers around three elements:

• Conservation and reversibility: Conservation the understanding that objects can change in size, volume, or appearance but essentially remain the same. Reversibility means that some things that have changed can return to their original state, while others cannot.
• Classification: This means children can classify objects into groups and subgroups. For example, they can group objects based on color, shape, or similarities.
• Seriation: Seriation is a child’s ability to group objects based on height, weight, or importance. It is an essential concept to master, as children require this skill during math and science education.

Examples

Some signs a child has learned the skills from this stage include:

• knowing that water has the same properties (e.g., wetness) even when it is in different vessels or has a different color
• understanding that water can freeze and then melt again but that other changes are permanent
• being able to organize crayons into groups based on their color
• being able to sort their toys into order, based on their size or importance

In this final stage of cognitive development, children learn more sophisticated rules of logic. They then use these rules to understand how abstract concepts work and to solve problems.

The child can analyze their environment and make deductions. They can create theories about what is possible and what might happen in the future, based on their existing knowledge.

This is known as hypothetical-deductive reasoning. It is an essential part of the formal operational stage. It allows someone to consider “What if?” A person with this skill can imagine multiple solutions and potential outcomes in a given situation.

Examples

A child at the formal operational stage can think of numerous ways of solving a single problem, then choose the best option based on how logical or successful it is likely to be.

For example, if a child has to create a model of the solar system using materials they have at home, there are a number of ways they could use them. Thinking of several possibilities and then using the one that is the most logical or effective shows they have hypothetical-deductive reasoning skills.

Children at this stage can also examine and evaluate their own thoughts and actions. For example, if they argue with a friend, they can consider how their opinions or behavior might have contributed. They can then decide how to approach the situation.

The following sections explain several important aspects of cognitive development that Piaget proposes in his theory.

Schema

Piaget included the idea of a schema into his theory of cognitive development.

A schema is a category of knowledge, or mental template, that a child develops to understand the world. It is a product of the child’s experiences.

For example, a child can develop a schema of a dog. Initially, the word “dog” only refers to the first dog they meet. However, over time, the word comes to represent and include all dogs. When a child puts this schema together, they may call every similar animal a dog before they master the category.

Schemas constantly grow and adapt as children gain new experiences, giving them the structure to acquire knowledge. Piaget suggested this occurs in two ways: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation means a child uses a preexisting schema to understand a new situation. For example, if they meet a new breed of dog, they may include it in their schema for “dog,” even if it looks different to dogs they have previously encountered.

Accommodation means a child adapts a pre-existing schema to fit a new experience or object. For example, if a child encounters a cat, they may add it to their schema for “dog” until someone explains that dogs and cats are different. They will then adapt their schema to this new information.

Equilibration

According to the theory, equilibration is what motivates children to continue through the stages of cognitive development.

When a child assimilates new knowledge, their worldview is inaccurate, so they are in a state of disequilibrium. This state motivates the child to accommodate new information and reach a state of equilibrium.

Piaget made many significant contributions to theories about child development, and many are still influential today. However, others have criticisms of his ideas.

Firstly, the way Piaget conducted his research would not meet the standard of research academics adhere to today. He tended to observe and interview small numbers of children in natural settings, rather than in study conditions. This meant that it was possible for the small sample size or the environment to create bias.

Additionally, he carried out his research in Western Europe and did not take into account the impact that different social and cultural practices might have on child development.

While some academics agree that there are developmental stages, they may not be as distinct or concrete as in Piaget’s theory.

Research has demonstrated that some skills develop earlier than he believed. For example, a 2021 article notes that egocentrism appears to resolve much earlier than Piaget believed, at 4 to 5 years of age rather than 7 to 11.

Piaget’s theory centers on the concept that children need to explore, interact, and experiment to gain information and understand their world. Based on this idea, educators and caregivers can help children learn by allowing them to:

• use their senses to explore objects and sensations (e.g., through touch, taste, sight, smell, or hearing)
• explore their physical surroundings themselves, within safe limits
• learn by doing, even if they make mistakes
• interact with other children who are at a similar stage of development or slightly higher
• get answers to questions they have about the world
• encounter new situations, objects, or challenges that create disequilibrium, as this encourages them to expand their knowledge

In later stages, word puzzles, problem-solving tasks, and logic puzzles help children’s cognitive development.

If a child is not exhibiting the behaviors or skills set out in Piaget’s theory at the exact ages he predicts, it is not necessarily cause for concern. However, parents and caregivers should speak with a pediatrician if they have any worries.

Piaget’s stages of development is a theory that children go through distinct stages from birth to adulthood, with each stage bringing new skills and milestones as they develop their knowledge of the world.

Piaget believed that children develop through a continuous drive to learn and adapt schemas, which are mental templates that help them understand things. His ideas still have a considerable impact on child psychology and approaches to education.

However, there are criticisms of Piaget’s theory, as well as alternative models of child cognitive development that also came from the 20th century, such as the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and Maria Montessori.

Jean Piaget’s 4 Stages Of Cognitive Development I Tickle Right

25 Apr Jean Piaget’s 4 Stages Of Cognitive Development

Every child is unique in an intrinsic manner. Their individuality also caters to their strengths, talents, & skillset. Although, it’s absolutely normal that they learn & grow at their own pace. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget believes that children take an active part in the learning process. You can think of them as scientists who perform experiments. They learn about the environment by making constant observations. 

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development centers the focus on understanding a child’s nature of intelligence. Instead of only focusing on how children acquire knowledge, the learnings of the theory suggest how children adapt to new information. During everyday errands, children come in contact with new insights. They build upon existing knowledge. It is naturally done by conforming to past experiences to blend in with the new ones.

We at Tickle Right are here to make sure that your child’s cognitive development involves learning based on actions. These actions & experiences will make your child think quicker & differently.

Table of Contents

How Jean Piaget Developed The Theory? 

Jean Piaget is a Switzerland born psychologist of the 1800s. During his employment tenure in the 1920s, he was curious to understand a child’s psychological approach to logical thinking. This theory was inspired by an encounter with his own daughter & nephew. He wanted to perceive why children give incorrect answers to questions that require them to think logically. This led him to believe that a child’s mind differs in versions from an adult’s mind. 

It’s naturally perceived that a child’s mind is a minor adaptation of an adult’s mind. However, Piaget’s understanding was the first ever to put light on that a child thinks differently from the way an adult does. The scope of acquiring intelligence skills develops in various stages over time. An older child is not just quick with logical thinking as a young child. Instead, there’s a difference in their thinking patterns. Adults are not more intelligent than children. It’s just about how children think differently than them. 

Piaget’s theory talks in detail about a child’s cognitive development process & potential. It’s based on the actions & experiences in their early stages of life. It is then that a child builds upon the past knowledge with the present one to progress mentally.

The 4 Stages Of Cognitive Development

As per Piaget, a child’s intelligence develops over a series of stages. The route to mind-blowing cognitive development goes through a universal approach. Irrespective of the culture, your child will go through the same process. Only the pace may vary for them. Given below are the same 4 stages of a child’s cognitive development. 

1. The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 Years

The sensorimotor stage includes the development of a child right from birth to 2 years of age. The following are the prime characteristics & the developmental changes in this stage: 

• The infant understands the world through their actions & sensations
• They learn about the necessary actions – sucking, grasping, listening, & looking
• They develop Object Permanence: Things will exist even if they can’t be seen or is hidden. This helps improve memory
• They realize that their actions can have an effect on the world around them
• Things are learned through trial & error experiences
• They develop cognitive abilities – representational plays, self-differentiation from the people & objects around them

In this stage, a child learns about the world through sensory activities & movements. The main focus of this stage is to develop an understanding of object permanence. This suggests that an object exists, even if your baby can’t see it. This stage is more about experiences in early childhood. They may discover something new every second moment. Their basic senses & reflexes help them connect with the surrounding environment. The cognitive development in this stage also helps develop physical actions & language cues. During the end stage, they begin to representational thoughts.

2. The Preoperational Stage: 2 to 7 Years

The preoperational stage entails the cognitive development of children ages 2 to 7 years. The following are the prime characteristics & the developmental changes in this stage: 

• The child begins to give a Symbolic Thought
• They begin to use words & pictures to demonstrate objects
• They may tend to be egocentric & intuitive
• They develop language & thinking skills
• They think of things in concrete terms

In this stage, a child’s memory & imagination skills are strengthened. The previous stage can be considered a foundation stage for language development. Although, the preoperational stage sparks the emergence of language skills wholly. They learn a lot from pretend plays. Yet, they often struggle with developing empathy, and logical skills, or understanding others’ points of view. Things are still very much concrete for them. The attribute of being egocentric & intuitive at this stage is another factor. It restricts a child from not thinking beyond their point of view. However, they’ve acquired the ability to represent the world internally.

3. The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 Years

The concrete operational stage focuses on a child’s cognitive development from ages 7 to 11 years. The following are the prime characteristics & the developmental changes in this stage: 

• The child learns to Think Logically through concrete events
• They acquire the concept of conservation
• They acquire logic & organization skills but are still very concrete  
• They develop inductive logic
• They become less egocentric & aware of the outside world

In this stage, the child becomes less egocentric. They begin to understand the perspective of other people around them. This also leads to the development of unique thoughts & feelings. The child understands that their thoughts & opinions are different from the rest. Such development is supremely marked by logical thinking & methodical manipulation. As it brings major changes in a child’s cognitive development process. They begin to figure things out in their head. This is also known as operational thinking. This helps develop a problem-solving approach for real-life roles. However, they may still struggle with hypothetical problems.

4. The Formal Operational Stage: 12 Years & Up

Piaget’s formal operational stages involve children from the ages of 12 years & older. The following are the prime characteristics & the developmental changes in this stage: 

• The child begins to think & deal with Abstract Concepts
• They begin to reason out with hypothetical scenarios
• Development of abstract thoughts
• They begin to think about moral, social, philosophical, ethical, and political issues. Those that require abstract thinking.
• They develop deductive logic

This is the final stage of Piaget’s cognitive development stages. It is characterized by deductive reasoning & understanding of abstract concepts. They develop the potential to think about alternative solutions to a problem. Even beyond it helps them develop scientific reasoning, abstract theories & solutions. It’s more like having the right critical thinking skills to deal with hypothetical situations systematically. 

FAQs

1. Who was Jean Piaget? 

Jean Piaget was a Switzerland born psychologist in the late 1800s. He was the first to put a systematic study on child development. He is one of the most iconic figures in the field of developmental psychology in the 20th century. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggested how children think differently than others. Their knowledge is built upon interactions, ideas, & experiences.  

2. What are the main points of Jean Piaget’s theory?

The following are the main points of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development:

• The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 Years – Object permanence
• The Preoperational Stage: 2 to 7 Years – Symbolic thought
• The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 Years – Operational thought
• The Formal Operational Stage: 12 Years & Up – Abstract concepts

3. What are the 3 main cognitive theories?

The following are the three main theories for cognitive development:

• Piaget’s cognitive development theory
• Lev Vygotsky’s social-cultural cognitive theory
• Information processing theory

Takeaway

You must know that your child is unique, talented, & different from other kids. The cognitive development process journey for your child begins right after birth. And for it to happen successfully, you must expose them to the right learning environment. We at Tickle Right, tap on a child’s undiscovered potential. Our right-brain training program helps nurture kids from a wholesome perspective. It intrinsically helps develop a love for learning & skill-building.

Main Stages of Development of an Individual: 4 Stages

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The following points highlight the four main stages of development of an individual. The stages are: 1. Period of Infancy 2. Period of Early Childhood 3. Late Childhood or Pre-Adolescence 4. Adolescence.

Stage # 1. Period of Infancy:

We may call the first three years of life as the period of infancy.

We may recapitulate the same:

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a. Physical Development:

These years are marked by rapid physical development. The size increases rapidly – ten inches in the second year, in the case of boys. In due course, the trunk grows faster than the head, and the proportion between head and trunk changes. The bodily functions tend to become more stable. The body controls the new situations of change in temperature, air, sugar, salt, work, balance and equilibrium.

b. The Nervous System:

There is an increase in the number of size of nerve cells during the prenatal period. After birth, these attain maturity. The brain grows rapidly. There is a rapid improvement in the functions and structure of sensory organs. By the end of this period, the child is able to perform all the functions of seeing, hearing, testing, smelling and feeling quite clearly, and as maturely as an adult.

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c. Motor Development:

During the period of one month to two years, there is gradual development in the co-ordination and control of bodily movements.

d. Linguistic Development:

The child at birth can only cry as an expression of emotion-pleasure or pain. His cries, at 6 months age, indicate his, recognition of some new situations. By the first birthday he may utter a few words-Mama, papa. It is at one year and a half that language-development, becomes more rapid. By the age of three, the child expresses his basic thoughts.

e. Emotional Development:

The infant expresses the emotions of pain and pleasure and these are further classified into anger, disgust, fear, elation and affection. He depends upon his mother in all matters, and needs, constant attention. He feels pleasure in the company of the mother, and distress in her separation.

f. Social Development:

Mother is the first company of the infant. The father and siblings are the nest. The only social experience he gets is in the company of the family members and later on the company of a few children in the neighbourhood. It is only at the end of the period of infancy that the child begins to take notice of other infants and to play with them.

Stage # 2. Period of Early Childhood:

This period is the pre-school period between the ages of three to six. Educationally, this is the most important and impressionable age. It is the period of rapid physical and intellectual development.

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a. Physical Development:

The child at three is normally a healthy child. During this period, there is increase in the ratio of muscular development. The varied play-activities, in which he absorbs himself help in the muscular and motor development. He acquires motor skills like catching, throwing, running, jumping, climbing, scribbling, using simple tools and riding a tricycle.

b. Linguistic Development:

There is rapid increase in vocabulary. Words are combined into coherent phrases and sentences, and simple thoughts are communicated with ease. Language development is also affected by the socio-economic environment at home. Better social environment and greater attention by parents helps in increased speech development. A second language other than the mother tongue tight cause linguistic interference.

c. Emotional Development:

The emotional behaviour of the child at this stage is further differentiated into affection for parents, affection for other members of family, attraction for play-mates, hope, disappointment, anxiety, shame, jealousy, hatred and fear. He still retains to some degree an attitude of dependence on parents. He is still largely guided by his innate tendencies and
instincts.

There is a chain of feelings of submission and elation, which alternate frequently. His moral behaviour also is directed by his emotions, the pleasure and pain. Again, at this stage, his emotions begin to be organised into sentiments. The most primitive sentiment is his love for his own self. This stage is therefore, called the stage of ‘Narcissism’ auto-erotism or self-love.

The word ‘Narcissism’ has been taken from a Greek legend of Narcissus where the theme is ‘falling in love with ourselves’. Clearly the child wants attention for himself. But soon the child extends his sentiment to his parents. He develops a deep sentiment of affection for his parents. According to Freud, the boy loves the mother, and the girl is attached to the father. Thus, he gives two technical names – Oedipus Complex and Elektra Complex, taken from Greek mythology.

Oedipus was the hero who stayed his father and married his mother. Elektra was the heroine who loved her father Agamemnon, and got her mother slayed. We may not admit the truth of the Freudian theory to the, degree Freud state. But, it is certain that at this stage, a boy has got great attachment for his mother, and the girl for her father. This leads us to the importance of having women teachers in the nursery schools for boys, and men teachers for girls. The boys look at the lady teachers as mother substitutes.

d. Intellectual Development:

At this stage, the child has got varied experiences connected with his immediate environment. He has accumulated a fund of knowledge. He can attend to his basic needs of feelings, clothing etc. himself. He learns the rudiments of reading and writing through play-activities. Montessori apparatus and Kindergarten gifts play an important role in his early education at this period.

Since this is the most impressionable stage of development, the pre-school education has assumed greater importance in the eye of modern psychologists. The instincts of curiosity, constructiveness and acquisition and the innate tendency of play work wonders at this stage. The child is again profusely imaginative.

This stage is also called the stage of fantasy, for the child may sojourn in the realms of imaginary worlds in order to escape the harsh realities of his immediate environment. He finds himself in the company of a compassionate and loving fairly, a goddess or godfather.

Imitation and make-believe are also at the climax during this stage. Most of the play-activities are characterised by irritation and make-believe, perhaps a preparation for the future.

e. Social Development:

The primary social milieu for the child is the family. It is here that he gets the first lessons, in social intercourse. He learns how to behave, talk and converse with the family members. His second experience is in the neighbourhood. He might feel shocked to observe that the social atmosphere in the neighbourhood is not similar to that at home. But this stock is necessary as it forms a prerequisite for the later social experience in the nursery school.

