Jean Piaget’s

Theory
Prepared by: Angelou Manlapaz
BLIS II
Introduction
 Born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of
Switzerland on August 9, 1896.
 Natural scientist and developmental psychologist
well known for his work studying children and his
theory of cognitive development.
 His career of scientific research began when he
was just eleven, with the 1907 publication of a
short paper on the albino sparrow.
 In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, the
couple had three children, whom Piaget studied
from infancy.
 Began to explore children in Alfred’s Binet
Laboratory. This is where the Modern Test of
Intelligence was created.
Theory
 Piaget proposed the theory of childhood cognitive development in
1969.
 Cognitive Development refers to the age – related changes that
occurs in mental activities such as attending, perceiving, learning,
thinking and remembering.
 Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory focus only on the growth
of children’s knowledge and reasoning skills.
 Children’s are naturally curious explorers who try to make sense
of their surroundings.
 The child is Constructivist – the one who gain knowledge by
acting or otherwise operating on object and events to discover their
properties
Key concepts on the
dynamic development:
Schemes
Organization
Adaptation
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibration
 Schemes
 The basic building block of
intelligent behavior – a way of
organizing knowledge

 An organized pattern of thought

that establishes a mental frame
work that represent some aspect
of the world

Key Concepts
Organization
 The child’s tendency to arrange available schemata into
coherent system, or body of knowledge.

A flying objects may be

a bird a plane Superman

Key Concepts
 Adaptation
 One’s inborn tendency to
adjust to the demands of the
environment

 The process of changing a

cognitive structure or the
environment (or both) in order
to understand the
environment.

Key Concepts
 Assimilation
 Is using an existing schema
to deal with a new object or
situation. The process of
bringing new objects or
information into a scheme
that already exists.

Key Concepts
 Accommodation
 The process of modifying old schemes or creating new
ones to better fit assimilated information

Dogs are “smaller” and Cows are “larger” and

“does not give milk” “gives milk”

Key Concepts
 Equilibration
 The dynamic
process of moving
between states of
cognitive
disequilibrium and
equilibrium.

Key Concepts
Four Stages
in Cognitive
Development
1. The Sensorimotor Stage
(birth to 2yrs)(Infancy)

☺ Thought that is based only on

sensory input and physical
(motor) actions.

☺ They know the world only in

terms of their own sensory
input and their physical or
motor actions on it.
1. Reflexes (0-1 month)
☺ The child uses only innate reflexes

Rooting
Sucking reflex Grasping reflex
reflex

Sub stages
2. Primary Circular Reaction (1 – 4month)

☺ It is a pleasurable response,
centered on infant’s own
body and, that is discovered
by chance and performed
over and over again

Sub stages
3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4 – 8 month)
☺ The child begins to take
an interest in
their environment.

☺ They notice that they can

actually influence events
in their world

Sub stages
4. Coordination of Reactions (8 – 12 month)
☺ At this point, the child
begins to engage in goal-
directed behavior; they
begin to develop cause-
effect relationships
☺ Voluntary imitation on
novel response

Sub stages
Object Permanence
is a child's awareness or understanding that objects
continue to exist even though they cannot be seen or
heard.
5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 – 18 month)
☺ Piaget believed this marks
the developmental starting
point for curiosity and
interest

☺ Infants show increasing

flexibility and creativity in
their behaviors, and their
experimentation with objects
often leads to new outcomes
☺ Voluntary Imitation on novel
response
Sub stages
6. Early Representational Thought (18 – 24 month)

☺ The infants are internalizing

their behavioral schemata to
construct mental
representations of objects,
actions, and events.
☺ They can reproduce the
behavior of models who are
not present

Sub stages
2. Preoperational Stage
(2 to 7 yrs.) (Toddler and Early Childhood)

 Thought characterized by the

use of mental representations
(symbols) and intuitive
thought.
 Two sub stages: the
Preconceptual period and the
Intuitive period
Preconceptual Period (2 – 4 yrs old)

 Characterized by appearance of primitive ideas, concepts

and methods of reasoning
 Symbolic functions
 Symbols in Language

 Symbols in Artwork

 Symbols in Play
Symbols in Language
 language development is based on children’s mental
representational ability—their ability to let a symbol (e.g.,
a word) stand for an object in the environment.
 Winkie for blanket
 Kitty – cat
 Poon – spoon
 “Balls” for any round objects that roll
 Symbols in Artwork

By age 6, the body is

At age 4 the child draws the represented more fully,
The 2-year-old’s drawing person as a happy head with including the neck and torso
of a person is just a arms and legs
Symbols in Play
 The ability to form mental
representations allows these
children to use symbolism
in their play

 Fantasy play, in which they

pretend to be something
they are not (like a
superhero).
Egocentrism
refer to the young child’s inability to
take another person’s perspective.

Animism
Treating inanimate objects as
living ones.

The Three-Mountains Task

Intuitive Period (4 – 7 yrs. of age)
 This when the child’s thinking about objects and events is
dominated by salient perceptual features.
 Less egocentric
 Centration – the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a
problem when two or more problem is relevant and thus
resulting to;
 Conservation problem

piaget’s
Conservation the understanding that some basic conservation
properties of objects remain the same even when a
transformation changes the physical appearance. task.(mp4)
3. Concrete Operational Stage
(7 to 12 yrs.) (Childhood and early Adolescence)

 Stage of cognitive development

in which children are able to
think about two or more
dimensions of a problem,
reversible operations and
thinking more logically about
real objects and experiences
Characteristic

 Mental representation
of actions
 Linguistic humor
- puns and jokes becomes
hilarious to the child

 Relational logic
Relational Logic:
1. Seriation - the ability to sort objects in an order according to size,
shape or any other characteristic
2. Transitivity - the ability to recognize logical relationships among
elements in a serial order.
3. Classification - the ability to name and identify sets of objects
according to appearance, size or other characteristic
4. Decentering - where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a
problem to solve it.
5. Reversibility - the child understands that numbers or objects can be
changed, then returned to their original state.
6. Conservation - understanding that quantity, length or number of items
is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items.
7. Elimination of Egocentrism - the ability to view things from another's
perspective.
4. Formal Operational Stage
(from 12yrs and beyond) (Adolescence and Adulthood)

 This is during adolescence

that cognitive development
reaches its fullest potential
 The individual now begins
to think more rationally and
systematically about
abstract and hypothetical
events
 Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning
 The ability to use deductive reasoning to systematically manipulate
several variables, test the effects in a systematic way, and reach
correct conclusions in complex problems
 Pendulum Problem
Find the height at
which the swinging
of the object has
started.
1. Find the length
of the string
2. Weight of the
object
“If you hit a glass with the hammer, the glass will
break.”

Dan hit a glass with the hammer.

What happen to the glass?

Why did it break?
“If you hit a glass with the feather, the glass will
break”

Dan hit the glass with the feather.

What happen to the glass?

Why did it break?
General Characteristic of this Stages

1. Each stage derives from the previous stage and

incorporate and transform to prepare for the next and
no going back.
2. The stages follow an invariant sequence. There is no
skipping stages.
3. The stages are universal.
4. Each stage is a coming into being. There is a gradual
progression from stage to stage.
 Thank you!

Reference:
Cook, Joan Littlefield & Cook, Greg (2005). Child Development Principles & Perspective
Shaffer, David R. (1985). Developmental Psychology Theory, Research and Applications
Slideshare ppt. Lawrence, A.S.Arul. Cognitive Development; Sakiwat, Lethane. Piaget’s Cognitive
Development Theory