Piaget’s Theory

Cognition comprises memory and thinking processes, and the development of cognition refers to the long-term changes in these processes. Jean Piaget is known for his contribution to psychology through his cognitive stage theory. He focused on children and their cognitive skills and connected their growth with their ability to think scientifically and logically. This article is about Piaget’s theory and its relation to cognitive development in youth and children.

Who Was Jean Piaget?

Jean Piaget was a Swiss constructive psychologist. He thought that learning involves assimilating and accommodating new experiences with concepts. He believed in the assimilation of new experiences to fit in existing concepts and accommodation of concepts to allow new experiences. These two processes work hand-in-hand and allow us to act on short-term learning. In addition to that, it also affects our long-term developmental change. Piaget observed children minutely and proposed that cognition in human beings took place in certain stages of their growth from being a toddler to an adolescent. 

As far as stages are concerned, Piaget believed that the sequence of thinking has four main features, which are as follows:

1. The thinking sequence always takes place in the same order.
2. Human beings can’t skip any of the stages.
3. Each stage is significant for the succession stage to take place.
4. Every stage incorporates itself in the earlier stages conveniently.

Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

In psychology, Piaget’s theory is also known as the Staircase Model of cognitive development. Jean Piaget proposed this theory of cognitive development in four main stages:

1. Sensorimotor intelligence
2. Preoperational thinking
3. Concrete operational thinking
4. Formal operational thinking

Sensorimotor intelligence stage

According to Piaget, the sensorimotor stage comes first – from birth until two years of age. It is defined as the ability of toddlers to think with the help of their motor actions and senses. New parents always note how infants touch, look, manipulate, listen to, and even chew and bite objects. Jean Piaget believes that these actions allow them to enter the world and are crucial in their cognitive development. Sensorimotor intelligence consists of toddlers learning about the world, beginning with their surroundings.  

The infants’ actions allow children to comprehend and later represent different events and objects. Although achieving stability is called object permanence, where the child knows through the representation of the object, the child constantly feels, touches and manipulates the object and believes in the existence of the object even when it is out of sight. 

The preoperational stage 

The preoperational stage occurs in children between 2 and 7 years, and here, children use their ability to represent objects in different experiences. However, they cannot do it in a logical or organised manner. To understand better, one can think of preschool plays that every toddler takes part in throughout their preschool. Even though they know the function of a telephone, they would use a different object to depict a telephone, such as a banana. Even though the toddlers might know that a banana is a fruit and not a telephone, they are merely using the former to represent the telephone. There are two levels of cognition – one where they imagine an object to represent another, and second where they are aware of the object and know the difference between the representation. Both these levels of cognition are also known as metacognition as it reflects on and monitors thinking. 

The concrete operational stage

As children graduate from preschool and start elementary school – between ages 7 and 11 – their ability to represent objects logically and flexibly increases. Despite having more straightforward rules and regulations than adult thinking, they are often successful in academic tasks. For example, according to Piaget, a child may think and work with this logic – if nothing gets added or taken away, they will be left with the same amount. This principle allows children to perform mathematical tasks at schools efficiently, and Piaget believes this period to be a concrete operational stage. The reason is that children are mentally operating on concrete events and objects, even though at this stage, children are still unable to systematically operate representations of events and objects. The skills to manipulate representations develop in children much later during adolescence. 

The two significant differences between concrete operational and preoperational stages are reversibility and decenter. The ability to think about the steps of a process in any order is called reversibility. Even though both toddlers and children can recall steps of a process, only the children can recall the steps of a procedure in order. On the other hand, decenter allows children to focus on more than one problem at a time. In the concrete operational stage, the children will be able to focus on more than one problem and, hence, they are able to complete subtraction of two-digit numbers involving borrowing. In elementary school, both reversibility and decenter often take place at the same time. For example, provide a toddler and a child with two clay balls each and squish one of them into a log. The toddler in the preoperational stage will believe that the ball has changed. But the child in the concrete operational stage knows that only the shape of the ball has changed; the log can be squished back into a ball.

The formal operational stage

From the age of 11 and beyond, children can recognise and manipulate concrete objects and events and comprehend abstract and hypothetical counterparts. In the formal operational stage, children can operate on different representations and forms. They use hypothetical reasoning, where they efficiently manipulate ideas in different ways. The fourth stage of cognitive development is about formal thinking of one type only – to solve scientific problems. Since formal operational thinking is not used daily, research can note that many people may not achieve or utilise formal thinking in their lives. Formal thinking skills do not guarantee whether a student is well-behaved or motivated; neither does it guarantee skills like playing sports.

Conclusion

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development consists of the development of cognition in human beings. The theory deals with the cognitive development of human beings right from when they are a toddler till the time they become adolescents. The theory comprises four stages, including sensorimotor intelligence, which ranges from birth until the toddler is two years of age. It is followed by the preoperational stage, where the toddler acquires representing various objects. The concrete operational stage deals with a child’s flexibility to represent objects logically. Last but not least, the formal operational stage starts when the child is of age 11 and continues till late adolescence. Here the child is manipulating different events and objects and acquires understanding hypothetical counterparts.