He begins to have playmate, to develop friendship with other children, and to steer his way amongst them with self-reliance. He may become member of a group. It is here that he obtains a complex social behaviour characterised by co-operation, sympathy, social approval, teasing, bullying, quarrelling and rivalry.

Stage # 3. Late Childhood or Pre-adolescence:

This is the period between 6 and 12 years of age, beginning with the entry into school and ending in the advent of puberty. This is the period of excellence and pseudo-maturity. New interests develop and except maturity in sex, there is maturity in other physical and mental spheres. As regards, sex, it remains dormant, but emerges with great force at the end of this stage. It is therefore that this stage, is called ‘latency period’.

a. Physical Development:

This is the period of steady growth. The first teeth are replaced by the permanent set. The bones become harden. The height and weight increase. There is improvement in motor development, skill and endurance. A child at this stage is physically restless. He must engage himself into one or the other activity.

b. Mental Development:

This is the age of intellectual advancement, when new experiences are acquired and applied. The child develops powers of observation, reasoning and abstract thinking. He accumulates a large amount of knowledge and information. He learns the three R’s-reading, writing and arithmetic. He is able to read books, and derive information and pleasure. His power of perception becomes keen.

His memory (remembering, recognising and recalling) becomes keener. This gives place to logical thinking. Physically and intellectually, this is the period of stability. His I.Q., also becomes stable and indicates the degree of his intellectual capacity for future. He displays interest in reading different types of works. A boy loves adventure and fairy tales, and a girl loves fairy tales, mild romance and biographies.

c. Social Development:

During this period, there is further development of social traits like ‘co-operation and team-spirit. Gregarious instinct ripens at this stage, and it gets numerous opportunities for fulfillment while the child comes into contact with children of his age in the neighbourhood and in the school. Now the child tries to loosen the shackles of the family ties.

He becomes increasingly independent of his parents, whom he considers merely convenient persons to provide food and shelter. He becomes member of a gang or band, and plays all sorts of mischief with the elders when these work. He asserts himself in the gang, and sometimes becomes a hero or a leader.

In words of Ross, “he no longer ploughs his lovely furrow, but finds the company of others like himself an indispensable means of self-assertion” In the wake of asserting ones self, the self centred behaviour sometimes gives rise to jealousies quarrels and aggression. But he learns one important lesson.

He is ruled by public opinion, and becomes conscious of his allegiance to his gang, whose dictates he complies silently any at and cost (even at the cost of resentment of his parents).

Social development takes place mostly at the playfield. Boys usually take exuberant interest in competiting games like football, hockey, kabaddi and khokho. The girls usually prefer indoor games, but given the opportunity, they show interest in badminton and skipping. The team spirit develops here, but there are numerous chances of quarrels.

Boys indulge into physical combat; and girls into verbal fight or pulling each other’s hair. Boys like biking, climbing and mischief-making. Girls at this stage, show interest in music, painting, needle­work and dancing.

d. Moral Development:

The conduct of the young boy is mostly governed by the mores of his group. To some extent, the consciousness of right or wrong is determined by the religious and moral training received at home. The rebukes of the parents work as deterrents. But the more his parents are aggressive, the less are the children co-operative. The parents have to be very careful in dealing with the child.

The child may flout the authority of the parents. But he dare not challenge the gang. This is, what is called ‘school boy morality’. Such moral behaviour is dangerous only when the group is not lead properly by the school authorities. The group can work wonders, if its energies ire channelised to altruistic works.

But this is the period, when altruism is not understood by the child. His main interest is to engage himself in outdoor activities, with an ‘one-ward look’. He is an extrovert, and he is intensely curious to know the world around. He is more practical than he was during the infancy, or will be during adolescence.

Stage # 4. Adolescence:

a. The Nomenclature:

What is exactly the period of adolescence? When does it begin and when does it end? From the biological point of view, adolescence is the stage when puberty dawns. Hence it may begin with 13 and go up to 20. There are marked physiological changes in this period, especially with regard to sex. posting 

These changes are discussed below. But there is no rigid uniformity as regards the beginning of these changes. Among boys the puberty period is usually between 13 and 17, but among girls 11 to 16. The onslaught of puberty depends upon numerous factors such as sex, standard of living, health and climate. Culturally, adolescence period varies from community to community.

In some communities marriage among girls takes place quite early – as early as 13. Even boys are made to marry and start some profession at the age of 16. Practically adolescence ends when adulthood is thrust upon them quite early. In middle-class families, the tendency to delay the marriage even to 25 among girls, and to engage them in higher studies, prolongs the adolescence period.

Any way adolescence is the period between late-childhood and adulthood. In words of Ross, “adolescence is best regarded as a recapitulation of the first period of life, as second turn of the spiral of development.”

b. Physical Development:

(i) Size:

There is a sudden change in height and weight, due to hyperactivity, of endocrine glands. Some boys mature early and are tall for their age. Some achieve high degree of muscularity, which they utilise in sports and athletics. Girls grow more rapidly and turn to be women. The bones, muscles and other organs of both boys and girls grow very speedily. They reach the final body type by the end of adolescence.

(ii) Changes in bodily development:

The physical growth is also disproportionate due to extra lengthening of limbs with hands and feet looking longer. The entire physique is now awkward and clumsy, and the adolescent becomes conscious of the same. He observes growth of body-hair, particularly in pubic and under-arm areas. There is a change in the contours of face and body.

(iii) Changes in body-functions:

With the secretion of hormones from ductless glands there is change in body-functions. The muscles harden. The voice of the boy deepens and becomes high-pitched. In the case of girls, it becomes shrill. Menstruation starts in girls, and night emissions in boys.

(iv) Sex. Sexual development is the central fact of adolescence:

It is at the beginning of this period that sex-glands begin to function. In the case of boys the seminal glands begin to work, semen is produced and there are night- emissions, which horrify the ignorant adolescent. He develops attraction towards the opposite sex. There is a re-awakening of the repressed sexual impulse which lay dormant in later childhood.

Among girls, the sex-development takes the form of development of breasts, changes in pelvic area, development of uterine region and menstruation. All girls become self-conscious about this type of change. Menstruation usually becomes a disturbing and sometimes horrifying experience.

Even the boys feel ashamed in diffidence and prudery, when they experience localised sensations in genital organs and observe night- emissions. Sex-development is equally disturbing to both boys and girls. ‘Many adolescents, nor understanding in the least what is happening to them, suffer agonies thinking that they are lost souls or abnormal or diseased.’

c. Mental Development:

(i) Intelligence:

Intelligence grows at a uniform rates during late childhood. Recent mental testing has displayed that at the beginning of puberty there is a general decline in the rate of growth of general intelligence. But the intelligence reaches its maximum limit by the end of this period. Herein also there are individual differences.

Some children reach the maximum limit a bit earlier, and some continue to develop later than the average. Some studies have revealed that children who reach puberty earlier are slightly more intelligent than others. Usually interior types reach the ultimate mental maturity earlier than the rest.

(ii) Reasoning and Abstract Thinking:

Infancy is the period of sense- perception, late childhood of memorisation and accumulation of experience. But adolescence is the period of logical thinking, reasoning and abstractions. The adolescent can concentrate for a longer time, and there is increase in his powers to lean and remember.

(iii) Widening of Interests:

Adolescent psychology has revealed that interests of both boys and girls widen to a great degree. Boys love reading and writing. They begin to take interest in scientific pursuits. Some develop definite interest in varied educational courses like agriculture, commerce, technology. This is revealed through their hobbies and activities.

Girls become interested in fine arts, music, dancing, painting and home science. The general interest of the adolescents is outward to the worlds of nature, men and things. In words of James S. Ross, “fantasies fade and reality is faced. The young man of eighteen is a man of the world pre-occupied with practical problems, and proud of his knowledge of affairs and his practical efficiency. He chooses a career, which is frequently that of his earlier hero, and gradually pursues his way to complete manhood.” Here in this period lies the need for educational and vocational guidance.

d. Emotional Development:

(i) Heightening of emotions:

Adolescence is the period of heightening of all emotions, whether expansive or inhibitive. The heightening is again characterised by high degree of instability. The adolescent has extreme emotions. Sometimes he is hilarious; but on the occasions he is extremely melancholy. He may develop morbid fears, inferiority complex and brooding nature. He falls prey to extreme moods of depression, shyness and secretiveness. He is sensitive to criticism, and is too much conscious about sex.

The changes in the organs lead to curiosity and repressed feelings of disgust and alarm. In words of Ross, “the adolescent lives an intensely emotional life, in which we can see once more the rhythm of positive and negative phases of behaviour in his constant alternation between intense excitement and deep depression “.

(ii) Dependence and Independence:

The adolescent harbours sometimes an attitude of dependence. The dependence however, is not necessarily on the parents, but on heroes found in real life, in history, or in literature.’ It is through this attitude that religious idea dawns in him, and he begins to take interest in religion, religious heroes and Father in heaven. But along with this attitude of dependence he has a spirit of independence.

He flouts the authority of parents when unreasonable. He does not tolerate the over strictness of the parents and the teachers. He wants freedom of self-expression and self-determination. What is exactly needed is a sort of balance between control and freedom. Any extremity of both is dangerous.

(iii) Special feelings:

Strange special feelings capture the minds of adolescents. Self-consciousness gives rise to pride and humility. Sex- consciousness raises the feelings of curiosity, secretiveness and guilt. Boys commit masturbation and they think they have committed a sin. Pugnacity is also common among boys and self-display among girls.

Exhibitionism through dress, manner, gesticulations and talk is a natural phase in adolescence, more prominent in girls. In India, college girl will naturally try to imitate the fresh fashions exhibited by heroines in the pictures. Attraction towards the opposite sex gives rise to desire to be in the company of the opposite sex and to converse with them.

A college girl must have a film-star of her choice, and so a boy must have a heroine of his choice. They will never feel tired of discussing their favourite stars. All this may appear to be abnormal for the adult, but it is perfectly in keeping with the period of life.

(iv) Other feelings:

An adolescent wants security. Again, he develops a spirit of criticism. A strong curiosity impels him to start questioning the why and wherefore of things. He indulges in hero-worshipping. He loves adventure, travel and wandering. He has a strong group-feeling. Again, he has a strong imagination. But herein he may falter, and become egocentric and introverted. Many adolescents tend to live in realms of fantasy. But such introversion is harmful.

e. Social Development:

(i) Gregariousness:

The gregarious instinct plays an important role in this period. The adolescent has long forsaken the interest in the family. He is more interested in the contemporaries and close associates. He continues to be a member of a gang or group. He tries to grow independent of parents and falls in line with the activities of the group in the school and outside the school.

(ii) Empathy:

Empathy is a new development at this stage. The adolescent acquires an ability to value and understand the feelings of others, especially his associates. Sometimes he acts blindly after the suggestion and imitation of his fellow-mates. The cause of strikes and demonstrations by the adolescent youth is this inherent tendency.

Unless wisely directed, the young can go blind and run amuck. A slight provocation is enough to make the adolescents assemble in protest, and to widen the size of the protesting group due to Empathy. A strike at Lucknow may start chain of strikes at all the places in the country.

f. Moral Development:

(i) Religious Consciousness:

Religiousness consciously dawns at this stage, and the adolescent takes interest in philosophy behind religion and life with an attitude of curiosity and scepticism. He may find solution of his mental problems in his attitude of dependence upon a higher religious hero, god, goddess or prophet. Sometimes his scientific approach conflicts with the narrow theological dogmas. An Indian adolescent cannot be expected to have belief in the Pauranoic mythology that conflicts with scientific facts known at present.

He can therefore be drawn only to the higher philosophy and spirituality. The narrow religious dogmas, ceremonies and conventions have no worth for him. He may devote himself to the pursuit of truth in the realm of science and philosophy, or of beauty in art. He will love religious heroes, find inseparable interest in reading their biographies and feel drawn to altruistic career.

(ii) Altruism:

At this stage, ideas of social service and altruism are formed and cherished. If properly guided, the adolescent youth harbours a genuine love for mankind, and he is enthusiastic about service to the needle. He desires to help in the creation of an ideal society. The contribution of adolescent youth in the independence movement was no mean. Nor did they fail in their duty during the recent Chinese Aggression and conflict with Pakistan.

They rose of the occasion and spent their energies in civil defence, collecting contributions and serving the Jawans. The adolescent of today is socially and politically wide awake. He takes keen interest in the social and political events. He thatches his wagon to a star, and is, by his very nature, a reformer.

(iii) Inconsistency of Conduct:

Inspite of the above qualities, the adolescent’s moral conduct is unpredictable at the beginning of the beginning of the period. The stresses and strains inherent in this period, disturb his mental equilibrium. He may lose self-control. He has still to learn self-control especially with regard to sex-instinct.

Unguided or misdirected many an adolescent and degenerates and sports his physical and mental health through acts of sexuality like masturbation and intercourse. Such problems have been increasingly observed in co-educational secondary schools. But proper guidance and suitable environment tend to lead the youth to constructive acts.

He can achieve self-control and build in his mind a set of ideals. His hero- worship can result in sentiment of love for moral qualities of the hero. He forms strong sentiments, and gradually he consolidates his self in something stable and permanent. At times, he is guided by social approval or disapproval.

But here also he needs help to be guided by his ideals. He can increase his will power by which he can control his base impulses, rise above the social approval and act according to his will. This is the highest stage of moral conduct is reached when behaviour is directed by ideals rather than by social praise or blame. There are few who dare to follow the light that is in them, regardless of social consequences, but these few are the salt of the earth.

g. Special Needs of Adolescent:

The various needs of adolescent which impel him to act in various directions are discussed below. In the absence of fulfillment of these, he remains maladjusted and a problem youth.

What is needed, therefore, is a clear understanding of his special needs:

(i) Sex-need:

Sex is the fundamental fact of adolescence. The sexual instinct which was dormant till now, and which took the shape of auto-eroticism in the infancy, and homo-sexualism during late childhood, takes a strong turn and develops into hetero-sexuality wherein the object of attachment becomes the opposite sex.

Curiosity about sex, sex-consciousness, consciousness about the biological changes going on in the body (like menstruation and emission) – all this pervades the mental horizontal of the adolescent. He needs curiosity to be satisfied. Sometimes in the advent of satisfaction of sex-curiosity, from the pure point of view of adventure and thrill, the adolescent boy or girl may commit an intercourse and repent afterwards with shame and remorse.

Sex- education, is therefore, essential at this stage. The adolescent needs private instruction from the adult or from the teacher, in a scientific manner, so that he gets a clear picture of the entire phenomenon, and has a clear understanding of the real purpose of sex in adult life.

During the ancient period of India’s history, there were rigid rule regarding celibacy and studentship in Gurukulas and Ashramas. Co-education was not favoured and the adolescent was mostly kept away from the scene. But now-a- days, the social environment which is strongly charged with sex and beauty (with the vulgar scenes in movies, vulgar posters, advertisements with sex- appeal, sex-stimulating fashions of dress, exhibitionism among girls and women, erotic songs and above all lack of vigilance by the adults) acts as a stimulating agent, and its influence needs to be counterbalanced by a deliberate plan and programme of sex-educational institutions for boys and girls. Sex cannot be avoided.

It is simply to be redirected and sublimated. In words of Slaughter “Like the overflow of a great river, it irrigates and fertilizers great tracts of life’s territory”. Then how to redirect its energies into useful channels? An organised programme of games and athletics in which every adolescent participates will redirect his surplus energy, and keep him side-tracked from sex. Similarly a network of co-curricular activities should keep the adolescent mind engaged, because sex is not only a physical problem but also a mental problem. Sex can also be sublimated to creative activities in the realm of painting, music, dance, flower-gardening and decorations.

(ii) Security Need:

As explained above, an adolescent has an attitude of dependence. He, therefore, wants to belong to a group. He wants attention and affection from the elders. He wants inspiration from a hero, whom he worships, and who can guide him. This need can be fulfilled if the adolescent is given opportunity of studying the biography of great men like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Vivekananda, Dayananda, Laxmibai, Sarojini Naidu, Jagdish Chander Bose, Ishwar Chander Vidya Sagar, Tilak, Gokhle, Lajpat Rai, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsi, Surdar, Rana Pratap etc. He will derive strength and inspiration from them, imbibe ideals, formulate his life-goal and strengthen his will and character.

