Piaget’s

Cognitive Development Theory

 After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Explain terms and concepts associated with Piaget’s

cognitive theory;
• Discuss the stages of cognitive development; and
• Identify teaching strategies that are supportive of Piaget’s
theory.
EXPERIENCE

Jean Piaget (born August 9, 1896,

Neuchâtel, Switzerland—died
September 16, 1980, Geneva) was
a Swiss psychologist who was the first
to make a systematic study of the
acquisition of understanding in
children. He is thought by many to
have been the major figure in 20th-
century developmental psychology.
What is Cognitive Development Theory?

In his theory of cognitive development, Jean Piaget argues that

children’s cognitive development is influenced by biological maturation
and their interaction with the environment. Children undergo a similar
order or stages of development. Owing to varies circumstances the
children are exposed to the rate at which children go through the stages
differ. Some children may even miss the later stages of cognitive
development.
To explain how cognitive development happens, Piaget
introduced the concepts of schema, assimilation, and
accommodation.

• Schemas as “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing

component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core
meaning” (Piaget, 1952). It is the person’s way of organizing knowledge.
Viewed like the central processing unit of a computer, schemata (plural
form) are like individuals files representing an aspect of the world like
objects, actions, and concepts. Schemata guide the person’s way of
responding to a new experience.
To explain how cognitive development happens, Piaget
introduced the concepts of schema, assimilation, and
accommodation.

• Assimilation, the process of taking new information into the existing

schema.
• Ex: A child’s schema for dog might include furry, four legged, barks, and wags its
tail.
• Accommodation involves changing or altering existing schemas owing to
the new information provided or learned.
• Ex: When the child sees the cat for the first time, they might call it a dog because
it fits their existing schema.
To explain how cognitive development happens, Piaget
introduced the concepts of schema, assimilation, and
accommodation.
 Assimilation

The balance between assimilation and

Equilibrium
accommodation is achieved through a mechanism,
which Piaget called equilibration.
New Situation
This ability is believed to be a factor in children’s

Disequilibrium ability to move from one stage to another in

cognitive development. If the person is unable to
Accommodation take a balance of these two processes,
disequilibrium occurs.
Stages of Cognitive Development

To Piaget, cognitive development among children has four phases. Children

generally move through these different stages of mental development. Each stage
describes how children acquire knowledge and the nature of intelligence.
 Stage Milestone
Sensorimotor (0-2 years) Learns through reflexes, senses, and movement actions on the
environment. Begins to imitate others and remembers events; shifts to
symbolic thinking. Comes to understand that objects do not cease to exist
when they are out of sight- object permanence.
Moves from reflexive actions to intentional activity.

Preoperational (2-7 years) Begins about the time the child starts talking, to about seven years old.
Develops language and begins to use symbols to represent objects. Has
difficult with past and future-thinks in the present. Can think through
operations logically in one direction. Has problems understanding the
point of view of another person.

Concrete Operational (7-11 years) Begins about first grade, to early adolescence, around 11 years old.
Can think logically about concrete (handon) problems. Understands the
past, present, and future.

Formal Operational (12 years and Can think hypothetically and deductively. Thinking becomes more
up) scientific. Solves abstract problems logically. Can consider multiple
perspectives and develops concerns about social issues, personal
identity, and justice.
 SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

Two major achievements happen at this stage.

 Object permanence - the belief that an object still exists even if not within the sight of
the child.
Example: A baby who learns that a toy hidden under a blanket still exists.
 The other major achievement children demonstrate in this stage is goal-directed
actions. Initially, children do not think about what they do as these actions are
instinctive and involuntary (e.g., getting food and family attentions). Later, Piaget
believed that as children grow, they begin to think about what they need to
accomplish, how to do it, then act to it.
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

At this stage, children have not yet mastered mental operations because they use
action schemes connected to physical manipulations, not logical reasoning. By
operations, it means actions a person carries out by thinking them through instead of
performing them (Woolfolk, 2016). Another ability demonstrated at this stage is
children’s ability to form and use symbols to represent a physical actions or reality; this
is a semiotic function. A child’s ability to identify from a book the picture of a bird
illustrates this skill.
 CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE

Concrete operations are described by Piaget as the ability to engage in “hands-on thinking”
characterized by organized and rational thinking. A major ability at this stage is reversible thinking,
thinking backward, from the end to the beginning (Woolfolk, 2016). Reversibility involves conservation and
decentration. Conservation is the belief that, whatever the arrangement or appearance of the object, as
long as there is nothing added or decreased, the number or amount of the object would remain the same. A
related skill is decentration, the children’s ability to focus on more than one dimension of an object at a
time.
Classification is another skill at this stage. It involves the ability to group similar objects in terms of
color, shape, use, etc.
A related skill is seriation, the ability to arrange objects according to size, like small to smallest, far to
farthest, etc. That a bull is big, the carabao is bigger, and the elephant is the biggest best illustrates this
ability.
 FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

At this stage, adolescents can engage in mental processes involving

abstract thinking and coordination of some variables. All the earlier mental
abilities have been mastered. The adolescents can now think like a scientist,
as they can give hypotheses and conjectures about the problems, set up
experiments to test them, and control extraneous variables to arrive at a valid
and reliable explanation. They are capable of giving deductions as they
systematically evaluate their observations as well as their answers. This
ability is called hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
 Teaching Implications of Piaget’s Cognitive
Development Theory
Berk (2013) provided a summary of teaching implications derived from
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. These considerations include

1. the following:
A focus on the process of children’s thinking, not just its products. Instead of simply checking for a correct
answer, teachers should emphasize the students’ understanding and the process they used to get the answer.
2. Recognition of the crucial role of children’s self-initiative, active involvement in learning activities. In a
Piagetian classroom, children are encouraged to discover themselves through spontaneous interaction with the
environment, rather than the presentation of ready-made knowledge.
3. A de-emphasis on practices aimed at making children adult-like in their thinking. It refers to what Piaget
referred to as the “American question,” which is “How can we speed up development?” He believes that trying to
speed up and accelerate children’s process through the stages could be worse than no teaching at all.
4. Acceptance of individual differences in developmental progress. Piaget’s theory asserts that children go
through all the same developmental stages. However, they do so at different rates. Because of this variation,
teachers must exert a special effort to arrange classroom activities for individuals and groups of children rather
than for the whole class.
 Teaching Implications of Piaget’s Cognitive
Development
In addition, Webb (1980) recommended some Theory
considerations for teachers to ponder upon in
their teaching practices. These include the following:

• Consider the stage characteristics of the student’s thought processes in planning learning activities.
• Use a wide variety of experiences rather than drill on specific tasks to maximize cognitive development
• Do not assume that reaching adolescence or adulthood guarantees the ability to perform formal operations.
• Remember that each person structures each learning situation in terms of his schemata; therefore, no two persons will
derive the same meaning or benefit from a given experience.
• Individualize learning experiences so that each student is working at a level that is high enough to be challenging and
realistic enough to prevent excessive frustration.
• Provide experience necessary for the development of concepts before the use of these concepts in language.
• Consider learning an active restructuring of though rather than an increase in content.
• Make full use of wrong answers by helping the student analyze his or her thinking to retain the correct elements and
revise the miscomprehensions.
• Evaluate each student in terms of improving his or her performance.
• Avoid overuse of materials that are so highly structured that creative thought is discouraged.
• Use social interaction in learning experiences to promote increase in both interest and comprehension.
 EXPERIENCE

Experiments using Piagetian concepts and tasks in the classroom have proven their
soundness in explaining cognitive development among learners. Campbell and Ramey (1990)
reported that low-SES children who had early educational intervention developed the ability to
conserve earlier than those without intervention. Moreover, the proportion of no conservers in
the low-SES intervention group did not differ significantly from that of their more advantaged
peers in the first and third years in early elementary school. A study among high school
students tasked to perform formal operational tasks indicated that, at certain grade levels and
subject areas, public school science students who demonstrated formal operational logic ten
to receive higher grades than nonformal operational students (Sayre & Ball, 1975).
 EXPERIENCE

More than testing the applicability of the Piagetian tasks, Webb (1980) argued
that rather than concentrating on the learning of specific Piagetian tasks and
operations, the classroom milieu should be structured to encourage constant
thinking on the part of students. She pointed out that verbal rule, cognitive conflict,
and task analysis may be used in a wide variety of settings to increase the
incidence of transfer. To her, better comprehension at a given stage may be a
more appropriate goal than forced acceleration to the next cognitive level.
“If you follow the child,
you can find out
something new.”

-Jean Piaget
THANK YOU!!!