(iii) Gregarious Need:

As discussed above, this instinct assumes greater strength and importance at this age. If misdirected, this impulse directs him to be a member of gangs of pick-pockets, cinema-goers, truants and vagabonds, who do unsocial acts. The strikes, the organised, indiscipline in schools and colleges is because of lack of proper direction and due to satisfaction of this need. The adolescents should be enabled to satisfy this need through such group formation as scouting, girl-guiding, N.C.C. club-membership, social- service squads, civil defence and community activities.

(iv) Adventure Need:

This thirst for adventure is strong at this age. In the absence of proper direction it takes the form of aimless wandering, vagabonding, unsocial acts like strikes and demonstrations. Even the sexual acts mean a thrill and adventure for them. But properly directed, love of adventure can take the form of hiking, excursion, educational tours, social service and scientific exploration.

(v) Social Approval:

In all acts, an adolescent wants recognition, may be in the form of praise, a prize, a cheer, an applause, a gift or a reward. He is ambitious of achieving success and getting public applause. From this point of view, the system of giving prizes, rewards and other forms of recognition have an educational value, in consonance with the psychological needs of the adolescent.

h. Special Problems of Adolescents:

The special problems of adolescent have already figured during the discussion about the physical, emotional and social development. The first and the foremost problem is the problem of sex. The period of adolescence is known as a period of stresses and strains. It is the most difficult and the awkward period. The period marks the re-awakening of repressed sex-impulse. In order to help him, an attitude of sympathetic understanding is needed. An urgent need of sex-education has been long felt. Silence and hush-hush policy is dangerous and harmful.

Next comes his emotional problems. The abnormal functioning of the nervous system and the endocrine glands are mainly responsible for it. He has got extreme emotions – frustration and triumph, alternating each other. What is required is to help him in emotional control. The introduction of music, art and co-curricular activities will provide catharsis and reduce emotional tension in him.

Sublimation of emotions is the right guidance. His various needs must be satisfied and guided properly. He must have security. He must get social approval. He must have an opportunity to explore new fields. Thirdly he faces problems of social adjustment. An adolescent, sometimes, cannot adjust himself to the conditions at home, school or society. His parents impose rigid restrictions which are against his nature.

He may not get sympathetic treatment from his teachers. He may have academic problems. He may not be able to pull on with his class-fellows. Even a bright child is not at home in the company of mediocres. A rigid discipline, an over-crowding, an unhealthy atmosphere, lack of activities in the school may create problems of adjustment. This tension can be resolved only when the environment is made congenial. It is the duty of the parents to understand his problems and help him in the adjustment at home.

Adolescent and the Teacher:

A teacher can help the adolescent to overcome his special problems, pass through this critical period smoothly and to adjust himself to the environment.

For this, the following suggestions are made:

1. The teacher should make a thorough understanding of the general characteristics of the period of adolescence, its stresses and strains, urges and carvings changes and problems.

2. He should have a sympathetic attitude towards him.

3. He should set a good example of good conduct himself, and display his own emotional stability.

4. He should impart right information about sex.

5. He should redirect the energies of the adolescents to fruitful channels through sports and activities.

6. He should afford some freedom in organising and planning. He should not impose unreasonable restrictions. He should not force adult standards and curb his self-expression.

7. He should give applause and recognition to the achievements of the adolescent.

8. He should provide a variety of curriculum, in accordance with the diverse aptitudes. There should be special provision of music, art and dance for girls. A network of hobbies must be provided to cater to diverse interests.

9. Educational and vocational guidance should be provided.

10. Some programme of moral and religious teaching, accompanied by social service should be organised in the school.

11. Adolescent should be helped to control his emotions.

12. Patriotism, nationalism, citizenship and self-sacrifice are some of the essential ideals that must be fostered in them.

13. Some freedom should be given to them, in all matters like selection of courses, selection of games and hobbies, and the daily mode of work. Adult standards should not be thrust on him.

14. Practical bias must be given to the curriculum. Work-experience and scientific enquiry are in consonance with adolescent psychology.

15. The Hadow Committee Report in England sums up the above task so beautifully.

“There is a tide which begins to rise in the veins of youth at the age of eleven or twelve. It is called by the name of adolescence. If that tide can be taken at the flood, and a new voyage begin in the strength and along the flow of its current, we think that it will move on to fortune.”

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Intellectual development of the child: Piaget’s theory

Swiss biologist and philosopher Jean Piaget’s theory of intellectual development covers the period from infancy to adulthood. Piaget focuses on the development of the child’s thinking, and above all, the development of logical thinking. Piaget believed that the thinking of an adult differs from the thinking of a child in the first place by greater logic.

At various times Jean Piaget named different stages of intellectual development, but most often there were four: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the stage of concrete operations and the stage of formal operations. The sensorimotor and preoperational stages are manifestations of preconceptual thinking. At this time, the judgments of children relate only to a specific subject, something visual and known to everyone, categorical and isolated: they are not connected by a logical chain. The child understands in the first place judgments by analogy and through a clear example. The central feature of pre-conceptual thinking is egocentrism (not to be confused with egoism). Egocentrism causes not only such a feature of children’s logic as insensitivity to contradiction, but also a number of others: syncretism (the tendency to connect everything with everything), transduction (the transition from the particular to the particular, bypassing the general), inconsistency in volume and content.

Beginning at about the age of 7, a child already develops conceptual thinking, starting from the stage of concrete operations and developing at the stage of formal operations.

Sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to 2 years and is divided into 6 substages, during which the child consistently demonstrates the following features and achievements: 1) The child has unconditioned reflexes and is not able to think, set a goal and distinguish himself from the environment ; 2) Reflexes turn into repetitive actions; 3) The ability to reproduce random, pleasant and interesting results of one’s own actions appears; 4) The ability to coordinate actions aimed at prolonging the impression that aroused interest increases; 5) Discovering new ways to get interesting results; 6) The emergence of the ability to imagine missing events in symbolic form. The main achievements of this period include the formation of coordinated movements corresponding to such material structure as grouping, representational construction and intentionality. A particularly noticeable result of this stage is the construction of a permanent object, that is, the understanding of the existence of objects independent of the subject.

The preoperative stage is typical for ages 2 to 7, with two substages. At the first substage, the formed new ability to represent is assimilated by sensorimotor structures, and they must adapt to it. In addition, the child establishes a number of functional laws, truths and associations regarding the environment: for example, an understanding of identity and certain dependencies and correlations. A distinctive feature of children of this age is the surprising limitation of their thinking. One gets the impression that their thought is focused exclusively on one aspect of the situation, often their own point of view (egocentrism), and all other points of view or dimensions are not taken into account. Pre-operational thought, besides focusing on the single most conspicuous aspect of an event, does not appear to follow the laws of logic or physical causation, but rather is limited to contiguity associations. Thus, children’s arguments for their actions are often absurd inventions or are the result of their desire to justify themselves at any cost.

The stage of specific operations characterizes the age from 7 to 12 years and is divided into two sub-stages. At this stage, the mistakes that the child makes at the preoperational stage are corrected, but they are corrected in different ways and not all at once. The meaning of the definition “concrete” operation, which is included in the name of this stage, is that the operational solution of problems (i.e., a solution based on reversible mental actions) is taken separately for each problem and depends on its content. For example, physical concepts are acquired by a child in the following sequence: quantity, length and mass, area, weight, time and volume.

The formal operations stage occurs at age 12 and over. The system of reversible operations, becoming more coordinated, enters the next stage of development, formal operations, which begins at the age of 11-12 years. The previously developed ability to classify objects develops into the ability for combinatorial thinking: analyzing a physical event, the child is able to take into account all possible aspects and change them one by one, like a qualified experimenter, in search of a logically sound answer. The ability to vary – mentally and hypothetically – aspects of a situation in a fixed order means that the child can invent objects and situations that do not exist in reality. Thus, possibility takes precedence over reality, and the form is manipulated and considered in isolation from the content, i.e., not in the way a child at the stage of concrete operations does.

Within each stage and substage, Piaget often distinguished three levels: failure, partial success, and success. In the latest versions of his theory, Piaget viewed development not as a rectilinear movement from one stage to another, but as a movement in a spiral, characterized by the fact that the various forms and different content of thinking, characteristic of the previous level, are rethought, restructured and integrated, or unified, at the next higher level. The invariant quantitative aspects of the problem of transforming a clay ball are learned before others.

The fundamental problem of Piaget’s theory, to which no convincing answer has been found, remains the problem of novelty and spontaneity. How, from a cognitive structure, in which any new Knowledge is completely absent, does it emerge exactly – new knowledge? Moreover, how does one come to understand that new knowledge that has arisen is necessarily connected with other knowledge?

Piaget’s other theories, supplementing his main theory, are devoted to the development of moral judgments, perceptual development, the development of representations and memory, all of these lines of development are considered from the point of view of the limitations imposed by various levels and consequences of our intellectual activity.

4 stages of the development of children’s intellect according to Jean Piaget

As soon as we talk about child development, its periods and laws, the name of the Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget immediately pops up. He managed to actually find out, and find out exactly, by experience: how children develop, what tasks they face at different stages, and in general – how we learn to think.

Young Jean Piaget loved biology since childhood, constantly observed various living beings and wrote articles about them. At the same time, he received a Ph.D. and was interested in psychoanalysis. All these activities and hobbies seemed to prepare him for what became the main business of Piaget’s life – to observe children. The young Ph.D. becomes a teacher at an all-boys’ school in Paris run by Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Piaget helps Binet process the results of the test and draws attention to the fact that children of the same age constantly make similar mistakes. Mistakes adults don’t make. This led Piaget to the idea that cognitive development overcomes certain steps common to all, that our mind only gradually matures to understand certain concepts, and this happens in approximately the same way for all people. Later, in addition to other people’s children, Piaget also observed three of his own from birth.

Jean Piaget

Piaget’s method combined rigorous scientific observations and experiments (to which he was accustomed in his youth) and free conversation (as in his favorite psychoanalysis). Piaget’s own method was called “clinical conversation,” and it was excellent for studying children’s thinking.

What Piaget found out

According to Piaget, the central core of the development of the psyche is the intellect. The child develops and forms an increasingly adequate scheme of the situation – and thus, actively interacting with the environment, adapts to it. During this process, the child gradually begins to understand some of the laws that operate in the world of things and people. Each stage of development is characterized by typical errors (limitations) of thinking.

Stages of development of children’s intelligence

1. Stage of sensorimotor intelligence (0 — 2 years)

With the help of the senses and their movements, the child discovers the world around him, begins to see the connection between his own actions and their consequences. He begins to understand that he himself is something separate from the outside world. But the “inner plan” is not yet available to the child, he manipulates only specific objects.

2. Period of pre-operational submissions (2-7 years)

The child gradually begins to form an “inner plan”. Now he is learning to use symbols: a pencil is a thermometer, and a box lid is a boat. This stage is called preoperational because the child is not yet able to perceive certain types of experience.

For example:

• objects that lie in a row, according to the child, become larger if they are arranged at large intervals;
• Even after several tests, the preschooler is unable to understand that if you pour water from a tall and narrow glass into a low and wide one, then the amount of water will not change;
• the child believes that a piece of plasticine will decrease if it is rolled out of a ball into a sausage. And the rope will become shorter if it is bent.

If you teach a preschooler the correct answer and explanation, he will perceive this information. But it is worth slightly changing the experiment, and the child will again begin to give the same answers. At the same time, he begins to understand the law of conservation of the number of objects (for example, balls) earlier than the law of conservation of matter (for example, water or plasticine) and the reversibility of operations.

The child’s thinking at this stage is self-centered: he can hardly understand that someone has a different point of view than his own. This partly explains the limitations of its capabilities at the pre-operational stage.

For example, Piaget showed children taken one at a time a model of three mountains, each of which had some distinguishing feature: a house, a river, or a snowy peak. He also gave them several photographs, in which the mountains were depicted from different sides. The child was asked to choose a photograph in which the mountains were seen as the child himself sees them, from the same side. Usually the child was not mistaken. After that, Piaget planted a doll on the other side of the model and asked the child to choose a photo in which the mountains are depicted as the doll “sees” them. The preschoolers couldn’t do it and chose their photo again. Even if the child and the doll were swapped, everything was repeated: the child chose his picture correctly and could not take the “doll’s point of view”.

Piaget emphasized that egocentrism does not go away when the child has more experience, but only when he begins to realize that his point of view is only one of the possible ones, that he is not the only center, but one of many centers. Piaget called this transition from egocentrism to decentration the law of development.

3. Period of specific operations (7-11 years)

The child can already not only use symbols, but also manipulate them on a logical level. For example, add and subtract non-existent cows, combine objects into classes. He begins to understand the conservation of matter (if you divide a lump of plasticine into many small lumps, it will not become smaller) and the reversibility of operations. However, it still solves all the tasks separately, and the solution depends on the content of the task. The child still does not know how to generalize.

After solving a problem about Vasya and apples, a first-grader may get hung up on the same problem about Lucy and cucumbers, simply because for him these are still different problems. A second grader is already quite able to understand why a square is a kind of quadrilateral, and a duck is a kind of bird. But if you ask him who is more numerous in the world, ducks or birds, squares or rectangles, then he most likely will not find an explanation and will begin to argue that there are “a lot” of both ducks and birds. And he has every right to do so. After all, although an eight-year-old can classify, understanding the relationship between part and whole requires something more – logical thinking. And it develops later.

4. Period of formal operations (after 12 years)

Now concrete and abstract logical thinking is available to the teenager. He can imagine non-existent objects, think by analogy, understand metaphors, take the point of view of another person. Now he can solve problems “in a general way”, and he does not need apples with dogs for example. To think, a teenager no longer needs a connection with real physical objects or actual events. Operations have completely moved to the internal plan.

How children’s thinking is connected with speech

Piaget was the first to talk about the fact that the development of thinking is connected not with speech, but with the development of mental operations. That is why a non-speaking child does not mean an undeveloped child. Not speech, but operating with objects and concepts is the basis on which the intellect develops. And this development always goes from outside to inside, from the concrete to the abstract.

Since the time of Piaget, his methods have been improved, and his conclusions have been repeatedly verified, corrected and supplemented. Now analogues of clinical conversations are being used with might and main in diagnosing the development of children. Well, we should remember that it is impossible to either skip the stage of development or accelerate its passage. Although at the end of the previous stage, it is quite possible for children to begin setting tasks for the next one. For example, playing “phone” with two-year-olds, putting not a real phone to their ear, but its replacement symbol. Or to show five or six-year-olds that a large object can be light, and a small one can be heavy. Or write with 10-11-year-olds an essay “from the point of view of my dog.” After all, in the end, there is no clear boundary between the stages. The main thing is not to make gross mistakes that speak only about our adult egocentrism, which has no explanation from the point of view of development theory and therefore is not so forgivable.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, iStockphoto (Jovanmandic, mzoroyan, djedzura)

Cover image: iStockphoto (KenDrysdale), Wikimedia Commons

and psychologist Jean Piaget. According to this theory, children go through four different stages of mental development.

Let’s take a closer look at Piaget’s theory to understand how children acquire knowledge and the nature of intelligence.

Natalia Ozhogina

https://unsplash.com/photos/6cQHvjzmZOU

First, let’s define the term itself. Cognitive development is the development of all human thought processes. These include perception, memory, concept formation, problem solving, imagination, and logic. How is a child’s intelligence formed?

Contents of the article

Children are little scientists

Jean Piaget called children little scientists. He paid attention to how children actively explore the world around them, observing it, studying it, and arranging experiments. Children, like sponges, instantly absorb new knowledge, act on existing knowledge, and adapt ideas to new information.

Stages of development according to Piaget’s theory

The whole development of the human intellect, according to Jean Piaget’s theory, is divided into four stages. From birth to 2 years, there is a stage of sensorimotor intelligence. From 2 to 7 years – the preoperative stage. From 7 to 12 years old – the stage of organizing specific operations and from 12 years old – the period of formal operations.

Why Piaget developed his theory

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1896, the son of a professor of medieval literature. Jean published his first scientific article when he was only 11 years old. During his life, the scientist wrote 60 books and several hundred articles.

Jean’s interest in the intellectual development of children began when he received his degree and moved to Paris to teach at a boys’ school run by Alfred Bean, creator of the famous IQ test. There, Piaget noticed that the thought processes in children of different ages are significantly different.

A child’s mind is not a reduced copy of an adult

Observing children (his own nephew and daughter), the scientist discovered that a child’s mind is not just a reduced copy of an adult. Although before that, children were treated in exactly this way – as with small versions of adults. The scientist was one of the first to come to the conclusion that the way children think is significantly different from the intelligence of adults.

Children think differently

Piaget suggested that the way children think also differs depending on their age. Older kids don’t just think faster than younger kids. They think differently.

Then he concluded that children are no less smart than adults, the only thing is that they think differently. Albert Einstein commented on Piaget’s discovery as “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.”

Child development stages

Sensorimotor stage: 0 to 2 years

Babies experience the world through movement and sensation: grasping for parents, objects, toys, breastfeeding, looking and listening. Gradually, they begin to understand that things continue to exist, even when you do not look at them. Then the kids realize that their actions can change something in this world.

All children’s experience during this period is “acquired” through basic reflexes, feelings and motor reactions. Children not only learn to do many new things (such as crawling or walking), but also begin to “learn” the language from the people they communicate with.

The sensorimotor stage of a child’s development is characterized by literally explosive growth and learning. Children make discoveries every day, interacting with the world around them, comprehending it and understanding how it works.

Jean Piaget broke this stage into several substages, because in the final part of the sensorimotor stage, early representational thinking appears in children.

According to the scientist, understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen is the most important discovery that a child makes at this stage of development. It is the understanding that objects are separate and distinct entities that helps children begin to associate names and words with objects.

Preoperative: 2 to 7 years

Babies improve in speech and thinking, but still think in very specific terms. Passing through this stage of development, children begin to learn to think symbolically, to use words and images to designate objects.

And although the foundations of language development are laid, basically, at the previous stage, the preoperative stage, by definition, is considered “linguistic”. This is one of the main distinguishing features of this stage of the development of the intellect.

Toddlers at this stage of development gain a lot of experience in role play. They learn by playing. The most interesting thing is that children at this age are still very egocentric, but they try to look at the world, people and things from the point of view of others. They literally have to struggle with logic and acceptance of other people’s points of view. Also, some children may still struggle with understanding the idea of ​​permanence.

Such an experiment speaks about the difficulties of perception. We take clay, divide it into two absolutely equal pieces. At the same time, one of them must be rolled into a compact ball, and the other must be turned into a large flat pancake in shape.

When a child in the preoperative period is asked to choose one of these pieces of clay to play with, he usually chooses the flat one. Because the flat figure looks bigger.

Stage of organization of specific operations: from 7 to 12 years

At this stage, children develop logical thinking, so they study at school from this age. They begin to use inductive logic and can reason from specific information to general principles.

Children begin to make sense of specific events as well as understand the concept of conservation. For example, they already understand that a short wide cup can contain the same amount of juice as a tall narrow glass.

Children’s thinking becomes more structured. At this stage of development, the child becomes much more adept at using logic. But his thinking still retains concreteness and literalness. It can also be rigid (inflexible). Children at this stage of development tend to struggle with abstract concepts.

On the other hand, one can already speak of less egocentricity. Children begin to think about how other people feel and think. And also, they begin to understand that their thoughts are unique. And that not all other people must necessarily share their point of view and feelings.

Formal operations stage: 12 years and older

At this stage of development, the adolescent begins to think abstractly and also to reason about hypothetical problems. Children begin to be interested in questions of morality, philosophy, ethics, social and political problems. They undertake to discuss these topics using abstract thinking and ideas. They use deduction and reason, following from general principles to specific information, think scientifically about the world around them.

This ability to think about abstract ideas and situations is the most important sign of intelligence in the formal-operational stage of cognitive development. Children are already beginning to plan the future and reason about hypothetical situations – these are also the most important features of the intellect that appear at this stage.

This is not a quantitative, but a qualitative process

One of the important postulates of Piaget’s theory: the intellectual development of children is not a quantitative process. That is, the child’s intellect is not formed simply as the addition of new information and knowledge to the existing ones.

No, it is a qualitative change in thinking that occurs in children as they develop and as they pass through the four stages. So, a seven-year-old child does not just know more about the world than a two-year-old. Fundamental changes are taking place in his brain by this age.

Important concepts of Piaget’s theory

How does a child’s cognitive development take place, how does his intellect overcome each of the above stages? Let’s look at the factors that influence how children learn and grow.

Schemes

Schemes in the minds of children are categories of knowledge that help them to realize and understand this world. They are directly related to understanding and knowledge.

According to Jean Piaget’s theory, schemes include both categories of knowledge and the process of obtaining them. As life experience is accumulated, new information is built into existing schemes. How does this happen?

Assimilation

Let’s take a simple example. Suppose a child has schematic knowledge about some animal. About a dog, for example. If a child’s only experience is with small dogs, then the child may assume that they are all like that. Small, loud and fluffy. What happens when a child meets a huge dog for the first time? Of course you will be surprised. But he will perceive this new information, modifying the pre-existing schema to include his new observations.

So, the process of incorporating new information into existing cognitive schemas is known as assimilation. This is a subjective process. Because each of us tends to modify new experiences and information to fit our pre-existing beliefs. In the example we have given with the dog, it is precisely the case of the assimilation of the animal into the schema of the dog in the representation that exists in the child that is described.

Accommodation

Accommodation (derived from the Latin word “accomodatio” – adaptation to something), in Piaget’s concept, is a property of the adaptation process. Accommodation is used by us in the process of adaptation, when changes in our existing schemas are required as a result of obtaining new information or new experience. Also, during this process, new schemes can be developed.

Balancing

According to Piaget’s theory, all children try to find a balance between assimilation and accommodation. And this balance is achieved with the help of a mechanism that Piaget called balancing.

As the child progresses through the stages of cognitive development, balancing and maintaining a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to take into account new knowledge (accommodation). Thanks to balancing, children move from one stage of intellectual development to another.

The creation of intelligence is an active process

One of the most important postulates of Piaget’s theory is that the creation of knowledge and intelligence is, in essence, an active process. Here is what the creator of the theory himself said about this: “I consider myself an opponent of the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality. I believe that to know an object means to influence it, to construct systems of transformations that can be carried out on or with this object. To know reality means to build systems of transformations that more or less adequately correspond to reality.

Thanks to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the world has become much better aware of how human intelligence develops. Now we understand that children not only absorb knowledge and are its passive recipients. They are constantly exploring this world and experimenting.

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4 stages of the development of children’s intelligence according to Jean Piaget – Common children, Voronezh

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4 stages of the development of children’s intelligence according to Jean Piaget

As soon as we talk about child development, its periods and laws, the name of the Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget immediately pops up. He managed to actually find out, and find out exactly, by experience: how children develop, what tasks they face at different stages, and in general – how we learn to think.

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Young Jean Piaget loved biology since childhood, constantly observed a variety of living beings and wrote articles about them. At the same time, he received a Ph.D. and was interested in psychoanalysis. All these activities and hobbies seemed to prepare him for what became the main business of Piaget’s life – to observe children. The young Ph.D. becomes a teacher at an all-boys’ school in Paris run by Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Piaget helps Binet process the results of the test and draws attention to the fact that children of the same age constantly make similar mistakes. Mistakes adults don’t make. This led Piaget to the idea that cognitive development overcomes certain steps common to all, that our mind only gradually matures to understand certain concepts, and this happens in approximately the same way for all people. Later, in addition to other people’s children, Piaget also observed three of his own from birth.

Jean Piaget

Piaget’s method combined rigorous scientific observations and experiments (to which he was accustomed in his youth) and free conversation (as in his favorite psychoanalysis). Piaget’s own method was called “clinical conversation,” and it was excellent for studying children’s thinking.

What Piaget found out

According to Piaget, the central core of the development of the psyche is the intellect. The child develops and forms an increasingly adequate scheme of the situation – and thus, actively interacting with the environment, adapts to it. During this process, the child gradually begins to understand some of the laws that operate in the world of things and people. Each stage of development is characterized by typical errors (limitations) of thinking.

Stages of development of children’s intelligence

1. Stage of sensorimotor intelligence (0 — 2 years)

With the help of the senses and their movements, the child discovers the world around him, begins to see the connection between his own actions and their consequences. He begins to understand that he himself is something separate from the outside world. But the “inner plan” is not yet available to the child, he manipulates only specific objects.

2. Period of pre-operational submissions (2-7 years)

The child gradually begins to form an “inner plan”. Now he is learning to use symbols: a pencil is a thermometer, and a box lid is a boat. This stage is called preoperational because the child is not yet able to perceive certain types of experience.

For example:

• objects that lie in a row, according to the child, become larger if they are arranged at large intervals;
• Even after several tests, the preschooler is unable to understand that if you pour water from a tall and narrow glass into a low and wide one, then the amount of water will not change;


• the child believes that a piece of plasticine will decrease if it is rolled out of a ball into a sausage. And the rope will become shorter if it is bent.

If you teach a preschooler the correct answer and explanation, he will perceive this information. But it is worth slightly changing the experiment, and the child will again begin to give the same answers. At the same time, he begins to understand the law of conservation of the number of objects (for example, balls) earlier than the law of conservation of matter (for example, water or plasticine) and the reversibility of operations.

The child’s thinking at this stage is self-centered: he can hardly understand that someone has a different point of view than his own. This partly explains the limitations of its capabilities at the pre-operational stage.

For example, Piaget showed children taken one at a time a model of three mountains, each of which had some distinguishing feature: a house, a river, or a snowy peak.

He also gave them several photographs, in which the mountains were depicted from different sides. The child was asked to choose a photograph in which the mountains were seen as the child himself sees them, from the same side. Usually the child was not mistaken. After that, Piaget planted a doll on the other side of the model and asked the child to choose a photo in which the mountains are depicted as the doll “sees” them. The preschoolers couldn’t do it and chose their photo again. Even if the child and the doll were swapped, everything was repeated: the child chose his picture correctly and could not take the “doll’s point of view”.

Piaget emphasized that egocentrism does not go away when the child has more experience, but only when he begins to realize that his point of view is only one of the possible ones, that he is not the only center, but one of many centers. Piaget called this transition from egocentrism to decentration the law of development.

3. Period of specific operations (7-11 years)

The child can already not only use symbols, but also manipulate them on a logical level. For example, add and subtract non-existent cows, combine objects into classes. He begins to understand the conservation of matter (if you divide a lump of plasticine into many small lumps, it will not become smaller) and the reversibility of operations. However, it still solves all the tasks separately, and the solution depends on the content of the task. The child still does not know how to generalize.

Having solved the problem about Vasya and apples, a first-grader may hang over the same problem about Lucy and cucumbers, simply because for him these are still different problems. A second grader is already quite able to understand why a square is a kind of quadrilateral, and a duck is a kind of bird. But if you ask him who is more numerous in the world, ducks or birds, squares or rectangles, then he most likely will not find an explanation and will begin to argue that there are “a lot” of both ducks and birds. And he has every right to do so. After all, although an eight-year-old can classify, understanding the relationship between part and whole requires something more – logical thinking.

And it develops later.

4. Period of formal operations (after 12 years)

Now concrete and abstract logical thinking is available to the teenager. He can imagine non-existent objects, think by analogy, understand metaphors, take the point of view of another person. Now he can solve problems “in a general way”, and he does not need apples with dogs for example. To think, a teenager no longer needs a connection with real physical objects or actual events. Operations have completely moved to the internal plan.

How children’s thinking is connected with speech

Piaget was the first to talk about the fact that the development of thinking is connected not with speech, but with the development of mental operations. That is why a non-speaking child does not mean an undeveloped child. Not speech, but operating with objects and concepts is the basis on which the intellect develops. And this development always goes from outside to inside, from the concrete to the abstract.

Since the time of Piaget, his methods have been improved, and his conclusions have been repeatedly verified, corrected and supplemented. Now analogues of clinical conversations are being used with might and main in diagnosing the development of children. Well, we should remember that it is impossible to either skip the stage of development or accelerate its passage. Although at the end of the previous stage, it is quite possible for children to begin setting tasks for the next one. For example, playing “phone” with two-year-olds, putting not a real phone to their ear, but its replacement symbol. Or to show five or six-year-olds that a large object can be light, and a small one can be heavy. Or write with 10-11-year-olds an essay “from the point of view of my dog.” After all, in the end, there is no clear boundary between the stages. The main thing is not to make gross mistakes that speak only about our adult egocentrism, which has no explanation from the point of view of development theory and therefore is not so forgivable.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, iStockphoto (Jovanmandic, mzoroyan, djedzura)

Jean Piaget

Biography

Jean William Fritz Piaget is a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, author of works on the study of the psychology of children, creator of the theory of cognitive development, founder of the Geneva School of Genetic Psychology.

As a child, Jean Piaget was so interested in biology that by the age of 15 he had published several articles on molluscs. As a result, he was offered a prestigious position as caretaker of the mollusk collection at the Natural History Museum of Geneva. By the age of 20, he had become a recognized malacologist. At 19In 18, Piaget defended his dissertation in natural sciences and received his Ph.D. from the University of Neuchâtel.

During his studies, Piaget became interested in psychoanalysis, a very popular direction of psychological thought at that time.

After receiving his degree, Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris and began teaching at a school run by Alfred Binet, the creator of the IQ test.

While helping to process the results of the IQ test, Piaget noticed that young children make the same mistakes that are not characteristic of adults.

Later, he created a general theory of stages of development, stating that people who are in the same stage of their development exhibit similar general forms of cognitive abilities.

In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland and headed the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923 he married Valentin Shatenau. The couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from birth.

In 1929, Piaget accepted an invitation to take the post of director of the International Bureau of Education, at the head of which he remained until 1968 years old.

Every year he wrote speeches for the IBE Council and the International Conference on Public Education, and in 1934 he declared that “only education can save our society from possible collapse, instantaneous or gradual. ”

From 1955 to 1980, Piaget headed the International Center for Genetic Epistemology.

In 1979, the scientist was awarded the Balzan Prize for his contribution to socio-political science.
Jean Piaget died at 1980 and was buried in Geneva.

Scientific heritage – Theory of cognitive development

Piaget did not agree that knowledge could be forced by reinforcement. His theory of cognitive development argued that children actively self-construct knowledge in the process of manipulation and exploration of the real world around them.

Being a biologist familiar with the work of Darwin, he based his theory on the biological concept of adaptation. Just as the body adapts to its environment, brain structures develop to adapt to and reflect the world around them.

Understanding the world by children and adults is very different. Piaget showed that young children, for example, do not understand that a hidden object – a favorite toy or even a mother – continues to exist. The baby believes that if he does not see something, then it does not exist. And only later, correlating his ideas with his experience (the toy reappears, which means that it continued to exist when the baby did not see it), he comes to the construction of logical conclusions, replacing the previous erroneous ones with them.

Piaget, as a result of numerous experiments, came to the conclusion that the thinking of preschoolers is largely determined by erroneous logic. For example, most children under 7 years of age believe that the amount of liquid changes if it is poured into containers of a different shape.

Piaget showed that children correct these misconceptions over time by interacting with the real world and comparing the information received during this interaction with their understanding of the properties of objects.

Piaget believed that children construct new knowledge on the basis of their experience through the processes of assimilation (lat. assimilatio – “similarity”) and accommodation (lat. accommodatio – “adaptation”).

If the experience gained by the child does not conflict with the existing ideas about the world around him (similar to it) and fits into the existing framework, then its results (for example, knowledge gained by experience) are assimilated by him in the process of assimilation.

If the new experience of the child from interaction with the environment does not fit into the existing framework of children’s ideas, then its assimilation requires a restructuring of thinking in order to adapt to new conditions, and this occurs in the process of accommodation (adaptation of the whole organism to new conditions).

Understanding, built in the process of accommodation on the feeling of the fallacy of their previous ideas, leads to the creation of a new picture of the world order in the mind of the child, more complex and objective.

Piaget’s theory shows that as children develop their brains and gain experience, they go through four stages in their development, differing from each other in ways of thinking.

Piaget stages of cognitive development

Stage	Development period	Description
sensorimotor	From birth to 2 years	Infants’ cognitive development begins with their exploration of the world around them using their senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch) and movements. Babies come up with ways to solve sensorimotor problems, such as how to turn a lever to hear the sound of a music box, how to find hidden toys, how to put objects in and out of containers.
Preoperative	2-7 years	Preschool children use symbols to indicate their discoveries, during this period speech develops and a game with imaginary plots appears. However, children’s thinking still lacks the logic of the next two stages.
Stage of specific operations	11 years and older	Children’s thinking becomes logical. School-age children already understand that the volume of liquid does not change when it is poured into another container. They are able to classify objects according to certain criteria. But at this stage, the child’s thinking is not yet abstract and does not reach the thinking of adults.
Formal Operations Stage	11 years and older	Children develop the ability to think abstractly, which allows them to operate with symbols that are not objects of the real world, such as mathematical symbols. They are able to think about the achievements of science, and not just about the most obvious problems of the world around them.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development convinced experts of the existence of an active position of children in acquiring knowledge, as well as that the thinking and mental abilities of children contain inexhaustible possibilities for acquiring knowledge.

Piaget explored children’s understanding of both the physical and social world. Piaget’s notion of developmental stages initiated many studies of children’s ideas about the world, about themselves, other people and the relationships between them.

Piaget’s theory stimulated the development of educational programs for preschool education, which were built on the basis of learning through discovery and direct contact with the environment.

Piaget’s theory in the 1950s launched a new evolutionary stage in the development of the general philosophy of constructivism, which originated in the 1920s, and formed the basis of the modern philosophy of child development.

The article uses materials from Wikipedia

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How many stages of intelligence did Piaget designate

Definition 1

Intelligence (mind) is the quality of the psyche, consisting of the ability to adapt to new situations, the ability to learn and remember based on experience, understanding and applying abstract concepts

Stages of development of the intellect according to Jean Piaget

According to J. Piaget, the central core of the development of the child’s psyche is the intellect. In the process of development, the child develops each time a more and more adequate scheme of the situation around him. All this contributes to the fact that in the process of interaction with the environment, the child gradually adapts to it. During this process, he begins to gradually understand certain vital laws that operate in the world of people and things.

Note 1

Each stage of intelligence development is characterized by a number of typical thinking errors (limitations).

J. Piaget developed the concept, according to which the development of the child’s intellect goes through several successive stages, each of which explains its development as a continuous process.

In order for the intellect to be fully developed, the passage of these stages is obligatory. The sequence of passing through the stages is unchangeable and stable, and the process of transition from one stage to another is imperceptible. Each stage is characterized by the fact that the child acquires more and more complex cognitive abilities.

In the event that a child’s transition from one stage to another does not occur in the same way as in others, then in this case one cannot speak of some kind of developmental deviation, just this child develops a little differently and the stages pass at an individual pace .

What is important in passing through the stages is not the age at which each of them occurs, but their sequence. For example, abstract thinking develops only after the child has learned all the concrete subjects.

Note 2

Initially, Piaget assumed that the development of the child is influenced by the environment and parents. However, later he understood and proved that no matter how parents encourage and “hurry” the development of the child, he will not develop at the pace and direction they need until he has the necessary psychological and physical readiness.

Stage of sensorimotor intelligence.

Period of preoperative representations

First stage of intelligence development , described by J. Piaget, is a sensorimotor stage that occurs from birth to 2 years of age.

This stage is characterized by the fact that the child, with the help of movements and sense organs, cognizes the world around him, begins to understand the relationship between his actions and their consequences. In addition, he begins to understand that he is part of the world. However, the “inner plan”, a child of this age is not yet available, he manipulates only specific objects.

Second stage of intelligence development , designated by J. Piaget, is the stage of preoperative representations, occurring at the age of 2 to 7 years.

This stage is characterized by the fact that the child begins to gradually form his “inner plan”, learns to use symbols. For example, during the game, the pencil can be a thermometer, and the lid can be a boat or raft.

The preoperative stage is called because the child does not have the ability to perceive certain types of experience. For example, a child believes that if the objects lying in a row are moved apart at large intervals, then there will be more of them, a piece of plasticine will be smaller if it is not rolled into a ball, but into a sausage, and the rope will not be so long if it is bent.

Of course, if the child correctly explains the necessary information, shows its effect on specific objects, he will perceive it and even remember it. However, he will not be able to apply this information in practice with other subjects and will also begin to indicate incorrect answers.

The thinking of children at this stage is egocentric. So, the child believes that only the information and skills that he has are truly true. This is due precisely to the fact that the child has limited opportunities at the preoperative stage.

J. Piaget pointed out that the child’s egocentrism gradually disappears, with the acquisition and expansion of his experience, as well as the realization that his point of view is not truly correct, there are also other views and opinions. This change indicates a transition from egocentrism to decentralization, as well as a transition to the next stage.

Period of specific operations. The period of formal operations

The third stage of the development of intellect is the period of concrete operations, occurs at the age of 7 to 11 years.

At this stage, the child can already use symbols and manipulate them on a logical level, for example, mental addition and subtraction, grouping objects.

The child comes to understand the conservation of matter, the reversibility of operations. However, generalization is not yet available to him, which is why he still solves all problems separately, and the process of solving a problem largely depends on its content.

Thus, despite the fact that the child knows how to classify, he still does not understand the relationship between the part and the whole, since for this understanding he needs to have logical thinking, which develops in him a little later.

The fourth stage of the development of the intellect , designated by J. Piaget, is the period of formal operations that occurs in a child after 12 years of age.

At this stage concrete and abstract logical thinking is already available to the child. He can imagine non-existent objects, think by analogy, understand metaphors, take the point of view of another person. Now he can solve problems “in a general way.” To solve, the child no longer needs to use objects (apples, dogs, birds, etc.) as an example. To think, the child no longer needs a connection with real physical objects or actual events. Operations have completely moved to the internal plan.

J. Piaget. Developmental Pedagogy and Psychology

J. Piaget

J. Piaget [6]. One of the most famous systems belongs to Jean Piaget, who based his system on the analysis of the development of thinking. According to Piaget, the intellect, as a living structure, grows, changes and adapts to the world. The differences between children and adults are due not only to the fact that children know less, but also to the fact that the way children learn is different from that of adults. Piaget suggested that children have some cognitive (thinking) limitations. As a person grows and acquires more knowledge, the ways of processing information in his cognitive structures become more complicated. The scientist identified three main periods in the mental development of the child, within each period there are several stages. All children go through periods and stages of development in a certain sequence, each new stage is based on the previous one, and this order is the same for all children.

The first period of development is called sensorimotor by Piaget, since at the age of two years children get acquainted with the world mainly through sensations – looking, grasping, sucking, biting, chewing, etc.

The second period – concrete operations, includes two stages: preoperative and operating room. The first stage is preoperative, typical for the age of two to six years. At this age, children form concepts and use symbols, but do so based on their experience. Unlike adults, children can only see things from their own perspective (egocentrism) and focus on one relationship at a time (centration). Often the child cannot think through the consequences of a particular chain of events. At the beginning of this stage, children take names so seriously that sometimes they cannot separate their literal meaning from the essence of this thing. So, a child can call the water in the mug “to drink”, and the water in the bathroom with another word, which means “to bathe” in his lexicon.

In cases where what is happening does not fit into the child’s experience, he can resort to “magical” ideas about cause and effect – for example, try to “spell” the bus so that he will come sooner. Also, the thinking of children of this age is characterized by “animism” (Latin “anima” – soul) – the animation of surrounding objects. For example, a child may decide that the elevator was “angry” with him and therefore slammed the door on the floor of his coat. At this stage, the child often has difficulty classifying objects and concepts.

At the second stage – the operating room (from seven to eleven – twelve years old), children begin to use logic in their thinking, to classify objects according to several criteria. The thinking of the child at this stage takes into account the hierarchy of classes. Thus, a car is a large group, within which there are subgroups of car brands, and within these subgroups there can be even smaller subgroups. Logical operations are successfully applied to actions with specific objects.

The third period – formal operations, from twelve years or a little later. The adolescent’s thinking develops to such an extent that he is able to operate with abstract concepts that are not based on visual images. Teenagers are not only able to think and talk about freedom, love, justice; they can build their conclusions and put forward hypotheses, reason by analogy and metaphorically, generalize and analyze their experience.

In the theory of cognitive development created by J. Piaget, the differences between the form and content of cognition are indicated. The content of children’s knowledge is everything that is acquired through experience and observation. The form of cognition is a special structure of human mental activity. As Piaget says, a person assimilates what surrounds him, but he assimilates it according to his “mental chemistry”. Cognition of reality always depends on the dominant mental structures. One and the same knowledge can be of different value depending on what mental structures it relies on. The most important pedagogical principle for Piaget is the recognition of the child as an “active explorer” who comprehends the world according to his own mental structure.

In studying the development of thinking, Piaget pointed to the interaction of the moral sense with the developing mental structures and the gradually expanding social experience of the child. The development of the moral sense according to Piaget is carried out in two stages. At the stage of moral realism, children are sure that the existing moral prescriptions are absolute and the degree of violation of these prescriptions is directly proportional to the quantitative assessment of what happened. Thus, the child will consider a girl who set the table and accidentally broke twelve plates as more guilty than a girl who intentionally broke only two plates in a fit of anger at her sister (following Piaget’s example). Later, children reach the stage of moral relativism. Now they understand that the existing rules in some situations can be significantly adjusted and the morality of an act depends not on its consequences, but on intentions. This Piagetian theory of two stages of moral development was developed considerably by Lawrence Kohlberg (see below).

Jean Piaget and the theory of intellectual development

Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in the family of a professor of medieval literature. He remembered his mother as a person of a neurotic nature; it was her behavior that inspired the boy’s interest in psychology.

Child development

Piaget received his PhD in natural sciences from the University of Neuchâtel. Further, after studying for one semester at the University of Zurich, he became interested in psychoanalysis and soon moved to France. There Piaget began working at an educational institution for boys under the direction of Alfred Binet*, where he engaged in research in the development of the intellect. Until Piaget became interested in the topic of cognitive development, it was believed in psychological science that adults were simply more experienced thinkers than children. While working in the lab, Piaget became interested in the reasons children used to explain their incorrect answers to questions that required logical thinking. The scientist decided to conduct a systematic study in the field of cognitive development and did it – the first in the history of psychology.

In 1923 Jean Piaget married Valentin Schatenau and they had three children. By that time, the topic of intellectual and emotional development captured the scientist entirely, so he informally studied how his own children develop. These observations eventually led him to one of the most important and most famous discoveries – the theory of the phasic development of the psyche.

During his lifetime, Jean Piaget published more than sixty books and hundreds of articles. He left a bright mark not only in psychology, but also in the field of education, sociology, economics, jurisprudence and epistemology. The scientist died on September 16, 1980 years.

* Alfred Binet – an outstanding French psychologist and teacher, founder of the first experimental psychology laboratory in France; Together with T. Simon, he compiled a diagnostic test for the mental development of children, named after its authors. Note. ed.

Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development

When Piaget first started working on his theory, his approach was very different from everything scientists and researchers had done in this direction before him.

• Instead of studying all the students, he focused on the children.
• The theory was not about learning specific behaviors or knowledge, it looked at development in general.
• Contrary to the generally accepted opinion at that time that the development of the psyche is a gradual process, during which human behavior becomes more and more complex, Piaget singled out several separate stages, describing them with clear quantitative characteristics.

Piaget believed that children are not just less competent thinkers than adults, but they are born with a basic mental organization, which is a set of genetic and evolutionary traits, and their learning and knowledge are derivatives of this structure.

Based on this premise, the scientist tried to explain the processes and mechanisms of the psyche in infants and older children, which over time allow them to learn to think logically and operate with hypotheses.

According to Piaget, children’s understanding of the environment develops gradually, and they inevitably encounter discrepancies between what they already know and what they learn.

In Piaget’s theory of intellectual development, three separate components can be distinguished.

1. Action schemas

Action schemas are the basic building blocks of knowledge that unite objects by similarity and difference. Each schema relates to a single piece of knowledge about the world—such as actions, objects, or concepts—and is a series of interrelated representations that are used to understand and respond to a particular situation. For example, if a child is shown a picture with a dog depicted on it, he creates for himself a diagram of the appearance of the animal: four paws, a tail, ears, and so on.

If the child can explain what he feels and perceives with the help of the scheme he already has, he is in a state of psychological balance.

Schemes of action are stored in the child’s memory and, if necessary, used by him in the future. For example, when the first time in a restaurant, the child creates a new scheme of actions associated with ordering dishes. Once in such an institution next time, he will already be able to apply his knowledge in a new, but similar situation.

Piaget also argued that some patterns of action are genetically programmed in children, such as the desire of a small child to suck on everything that comes to hand.

2. Processes that ensure the transition from one stage to another

Piaget believed that intellectual development is the result of the adaptation of knowledge and the human striving for balance. Adaptation of knowledge is carried out in two ways:

• Assimilation – the use of an existing scheme of actions and its application in a new situation.
• Accommodation – changing the existing scheme of actions in order to acquire new information.

To better understand how assimilation and accommodation work, let’s go back to the dog example above. Now the child has a diagram of the appearance of the animal: four paws, tail, ears. But when a real dog approaches him on the street, he will see other characteristics that are not included in his scheme.

It turns out that the dog is covered with hair, he licks his hand, he barks. Since there are no all these signs in the initial scheme, an imbalance arises, and the child begins to construct his own meaning. If the parent confirms that the new information also applies to the dog, assimilation occurs and balance is restored as the child successfully incorporates the new information into the existing schema.

But what if a child sees a cat on the street instead of a dog? Some characteristics are the same, although they are different animals. The cat meows, he can climb trees, he moves and behaves in a completely different way from a dog. Seeing a cat, the child goes out of balance, and he needs to coordinate (accommodate) new information, so he creates a new scheme, returning to a balanced state.

3. Stages of development of the intellect

Piaget believed that the mental development of the child goes through four stages. This is true for all children, no matter what culture they belong to, no matter where they live in the world. However, not all children go through the final stages.

• Sensorimotor stage (birth to two years)

The child cognizes the world through the senses, as well as using objects. By the end of this stage, he realizes that objects and people do not disappear, even if he does not see or hear them.

• Preoperative (two to seven years)

This is the stage of egocentric thinking, according to Piaget.

During this period of life, children are not yet able to understand the point of view of other people. They only have their own vision.

• Concrete operations stage (seven to eleven years)

At this stage knowledge is accumulated. Although the child is still unable to understand abstract or hypothetical ideas, he is already beginning to make sense of concrete events logically.

• Formal operations (age 11 and over)

At this stage, the child’s ability to manipulate ideas in the head, that is, to think abstractly, develops. It is during this period that children develop the ability for deductive and logical thinking and systematic planning.

Criticism of Piaget’s theory

Criticism of Piaget concerns mainly his research methods. Although he studied not only his own three children, but also others, all these children were from families with a fairly high social status – therefore, a very large sample was left without attention, and the results obtained by the scientist cannot be attributed to all sections of society.

In addition, a number of further studies revealed the fallacy of the assumption of an automatic transition from one stage of intellectual development to another. Many psychologists are convinced that environmental factors also play a key role in mental development.

Finally, according to many critics, Piaget underestimated the abilities of children, and four- and five-year-old children are much less egocentric than the researcher believed, and much better at understanding what is going on in their heads.

Nevertheless, thanks to the scientist’s hypotheses in psychology, a fundamentally new view of the mechanisms of the intellectual development of children has been developed, and his ideas have served as the most important building material for many other theories proposed since then, including those that refute his conclusions.

Paul Kleinman: Psychology. People, concepts, experiments .

Developmental psychology. The Cognitive Theory of Jean Piaget | Face Soul Actual psychology

Jean Piaget

J. Piaget built his theory of the development of children’s thinking on the basis of biology and logic. He considered the development of the cognitive activity of the child in the context of the general laws of the development of organic life.

The main goal of rational behavior, or thinking, J. Piaget considered adaptation to the environment. Ways of adaptation are called by him schemes. A schema is a repeating structure or organization of actions in certain situations. It can be simple movements, a complex of motor skills, skills or mental actions.

Piaget named assimilation, accommodation and balance as the main mechanisms by which a child passes from one stage of development to another. Assimilation is an action with new items based on already established skills and abilities. Accommodation is the desire to change one’s skills and abilities as a result of changing conditions and in accordance with them. Accommodation, restoring the disturbed balance in the psyche and behavior, eliminates the discrepancy between the existing skills, abilities and conditions for performing actions.

J. Piaget believed that one should strive to ensure that assimilation and accommodation are always in balance, because when assimilation dominates accommodation, thinking becomes rigid, behavior becomes inflexible. And if accommodation prevails over assimilation, the behavior of children becomes inconsistent and unorganized, there is a delay in the formation of stable and economical adaptive mental actions and operations, i. e. learning problems arise. The balance between assimilation and accommodation ensures reasonable behavior. Achieving balance is a difficult task. The success of its solution will depend on the intellectual level of the subject, on the new problems that he will face. It is necessary to strive for balance, and it is important that it be present at all levels of intellectual development.

Cognitive development occurs through assimilation, accommodation and balance, continuing throughout a person’s life.

An action scheme is that common thing that is preserved in an action when it is repeated many times in different circumstances, it is a mental structure at a certain level of mental development, a mental system or integrity that reproduces the logic of objective actions.

According to Piaget, there are four such stages: sensorimotor, preoperative, concrete operations stage, formal operations stage:

The initial stage of intelligence development is sensorimotor (from birth to 1. 5–2 years).

• — At this stage, the child acts with material objects, learns the world through various actions.
• — When balancing, the intellect of an infant is based on the data of the sense organs and bodily movements.

The second stage is preoperative (from 2 to 7 years).

• — Children experience the world through their own actions. Their thinking tends to be overly concrete, irreversible, and egocentric.

The next stage is specific operations (from 7 to 11–12 years old)

• — The child is able to perform systems of actions with objects in the mind, but based on specific material.
• – Children begin to think logically, use concepts regarding specific objects or events.
• – They can classify objects, build a hierarchy of concepts, comprehend the patterns of conservation.

The final stage is formal intelligence (from 11–12 to 15 years old)

• – Adolescents can explore all logical options for solving a problem, think conditionally hypothetically, make assumptions and provide a chain of logical evidence.
• — Formal thinking allows you to understand the point of view of another person. Kharkova D.Yu.

  5th year student Safargalina E.I. 2nd year student Sterlitamak branch of Bashkir State University, Sterlitamak, Russian Federation DOI: 10.24411/2520-6990-2019-10938 FOUNDATIONS OF THE THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT PIAGET

  Kharkova D. Yu.

  5th year student

  Safargalina E.I.

  2nd year student Sterlitamak branch of BashSU, Sterlitamak, Russian Federation

  BASES OF THE THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF PIAGET

  Annotation

  The article deals with one of the scientific areas of child psychology research, which is genetic psychology. The creator of this trend is Jean Piaget, a Swiss scientist and philosopher. The subject of research in genetic psychology is the development and origin of the intellect, the formation of concepts: time, space, object, etc. Genetic psychology studies children’s logic, the characteristics of a child’s thinking, the mechanisms of cognitive activity, the transition of forms of thinking from simple to complex.

  Abstract

  The article deals with one of the scientific directions of the study of child psychology, which is genetic psychology. The creator of this area is Jean Piaget — a Swiss scientist and philosopher. The subject of the study of genetic psychology is the development and origin of the intellect, the formation of concepts: time, space, object, etc. Genetic psychology studies children’s logic, the child’s thinking features, the mechanisms of cognitive activity, the transition offorms of thinking from simple to complex.

  Keywords: early childhood pedagogy, Piaget, genetic psychology

  Keywords: early childhood pedagogy, Piaget, genetic psychology

  as a complex system of several components at once: biological, epistemological, psychological, logical and sociological. Piaget believed that genetic methods in psychology and psychological studies of the development of cognitive processes in the development of a child can provide answers to important questions of the theory of knowledge: how is the transition from ignorance to knowledge, from false to true knowledge; can talents and attitudes exist from birth, or do they only come with experience. Piaget considered intelligence as one of the ways to adapt to the environment. All living organisms need to create a comfortable environment for themselves. The influence of the environment leads to a failure in the body. In order to achieve harmony again, the body must always be in motion to compensate for the imbalance. For example, an external injury, such as a cut on the leg, activates a process that will eventually restore the skin on the wound. Piaget brings the desire for balance to the top step, not only cognitive, but development in general. The appearance of balance makes it possible to understand the aspects of the development of the psyche and mind. Cognitive adaptation is formed by two opposite0003

  opposite processes – assimilation and accommodation. Although these two phenomena have different directions, they are directly related and complementary aspects of behavior.

  Assimilation can be compared with the assimilation of food: each problematic situation is solved by existing actions or cognitive schemes. In the process of reading, one can observe the assimilation of information. Children can “grab” different objects using the grasp pattern. With the help of assimilation, the stability and preservation of the cognitive structure is ensured. In the case of accommodation, the schema applied to the new setting or goal changes; it gives you the opportunity to apply various options. Children learn to reach out their hands and fingers for each object in their own way, whether it be paper or a ball (the grasping pattern has undergone accommodation). By balancing accommodation and assimilation, improved adaptation can be achieved, but this phenomenon is inaccurate and temporary, it will again be replaced by an imbalance. It is not always possible to achieve a balance and then, any of these phenomena becomes predominant. The overbalance of the scales in the direction of assimilation can be seen by watching the children play. A block of wood for a child can easily turn into a doll, plane or car. Most often, accommodation can be observed in imitation and comparison of one’s behavior with the properties of external influences. Children’s minds are built around 9 actions0003

  / technical science

  and experiments with various objects. The subject, in order to cognize the object, needs to work with it at the same time: to grab, feel, bring closer, remove, move, etc. The accumulated experience is deposited in the child as a scheme of actions (one of the fundamental concepts of Piaget’s concept). This concept, precisely speaking, is those general actions that are preserved due to their repeated repetition. Otherwise, giving a more general concept of the scheme of actions, they say that this is a structured stage at certain levels of mental development. At some such stage of development, the scheme of actions becomes an operation (operational structure), hence the name of Piaget’s concept – operational. An operation is an internalized (internal) objective action that has become reversible and forms a system with others.

  Already during our lifetime, we develop a structure of mental activity, which further depends on the experience gained and changes at each stage of development. Assimilation and accommodation allow mental activity to develop continuously and successively, and the peculiar organization of the mental act helps to distinguish the stages of intelligence. According to Piaget, the development of the psyche is a change in the intellectual structure between dominant stages, which tune into each other in a certain order at different speeds (depending on getting rich or poor experience).

  Piaget singled out three stages of intelligence development: sensorimotor, concrete-operational (representative), and formal-operational. All periods are characterized both positively and negatively.

  Piaget’s study of developing thinking begins from the first two years of life and consists in a practical and substantive analysis of the child’s activity. This is where the period of sensorimotor development begins. Piaget himself was the educator of two daughters, Jacqueline and Lucien, as well as a son, Laurent, and directly observed their development, thereby distinguishing six stages of sensorimotor development. On each of them, the transition of the innate mechanism and sensory behavior (for example, the sucking reflex) to forms of structured behavior is carried out. The period from the birth of a child to one and a half to two years can be characterized by developing feelings and motor apparatus: he begins to look, listen, touch, smell due to the manifestation of interest in the world around him.

  There are sub-periods of sensorimotor intelligence: from seven to nine months, when the baby observes his own body; after the ninth month, when the formation of the objectification of the scheme of intellect in space takes place. At this stage, intelligence emerges when the child begins to use certain actions as a means to an end. At the end of the first sub-period, children discover

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  many connections between their own actions and results – if you pull up the diaper, you will get the typewriter located there. The appearance of independent and permanent existence of other objects begins to appear. The property of the “constancy” of an object lies in the fact that further this object for the child gets the opportunity for an independent existence. The once missing object seemed to “cease to exist” for the child, now he is actively looking for the object in front of his eyes.

  Another significant change is the fight against egocentrism and unconsciousness. The baby now distinguishes itself from the rest. Piaget assigned an important role to the processes of growing up, which create an opportunity for development. But in order for the baby’s intellect to develop, it is necessary to “communicate” with the outside world, manage objects, this allows the intellectual structures to be transformed and gradually improved.

  In the next period, the ability of the child’s intellect reaches a new level. At this stage, symbolic thinking develops for the first time, semiotic functions such as language and mental images are formed. Thinking processes begin to take shape, visualization of representations of objects; the child gives them names. ©i©Ma1>#26″), 2Ш9

  And yet, each of these logical operations is specific and applies only to a real, tangible object and action with it, subject to a certain environment in which the child is comfortable.

  The stage of the formal-operational structure is manifested in the child’s ability to reflect on topics of various subjects without much difficulty. The formal thought process is the main element of the logical thinking of an adult; elementary scientific knowledge, deduction and hypotheses are based on it. The ability of a person to come to conclusions according to the laws of elementary logic, the ability to put forward hypotheses and test them in experiments, to draw a conclusion, is called abstract thinking.

  One often notices merit in adolescent children in the experimental derivation of some simple laws of physics. In such situations, the guys at the preoperative level act randomly, counting on a lucky break; children of a particular stage of development are more collected, trying several options. The child of the last stage, having made some attempts, stops them and begins to think about compiling various correct options. Then he proceeds to check them, analyzes them, studies their mistakes and successes. This course of action – a direct test of the possible outcomes of an event – is based on a new logical structure, which Piaget characterized using propositional language.

  Adolescents show the ability to understand and build theories, join the view of

  the world of an adult, go beyond the experience gained. Hypothetically speaking, the adolescent enters the realm of possible outcomes; ideals are more often than not erroneous. Just feeling the new social role of an adult, adolescents face difficulties, begin to consider different situations, as a result, the final stage of intellectual de-centering in a new environment begins.

  Piaget identified some of the difficulties regarding the development of the intellect that occur during the period when the adolescent matures. During the formation of the life scheme, at the age of fifteen to twenty years, a structure of cognitive thinking appears, which each individual applies in a certain way, according to the required tasks, and a certain scheme is also formed for various activities.

  Child psychology in our time has all sorts of difficulties. Issues of diagnosing, improving testing and methods for their implementation in a preschool educational institution. Thus, the materials obtained by leading psychologists in the past enable scientists to solve serious problems of our time in psychology.

  References

  1. B.L. Wulfson. Comparative pedagogy History and modern problems. 2003

  2. Frenet S. Selected pedagogical works / Per. from fr. M., 1990.

  3. Akimov A.A., Vildyaeva A.A., Agafonova A.A. Freud’s School of Psychoanalysis // Diary of Science. 2017. No. 5 (5). S. 7.

  Preoperative stage of cognitive development

  The preoperative stage is the second stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. This stage begins around age 2, when children begin to talk, and lasts until about age 7.

  At this stage, children begin to participate in symbolic play and learn to manipulate symbols. However, Piaget noted that they do not yet understand the concrete logic.

  Illustration by Hugo Lin. Copyright © 2018 Verywell.

  Key features

  The preoperative stage occurs around the age of 2 to 7 years. Speech development is one of the hallmarks of this period.

  Piaget noted that children at this stage still do not understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information and cannot accept the point of view of other people, which he called egocentrism.

  In the preoperative phase, children also become increasingly adept at using symbols, as evidenced by an increase in play and pretense. For example, a child might use an object to represent something else, such as a broom for a horse. .

  Role play also becomes important – children often play the roles of “mommy”, “daddy”, “doctor” and many other characters.

  Understanding egocentrism

  Piaget used a number of creative and clever techniques to study the intelligence of children. One well-known technique for demonstrating self-centeredness is to use a three-dimensional image of a mountain. Children are often referred to as “three mountains task”. Children are asked to choose a picture that depicts the scene they were watching.

  Most children do this without much difficulty. The children are then asked to choose a picture showing what someone else, , would have noticed when looking at the mountain from a different perspective.

  Invariably, children almost always choose a scene showing their own view of the mountain. According to Piaget, children experience this difficulty because they cannot perceive the other person’s point of view.

  Other researchers have also done similar experiments. In one study, children were shown a room in a small dollhouse. In the dollhouse, the children were able to see that a toy was hidden behind the furniture. The children were then taken to a full-size room that was a replica of a dollhouse. Very young children did not understand the need to look behind the sofa to find a toy, and slightly older children immediately looked for a toy.

  Developmental psychologists refer to the ability to understand that other people have different points of view, thoughts, feelings, and mental states as a theory of mind.

  Understanding conservation

  Another well-known experiment involves demonstrating a child’s understanding of conservation principles. In one preservation experiment, an equal amount of liquid is poured into two identical containers. The liquid from one container is then poured into a cup of another shape, such as a tall and thin cup or a short and wide cup. The children are then asked which cup has the most liquid. Even though the amount of liquid was the same, children almost always choose the cup that feels fullest.

  Piaget carried out a series of similar experiments on the conservation of number, length, mass, weight, volume, and quantity. He found that few children under the age of five showed any understanding of nature conservation.

  Criticism

  As you can see, most of Piaget’s attention at this stage of development was focused on what children were not yet able to do. The concepts of egocentrism and conservation focus on abilities that children have not yet developed; they lack the understanding that things look different to other people and that objects can change in appearance while retaining the same properties.

  However, not everyone agrees with Piaget’s assessment of children’s abilities. For example, researcher Martin Hughes argued that the reason children failed on the Three Mountains task was simply that they did not understand it. In an experiment using puppets, Hughes demonstrated that children as young as 4 are able to understand situations from multiple perspectives, suggesting that children become less self-centered at an earlier age than Piaget believed. Interaction with others

  Piaget’s explanation of the four stages of cognitive development

  Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children go through four distinct stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence. Piaget’s steps:

  • Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years
  • Preoperative: 2 to 7 years
  • Concrete life stage: age 7 to 11 years
  • Official stage of the operation: 12 years and older

  Piaget believed that children take an active part in the learning process, acting much like little scientists, conducting experiments, observing and learning about the world. As children interact with the world around them, they constantly add new knowledge, build on existing knowledge and adapt previously put forward ideas for posting new information.

  Illustration by Joshua Song, Verywell

  How Piaget developed the theory

  Born in Switzerland in the late 1800s, Piaget was a precocious student, having published his first scientific work when he was only 11 years old. His early exposure to the intellectual development of children came when he worked as an assistant to Alfred Binet and Theodor Simon when they were working to standardize their famous IQ test.

  Piaget’s interest in the cognitive development of children was largely inspired by his observations of his own nephew and daughter. These observations supported his nascent hypothesis that children’s minds are not just smaller versions of adult minds.

  Up to this point in history, children have been treated simply as smaller copies of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify that the way children think is different from the way adults think.

  Instead, he proposed that intelligence is something that grows and develops through a series of stages. He suggested that older children don’t just think faster than younger children. Instead, there are qualitative and quantitative differences between the thinking of young children and older children.

  Based on his observations, he came to the conclusion that children are no less smart than adults, they just think differently. Albert Einstein called Piaget’s discovery “so simple that only a genius could think of it. »

  Piaget’s stage theory describes the cognitive development of children. Cognitive development includes changes in cognitive processes and abilities. According to Piaget, early cognitive development includes action-based processes and then moves on to changes in mental operations.

  Stages

  By observing his children, Piaget developed a staged theory of intellectual development that includes four distinct stages:

  Sensorimotor cascade

  Age: from birth to 2 years

  Main characteristics and developmental changes:

  • The infant learns the world through its movements and sensations
  • Children explore the world through basic activities such as sucking, grasping, looking and listening
  • Babies learn that things continue to exist even if they cannot be seen (object permanence)
  • They are separate beings from the people and objects around them
  • They understand that their actions can cause something in the world around them

  At this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and preschool children acquire knowledge through sensory experience and the manipulation of objects. All of a child’s experience in the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, feelings, and motor responses.

  It is during the sensorimotor stage that children experience a period of rapid growth and learning. By interacting with the environment, children are constantly making new discoveries about how the world works.

  The cognitive development that occurs during this period occurs over a relatively short period of time and involves significant growth. Not only do children learn to perform physical activities such as crawling and walking; they also learn a lot about the language from the people they interact with. Piaget also broke this stage into several different sub-stages. It is during the final part of the sensorimotor stage that early representational thought occurs.

  Piaget believed that the development of object permanence or object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, was an important element in this stage of development.

  Having learned that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they exist on their own outside of individual perception, children can then begin to attach names and words to objects.

  Preoperative

  Age: 2 to 7 years

  Key characteristics and developmental changes:

  • Children begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects.
  • Children at this stage tend to be self-centered and try their best to see things from the point of view of others.
  • Although they improve language and thinking, they still tend to think about things in very specific terms.

  The foundations of language development could have been laid at the previous stage, but it is the appearance of language that is one of the main signs of the preoperative stage of development.

  Children become much more proficient at role play at this stage of development, but they continue to think very concretely about the world around them.

  At this stage, children are learning through role play, but are still struggling with logic and understanding other people’s point of view. They also often struggle with understanding the idea of ​​permanence.
  For example, the researcher might take a piece of clay, divide it into two equal parts, and then give the child a choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a compact ball, and the other is smashed into the shape of a flat pancake. Since the flat shape is looks larger, a pre-op child is more likely to choose this piece even if the two pieces are exactly the same size.

  Concrete stage of operation

  Age: 7 to 11 years

  Main characteristics and developmental changes

  • At this stage, children begin to think logically about specific events
  • They begin to understand the concept of conservation; that the amount of liquid in a short wide cup is equal to the amount of liquid in a tall thin cup, for example
  • Their thinking becomes more logical and organized, but still very specific.
  • Children begin to use inductive logic or reason from specific information to a general principle

  Although at this stage of development, children are still very specific and literal in their thinking, they become much more adept at using logic. The egocentrism of the previous stage begins to fade as children begin to think better about how other people might view a situation.

  Although thinking becomes much more logical in a particular working state, it can also be very rigid. Children at this developmental stage tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts.

  During this stage, children also become less self-centered and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. Children in the concrete operation phase also begin to understand that their thoughts are unique to them and that not everyone else necessarily shares their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

  Formal operational stage

  Age: from 12 years old

  Main characteristics and developmental changes:

  • At this stage, the adolescent or young person begins to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems
  • The emergence of abstract thought
  • Adolescents begin to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social and political issues that require theoretical and abstract reasoning.
  • Start using deductive logic or reasoning from a general principle to specific information

  The final stage of Piagetian theory includes the development of logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning, and an understanding of abstract ideas. At this stage, people become able to see many potential solutions to problems and think more scientifically about the world around them.

  The ability to think about abstract ideas and situations is a key feature of the formal operational stage of cognitive development. The ability to systematically plan for the future and reason about hypothetical situations are also critical abilities that emerge during this stage.

  It is important to note that Piaget did not see the intellectual development of children as a quantitative process; That is, children do not simply add more information and knowledge to their existing knowledge as they grow up. Instead, Piaget suggested that there is a qualitative change in the way children think as they gradually progress through these four stages. A child at the age of 7 years does not just have more information about the world than at age 2; In , the way he thinks about the world.
  

  Important concepts

  To better understand some of the things that happen during cognitive development, it’s important to first explore a few important ideas and concepts introduced by Piaget.

  The following are some of the factors that influence how children learn and grow:

  Diagrams

  The diagram describes both mental and physical activities related to understanding and knowledge. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us interpret and understand the world.

  From Piaget’s point of view, the schema includes both the category of knowledge and the process of obtaining this knowledge. As experience develops, this new information is used to modify, add, or change pre-existing schemas.

  For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If a child’s only experience was with small dogs, the child might think that all dogs are small, fluffy, and have four legs. Suppose a child meets a huge dog. The child will accept this new information by changing the pre-existing schema to include these new observations.

  Assimilation

  The process of incorporating new information into our pre-existing schemas is known as assimilation. This process is somewhat subjective because we tend to modify experiences and information slightly to fit our pre-existing beliefs. In the example above, observing a dog and labeling it “dog” is a case of assimilation of the animal into the child’s dog schema.

  Housing

  Another part of adaptation involves modifying or modifying our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as adaptation. Adaptation involves changing existing schemas or ideas as a result of gaining new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

  Balance

  Piaget believed that all children are trying to find a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is achieved through a mechanism that Piaget called balancing. As children go through stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to reflect new knowledge (adjustment). Balancing helps explain how children can move from one stage of thinking to another.

  Word Verywell

  One of the most important elements of Piaget’s theory to keep in mind is that it holds the view that the creation of knowledge and intelligence is an inherently active process.

  “I oppose views of knowledge as a passive copy of reality,” Piaget explained. “I believe that knowing an object means influencing it, building systems of transformations that can be performed on this object or with it. Cognition of reality means building systems of transformations that more or less adequately correspond to reality.”

  Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has helped us broaden our understanding of children’s intellectual development. He also emphasized that children are not just passive recipients of knowledge. Instead, children are constantly exploring and experimenting to understand how the world works.

  Piaget cognitive developmental stages

  What are the Piaget developmental stages?

  Piaget’s stages of development are part of the theory of the phases of normal intellectual development, from infancy to adulthood. These include thoughts, judgments, and knowledge. The stages were named after the developmental psychologist and biologist Jean Piaget, who recorded the intellectual development and abilities of infants, children, and adolescents.

  Piaget’s four stages of intellectual (or cognitive) development:

  • Sensorimotor. From birth to 18-24 months of age
  • Preoperative period. From toddlers (18-24 months) to early childhood (ages 7)
  • Concrete in working order. Ages 7 to 11
  • Officially in working order. From adolescence to adulthood

  Piaget acknowledged that some children may go through stages at an age other than the average above. He also said that some children may exhibit characteristics of more than one stage at the same time.

  But he insisted on the following:

  • Cognitive development always follows this sequence.
  • Stages cannot be skipped.
  • Each stage is marked by new intellectual abilities and a more complex understanding of the world.

  Piaget’s 1936 theory broke new ground as he discovered that children’s brains work quite differently from those of adults. Before his theory, many believed that children were not yet capable of thinking as well as adults.

  Some experts disagree with his concept of stages. Instead, they consider development to be continuous. Another criticism is that Piaget did not take into account how children’s culture and social environment influence their development.

  Sensorimotor Stage

  According to Piaget, in the early stages, babies are only aware of what is directly in front of them. They focus on what they see, what they are doing, and on physical interaction with their immediate environment.

  Because they don’t yet know how things react, they are constantly experimenting. They shake or throw things, put things in their mouths, and learn the world through trial and error. Later stages involve purposeful behavior leading to the desired outcome.

  Between 7 and 9 months of age, babies begin to understand that an object exists, even if they can no longer see it. This important milestone, known as object persistence, is a sign of memory development.

  Once babies begin to crawl, stand and walk, their increased physical mobility leads to greater cognitive development. Toward the end of the sensorimotor stage (18–24 months), infants reach another important milestone, early language development, which is a sign that they are developing some symbolic abilities.

  Preoperative

  In this stage (toddler to 7 years old) young children can think of things symbolically. Their use of language becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between the past and the future and to pretend.

  But their thinking is intuitive and yet not entirely logical. They are not yet able to understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time and comparison.

  Specific operational stage

  During this time, toddlers and teens between the ages of 7 and 11 demonstrate logical and concrete reasoning.

  Children’s thinking becomes less self-centered. They become more aware of external events. They begin to realize that their own thoughts and feelings are unique and may not be shared by others or even be part of reality.

  But at this stage, most children still cannot think abstractly or hypothetically.

  Formal operational stage

  Adolescents who reach this fourth stage of intellectual development—usually by the age of 11—can use symbols associated with abstract concepts such as algebra and science. They can think about things systematically, come up with theories, and consider capabilities. They may also think about abstract relationships and concepts such as justice.

  Although Piaget believed in continuous intellectual growth, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development. He also said that the further intellectual development of adults depends on the accumulation of knowledge.

  Piaget’s stages of development

  Along with stages of development, Piaget’s theory has several other basic concepts.

  Schemas are thought processes that are essentially the building blocks of knowledge. For example, a child knows that he must suckle in order to eat. This is a schema.

  Assimilation is how you use existing schemas to interpret a new situation or object. For example, a child who sees a skunk for the first time may call it a cat.

  Placement is what happens when you change the schema or create a new one to fit the new information you are learning. The child adjusts when he realizes that not all furry four-legged creatures are cats.

  The balance of occurs when you can use assimilation to accommodate most of the new information you are learning. This way you don’t keep adding new schemas all the time.

  Using Piaget’s stages of development

  Piaget’s theory influenced the education and upbringing of children. Here are some practical ways teachers and parents can put his ideas into practice:

  • Remember that children often learn best by doing things, not by hearing about them. You can’t learn to solve problems. It must be discovered.
  • The process of learning is just as (or even more) important than the end result.
  • Do not try to teach a child something he is not ready for. According to Piaget’s stages, children must master one level before moving on to the next.
  • Children learn as much from each other as they do from their parents or teachers. Give them joint projects or individual tasks.

  Preparatory | Play Encyclopedia

  The preoperative stage is the second of four stages proposed by Jean Piaget to describe the cognitive development of infants, children, and adolescents. Piaget was a developmental biologist who became interested in closely observing and recording children’s intellectual abilities. Piaget suggested that cognitive development occurs in stages, and distributed these stages according to the ages of children.

  From birth to about 2 years of age – sensorimotor stage. The preoperative stage (age 2-7 years) runs from early childhood to early childhood. The specific operational stage is from 7 to 12 years. The formal operational stage occurs from the age of 12 to adulthood.

  Piaget acknowledged that children may go through stages at different ages than what he considered normal, but insisted that cognitive development always follows this sequence and that stages should not be skipped. Each stage marks new intellectual abilities and a more complex understanding of the world.

  During the preparatory phase, children learn to use the symbols of the language. Their thinking is before (before) operations, that is, they cannot use logic or transform, combine or separate ideas.

  Between 2 and 7 years of age, preoperative children are described as egocentric. They are controlled by their own perceptions, thoughts and ideas and cannot take into account the point of view of others. The preoperative stage is divided into two sub-stages: the symbolic function sub-stage (ages 2-4) and the intuitive thinking sub-stage (ages 4-7).

  By about 2 years of age, the emergence of language demonstrates that children have acquired the ability to think about something without the presence of an object. The ability to mentally represent objects and events allows for more complex symbolism. This can be seen as young children express themselves in their artistic attempts to draw to depict things they are familiar with, such as houses, trees, flowers, and people.

  Because of their egocentricity, children in the sub-stage of symbolic function have difficulty distinguishing between their own views and those of others. The assumption that other children share the same feelings and thoughts can lead to difficulties in play situations when they encounter resistance to their ideas about how their play should be played. The main function of speech at this stage is to externalize one’s own thinking, rather than trying to communicate with others. Their conversations are often unrelated to what others are saying. Thus, young children often engage in parallel play with others rather than playing with them. They have not yet grasped the social function of language or rules.

  As young children develop an attachment to symbols, they find it difficult to share objects or people they consider their own. Adults often mistake toys for selfishness and therefore see their toys as part of themselves, which prevents them from giving them up. When a new baby comes into the house, young children perceive that their mother is theirs alone as part of their symbolic “me and mine” mindset, and resistance to the “intruder” is often seen.

  A kind of magical thinking also arises when we think that events that happen together cause each other. Therefore, children often become attached to a blanket or soft toy, because once this object was associated with comfort and good feelings, and subsequently they believe that it causes good feelings and begin to rely on it.

  Young children are becoming more and more adept at using symbols, as evidenced by their play and pretense. Role playing as mom, dad, or other significant people they have been watching, as well as using objects to represent something else, becomes important at this age. When children discover dangers, unpleasant people, and experiences, they may begin to express their fears in dreams and symbolic play. Because of their feelings of powerlessness, superhero games often draw them in to help them feel more powerful.

  Piaget described preoperative children as seeing the natural world alive, conscious, and purposeful. He used the term “animism” to describe children’s belief that inanimate objects such as their toys and teddy bears have human feelings and intentions. He identified four stages of animism. Children up to 4-5 years old believe that almost everything that is alive has a purpose. Between the ages of 5 and 7, only moving objects have a target. At the next stage, for children aged 7 to 9 years, only objects that spontaneously move are considered alive. K 9-12 years old children understand that only plants and animals are alive.

  Preoperative children aged 4 to 7 enter the sub-stage of intuitive thinking. Primitive reasoning begins with the fact that the thought processes of children change from symbolic thinking to intuitive. Descendants can organize objects into primitive collections, but inconsistently. Because they tend to focus or only focus on one attribute of objects at a time, their organization can be one time in shape and color in another. This is called centering, and once children can move beyond this limited thinking, they can manifest classification and conservation abilities that become apparent at a particular operational stage.

  Piaget described the preoperative stage in more detail about the limitations of children’s thinking and the mental tasks they cannot perform. These included the inability to decenter, preserve, understand that objects could be organized in a logical order, and perform inclusion tasks. He performed a number of experiments on the conservation of number, length, mass, weight, volume, and quantity. Conservation is the understanding that something remains the same in quantity even if its appearance changes. Pre-operational children focus on how the object looks now and cannot track transformations. They also fail to understand that the reverse transformation will return the material to its original state. These abilities are developed at the next specific stage of operation.

  Jean Piaget and his theory and stages of cognitive development

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  One of the most popular theories of cognitive development was created by Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who believed that cognitive growth occurs in stages. Piaget studied children up to adolescence, trying to determine how they develop logical thinking. He tried to document the stages of cognitive development by observing children’s memory processes.

  Jean Piaget

  Basically, Piaget believed that people create their own understanding of the world. From the point of view of theology, he was a psychological constructivist , believing that learning is the result of a mixture of two processes: assimilation and adaptation. Children first reflect on their previous experiences to understand a new concept and then adjust their expectations to incorporate the new experience. This means that children continuously build knowledge based on newly presented ideas, resulting in long-term change. Piaget was more focused on the cognitive developments presented over time.

  Related:

  In his research, Piaget stated that cognitive development occurs in four stages throughout childhood:

  1. The stages are in order.
  2. Children did not skip the stages, but passed each of them.
  3. There are visible changes from one stage to the next.
  4. Stages are presented as building blocks, each of which consists of parts of the last stage.

  Stages of cognitive development

  This type of developmental model incorporates each stage into the next, which is why it is often referred to as a “ladder” model. On this ladder, Piaget outlined four stages of cognitive growth that occurred in children around the age.

  1. Sensorimotor intelligence, from birth to 2 years.
  2. Preoperative thinking, 2 to 7 years.
  3. Concrete operational thinking, 7 to 11 years.
  4. Formal operational thinking, from 11 years old.

  Sensorimotor stage: Birth to 2 years

  The first stage is aptly named after the way infants learn until the age of two. From birth, babies perceive information through their senses: touching, looking and listening. They are very fixated on the oral cavity and tend to put everything in their mouths. Piaget believed that this stage was valuable for their development, and each subsequent step is built on the growth that occurs at this stage.

  We can observe the thought processes of infants through their actions. From about 6 months old, babies begin to organize ideas into stable concepts that don’t change. An infant may not understand a particular toy at first, but as he begins to look at it, feel it, and manipulate it frequently, he may visualize the object in his mind. This is how we can begin to observe knowledge in infants as they begin to demonstrate understanding of the object as it is. For example, by continuously playing with a toy animal, an infant begins to understand what kind of object it is and to remember his experience associated with this toy. Piaget designated this understanding as persistence of object , indicating knowledge of the toy even if it is out of sight. He considered this insight to be an important milestone in the sensorimotor stage and believed that it demonstrated differences in the thought processes of toddlers compared to infants.

  The sensorimotor stage is unique in that it occurs without the use of language. Because babies can’t talk, Piaget did some creative experiments trying to figure out what they were thinking. His experiments were able to demonstrate that babies actually represent objects and understand that they are permanent. In one of his experiments, Piaget constantly hid a toy under the covers. Toddlers or children aged 18 to 24 months searched for the toy themselves, while infants under 6 months did not. Older infants have interpreted the concealment of the toy as an urge to seek it out, which is thought to support the idea of ​​the object’s permanence.

  Preoperative stage: 2 to 7 years

  Children continue to use object representation important for the sensorimotor stage in a variety of activities. Although the way they represent objects has no logic or arguments, they continue to grow in this area until dramatic play . Artistic play, or the art of invention, is an indicative sign of this age and stage.

  Since drama is considered to be educational, teachers often promote its use in the classroom. The preoperative stage occurs between the ages of two and seven, meaning that creative activity is encouraged from preschool through second grade. Drama play is considered one of the first demonstrations of metacognition in children, or dualistic thinking. While engaging in creative play, children simultaneously reflect on real-life experiences.

  Specific stage of exploitation: ages 7 to 11

  In Piaget’s next stage, children begin to present objects and ideas more logically. Although the thought process is not at the same level as adults, they become more flexible in their thoughts and ideas. This allows them to solve problems more systematically, which leads to greater success in learning activities at school. Piaget called this stage concrete operational, because he believed that children can manage specific objects, but do not yet think methodically about representations of objects. Only later can children think about abstract events and manipulate ideas about events. For example, a child might implement the rule “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.” “Applying system rules or ideas can help a child solve simple problems in the classroom, such as addition and subtraction problems or scientific calculations.

  There are two things that distinguish concrete operational thinking from preoperative thinking. The first one is reversibility , which allows the child to control the order of any process. We can use the example of a scientific experiment with a shell or a float to demonstrate the existence of reversibility. In this experiment, the child places various objects in a bucket of water, testing whether they float or sink. A child in the preoperative stage will be able to describe the procedure performed, but only a child in a specific operational stage will be able to retell the experiment in various ways, for example, in chronological order or in random order. . Multi-step procedures are common in the classroom, making reversibility a valuable learning skill. Children who are still in the pre-operational stage may need help in performing activities in the form of prompts or reminders from the teacher. We can use the vocabulary learning task from the story as an example in class. The teacher can give the students a multi-step instruction: firstly, write down the words you don’t know when you meet them in the story, secondly, look up the definition before continue the story, and third, have a friend ask you questions about all the words you just learned. This type of multi-stage learning involves repeatedly returning to the first and second task, which can only be done by children who have already reached a particular work stage.

  The second acquired skill is decentralization . This allows the child to take a step back and analyze the problem from several angles. The ability to look at the problem from a different point of view is a key feature of a particular operational stage. We can observe the appearance of this ability at the preoperative stage, when children begin to participate in dramatic play. For example, a child might use a banana to mimic a phone, demonstrating awareness that the banana is both a banana and a phone. Piaget argued that children at a particular operational stage make more informed and calculated choices, demonstrating that they are aware of their decentralization. An example in the classroom can be displayed as a simple worksheet. Using multi-step instruction, the teacher can ask students to identify all problems that meet two criteria: this is a two-digit subtraction problem, and it requires regrouping. The child is only responsible for solving problems that meet both of these requirements. A child in a particular operational stage can easily move between the first and second criteria, analyzing each problem to see if it meets both specifications. This task also assumes that the student is already able to independently regroup subtraction tasks.

  Both reversibility and decentralization tend to go together in educational institutions. As you can see from the example worksheet, the procedures can be executed out of order as long as there are multiple criteria. Piaget had a popular example demonstrating the idea of ​​the conservation of , or the idea that the quantity would remain the same despite the shape. For his experiment, he used two clay balls of the same size. Although a child in the preoperative stage may testify that two clay balls “look the same,” they base their assumptions solely on external observations. If one ball of clay has been stretched as thin as a hot dog, the child may claim that they are different in preparation for surgery, even if the same amount of clay was used for the mold. At a specific stage of work, the child understands that two different forms can be made from the same volume of clay. The child can justify their answer using reversibility, stating that “you can compress it back into a ball” or decentralize, for example, “it can be longer, but thinner.” Piaget argued that children at this stage can show conservation of quantity, despite to the form.

  Formal operational stage: age 11 and over

  As children progress to the formal operational stage, they may think about more abstract ideas. Like the concrete operational stage, the formal operational stage takes its name from the newly acquired skill of representing objects or events. In the classroom, the teacher can now ask hypothetical questions with reasonable expectations. Students must internally reflect on various ideas and manipulate multiple points of view at the same time. “What if the world had never discovered electricity?” “What if European settlers never left for the New World?” Abstract questions such as these force students to use hypothetical reasoning for an answer.

  Piaget was most interested in hypothetical reasoning in scientific experiments, resulting in most of his research being done in middle and high school. In one study, students are asked questions about a pendulum, an axis on which weights are freely suspended. “What determines how fast a pendulum will swing: the length of the rope holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance it is pulled away?”

  The students participating in Piaget’s experiments were not allowed to physically solve the problem by manipulating the pendulum, they were asked to verbally justify the solution. This meant that people were forced to imagine all the factors independently, taking into account the factors that remained constant. The ability to solve this problem in a systematic way was a clear determinant of the formal operations in the thought process. The ability to manipulate different outcomes is a precise skill of the formal operational stage.

  There are clear benefits for students who have already reached the formal operating stage. They require much less support in problem solving, which allows them to be more independent in the educational environment and need less guidance from teachers. However, this does not mean that they can successfully complete all academic tasks, and this is not the only way to do this. Self-regulation remains an important part of academic success; if a student lacks self-motivation or misbehaves, they don’t do as well in school. Formal operational thinking also does not involve special skills such as musical and artistic talent or athletic greatness. One of the criticisms of Piaget’s theory is that this stage only covered the solution of scientific problems in an educational environment, which most people do not encounter in their daily lives. Thus, many never reach this level of operational thinking, and if they do, they use it only in inexperienced and familiar situations. This proves that more research is needed on the development of personal and interactive problems in children and young people.

  PREOPERATIVE STAGE

  The preoperative stage occurs between the ages of 2 and 6 and is the second stage of Piaget’s cognitive development.

  During most of the preoperative stage, the child’s thinking is egocentric or egocentric. According to Piaget, at the stage of preparation for surgery, it is difficult for a child to understand life from any other point of view than his own. At this stage, the child is very oriented towards me, myself and me.

  Egocentrism is very noticeable in the relationship between two preschoolers. Imagine that two children are playing next to each other: one is playing with a coloring book and the other is playing with a doll. They take turns talking to each other, but each child is completely oblivious to what the other is saying.

  Julie: “I love my cart, her name is Tina”

  Carol: “I’m going to dye the sun yellow”

  Julie: “She has long curly hair like my aunt”

  Carol: “Maybe I can paint the trees yellow too.”

  Julie: “I wonder what Tina’s eyes are made of? »

  Carol: “I lost my orange pencil”

  Julie: “I know her eyes are made of glass.”

  This type of exchange is called “collective monologues”. This type of monologue demonstrates the egocentricity of the child’s thinking at this stage.

  The egocentrism of a small child makes them believe that everyone thinks the same as they do, and that the whole world shares their feelings and desires. This sense of oneness with the world leads to the child’s assumptions of magical omnipotence. The world is not only created for them, they can control it. This leads the child to believe that nature is alive and controlled. This is the concept of egocentrism, known as “animism” , most characteristic of egocentric thought.

  Closely related to animism is artificiality , or the idea that natural phenomena are created by people. Such as the sun creates a man with a match. “Realism” is the child’s idea that his own point of view is objective and absolute. The child thinks from one point of view and considers this reality to be absolute. Names, for example, are real to a child. The child cannot understand that names are just verbal labels, or imagine that they could have been given a different name.

  In the preoperative stage, the child begins to develop the use of symbols (but cannot manipulate them), and the child can use language and words to represent invisible things. In addition, the preoperative child begins to cope with conservation problems. Although the child still cannot think in a truly logical way, the child may begin to refer to objects as part of a group. The child may have difficulty classifying before surgery.

  At the last stage of the preoperative stage, the child begins to understand between reality and fantasy. The child also begins to understand sexual roles in society.

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  Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development – Psychology in Action

  Preoperative Preparation (2-7 years): During the preoperative stage, children continue to acquire motor skills; however, this stage is much more characterized by children’s play patterns and a lack of logical thinking. As in the sensorimotor stage, children in the preoperative stage are involved in highly egocentric thinking, in which they are unable to conceptualize the other person’s point of view as different from their own (e.g., ” My favorite food is pasta, so my friend Michael’s favorite food is also pasta!”). During this stage, children also engage in a lot of imaginary/symbolic play (eg, pretending a cardboard box is a racing car; having tea parties with soft toys or imaginary friends).

  Notable cognitive characteristics of this stage are centering and, accordingly, a lack of understanding of preservation . When children are engaged in centering, they pay attention to only one property of the object, ignoring other properties and often making false conclusions. One way to observe the lack of preservation in children at this stage is to give them two equal-sized glasses with an equal amount of liquid, and then pour the liquid from one into a taller, thinner glass. When children see this, they will say that tall thin glass holds more liquid than shorter, wider glass, simply because tall glass is taller.

  Specific worker (7-11 years old): When children reach a specific operational stage, they become capable of logical thinking in specific circumstances and adult-like thinking patterns begin to emerge. Although they are not yet able to engage in hypothetical or abstract thinking, they show a better understanding of the properties and relationships of objects than children in the pre-operational stage. Children at this stage are no longer self-centered—they can take other’s perspectives—and no longer show focus, and they now understand conservation. In addition, they can classify objects based on a variety of characteristics (e.g., colors, numbers, masses, shapes). According to Piaget’s theory, while children at a particular operational stage have difficulty with deductive reasoning (using a general principle to predict a particular outcome), they may use inductive reasoning (using a few specific examples to find an overarching rule or characteristic).

  Formal Worker (ages 11-16 to adulthood): This stage develops the ability to think about abstract concepts. People in the formal operational stage use deductive reasoning and can engage in logical and methodical problem solving.

  While Piaget’s theory certainly had an impact on developmental psychology, it is not without its weaknesses. First of all, the theory suggests that development is a smooth, continuous process; Once children have thought patterns typical of the next developmental stage, they no longer exhibit patterns typical of the previous stage. Anyone who has experience with children can tell you that this is not entirely true: development does not occur evenly, linearly, and children who exhibit thought processes specific to a particular operational stage one day may exhibit preoperative thought processes the next day. Second, Piaget’s theory assumes that all processes are common to a domain, and that the ability to reason about one domain means that one can reason about other domains. This theory also ignores other environmental factors that are critical to children’s development, such as language and other sociocultural factors.

  Stages of a child’s intellectual development according to Jean Piaget

  Jean Piaget, a Swiss scientist, psychologist, philosopher, worked in science for 60 years, he created the Geneva School of Psychology. J. Piaget studied the intellectual development of the child and in his writings showed how it changes throughout childhood and adolescence.

  Examining the development of the child’s intellect, J. Piaget determined that it goes through a number of stages – these are stages or levels of development that successively replace each other. At each stage, a certain balance is reached, which is then disturbed, but the order of the stages remains unchanged.

  Piaget believed that the process of the development of intelligence is a change of three large stages, during which the formation of three main intellectual structures takes place: first, sensorimotor structures (systems of sequentially performed material actions) are formed, then structures of specific operations arise (systems of actions performed in the mind , but relying on external visual data), later formal-logical operations are formed (the highest stage in the development of intelligence).

  According to J. Piaget, intellectual development is a transition from the lower stages to the higher ones, and each previous stage prepares the next one, is rebuilt at a higher level.

  Sensorimotronic stage

  This is the period of sensorimotor intelligence that covers the first two years of life. The baby’s speech is not yet developed, there are no ideas, behavior is based on the coordination of movement and perception (that’s why it is called the sesomotor stage). Having been born, the child has congenital reflexes. For example, the sucking reflex may change over time: every day the baby sucks better and not only during meals, but also after he can suck fingers or objects that have touched his mouth. This is stage reflex exercises (0 – 1 month) . As a result, the first skills (1 – 4 meters) are also formed.

  Then the baby turns his head in the direction of the noise, he can follow the movement of the object with his eyes and try to grab it with his hand. These are primary circular reactions (1 – 4 m.) or repetitive actions that are reinforced by the child’s own activity. Secondary circular reactions (4 – 8m.) appear when the baby is not focused on his activity, but on the changes caused by actions. For example, a child may shake a rattle for a long time in order to prolong the sound that interested him. Later, when actions give an unexpected effect (a new impression), the baby repeats it and reinforces the new scheme – this is the beginning practical intelligence (8 – 12 m.) . When a child deliberately changes his actions, actively experiments in order to look at the result, tertiary circular reactions appear (12 – 18 months) .

  Further, the baby is already able to combine his actions in his mind and come to the right decision – internalization of actions (18 – 24 months) takes place. About two years, an internal action plan is being formed. For example, a child has toys in both hands and needs to open the door. He places them on the floor, while noticing that the opening door can hit them. He moves the toys to another place and opens the door.

  This ends the first sensorimotor stage and the child moves on to another stage of representational intelligence and specific operations.

  Stage of representational intelligence and specific operations

  This is the period of thinking with the help of representations. The lack of development of verbal thinking and a strong figurative beginning lead to a kind of childish logic. The kid is not yet capable of proof and reasoning at the stage preoperative representations (2 – 7 years) . He focuses on the external signs of objects. He considers things as they are given by direct perception. For example, children think that the wind is blowing because the trees are swaying. J. Piaget called this phenomenon realism. Children with pre-operational ideas are characterized by insensitivity to contradictions, lack of connection between judgments, a tendency to connect everything with everything, a transition from the particular to the particular, bypassing the general, etc.

  0010 egocentrism . Egocentrism is a special intellectual position of the child. Children perceive the world around them only from their own point of view, not understanding or accepting others. They choose what is best for them and closer. Egocentric thinking is characteristic of every period of child development.

  By the age of 7-8, the stage of pre-operational representations ends. Children gain an understanding of the conservation of the amount of matter, as well as the fact that during transformations, some properties of objects are preserved, while others change. Stage 9 begins0010 specific operations (7 – 11 years old) . At this stage, children are able to reason and prove, take into account different points of view. For logical operations, visualization is necessary, they cannot be performed in a hypothetical plan, and therefore are specific. By the age of 11, preparation for the formation of scientific concepts begins.

  The stage of formal operations

  This is the highest period of the child’s intellectual development. At the stage of formal operations (11-15 years old) children are freed from attachment to objects given by perception and begin to think like adults. They can consider judgments as hypotheses from which various consequences can be deduced, thinking becomes hypothetical-deductive.

  Stages of a child’s mental development

  Most developmental theories recognize that a person develops in stages, that is, in order to reach maturity, he must successively go through several stages . There are several schemes for describing the mental development of a child.

  Some researchers believe that mental development is a continuous and unchanging sequence of stages, each of which is prepared by the previous one. Others argue that the evolution of a child is a sequence of reorganizations, including the addition or suppression of some functions at certain points. We will focus on Piaget’s theory.

  There are three major stages in a child’s intellectual development.

  Sensorimotor stage (from birth to 2 years)

  At this stage, the child acquires motor and sensory abilities. In other words, he listens, examines, hits, crushes, bends, pushes, pours. Thus, on the basis of hereditary mechanisms and the first motor skills, various actions are gradually linked to each other. This gives rise to new means to achieve certain goals.

  The sensorimotor stage includes six stages:

  • Congenital reflexes (first month of life) – sucking, grasping. They are triggered by external stimuli and become more effective with repetition.

  • Motor skills (from 1 to 4 months) – sucking at the sight of a feeding bottle, grasping a bottle with a hand, etc. These skills are formed as conditioned reflexes.

  • Circular reactions (from 4 to 8 months) – grasping a string on which a rattle is suspended to make it make a sound, etc. This skill is formed through the development of coordination between perceptual systems and motor circuits.

  • Coordination of means and ends (from 8 to 12 months). The child’s actions become more and more deliberate, he is directed towards achieving the goal (for example, he moves the experimenter’s hand away to reach for the doll hidden behind it).

  • The discovery of new means (from 12 to 18 months) occurs in a child by chance, but causes the child to form a connection between the action and its result. For example, by pulling a rug towards him, a child can get a toy lying on it.

  • Invention of new means (18 to 24 months) – the child learns to find original solutions to problems as a result of already existing schemes of actions and suddenly emerging ideas.

  Stage of specific operations (from 2 to 11 years old)

  Further internalization of actions takes place and their transformation into operations that allow the child to compare, classify, measure, arrange in a row, etc. Thus, when dealing with concrete things, the child discovers that what he has finished building can be destroyed, and then recreated anew or in a different form. In other words, the child learns that there is a certain type of action that is reversible and can be integrated into general structures, and this allows him to operate with such categories as quantity, size, number, capacity, weight, volume, etc.

  The concrete operations stage is also divided into several stages.

  • The pre-operational level (from 2 to 5 years) represents the first stage of the internalization of actions. It is characterized by the development of symbolic thinking, which allows the child to imagine objects or stimuli using mental images and designate them with names or symbols, rather than direct actions

  However, the operations that the child is trying to perform at this time are limited by the still too narrow range of thinking and its egocentric character. At this age, the child does not seem to be able to take into account the various aspects of a given situation at the same time.

  • The first level of concrete operations (from 5-6 to 7-8 years) is reached when the child is able to understand that two attributes of an object, such as the shape and amount of a substance, are independent of each other (the fact that the sausage is long and thin, does not affect the amount of plasticine from which it is made). This idea of ​​the preservation of some features of an object extends already to the material from which it is made, to its length, and then, at the next level of development, also to its mass and volume. In this period of time, the child acquires the ability to both arrange objects in a row (for example, in order of decreasing size) and classify them (learns to classify blue objects as blue, birds as birds, etc.).

  • At the second level of specific operations (from 8 to 11 years old), the child, in addition to the idea of ​​conservation of mass and volume L, also receives an idea of ​​time and speed, as well as measurements with the help of a standard. At the end of this period, the child, in addition, more and more deeply understands the relationship between the features of objects; this allows him to arrange objects in space, solve problems of perspective or simple physical problems, and show him the way to logical thinking, characteristic of adolescents and adults.

  Stage of formal operations (from 11-12 to 14-15 years old)

  At this stage mental operations can be performed without any specific support. In fact, we are talking about abstract thinking, functioning with the help of hypotheses and deductions.

  Based on the book by J. Godfroy “What is psychology”

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