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The document summarizes Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development, which include the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7), concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 11), and formal operational stage (age 11 and up). At each stage, children's cognitive abilities progress as they experience stimuli and learn new skills, moving from concrete, sensory thinking to more abstract reasoning and logical thought. Piaget's theory suggests cognitive development follows a universal, predetermined order and progression through these stages.

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40 views4 pages

Jean Piaget From Site

The document summarizes Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development, which include the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7), concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 11), and formal operational stage (age 11 and up). At each stage, children's cognitive abilities progress as they experience stimuli and learn new skills, moving from concrete, sensory thinking to more abstract reasoning and logical thought. Piaget's theory suggests cognitive development follows a universal, predetermined order and progression through these stages.

Uploaded by

Majoy Turcolas
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Jean Piaget Stages of Cognitive Development

In the 1960s and 1970s, as Freudian and Jungian psychology were rapidly being
replaced by more empirical methods of studying human behavior, a Swiss philosopher
and psychologist named Jean Piaget (1896-1980) offered a new theory of cognitive
development.

The Jean Piaget theory of cognitive development suggests that regardless of culture,
the cognitive development of children follows a predetermined order of stages, which
are widely known as the Jean Piaget stages of cognitive development.

According to this Jean Piaget theory, children are not capable of performing certain
tasks or understanding certain concepts until they reach a particular Piaget stage.

In addition, Piaget believed that children move from one stage to the next after
extensive exposure to relevant stimuli and experiences. With these experiences, both
physical and cognitive, they are ready to master new skills, which are essential for
children to move through the Piaget stages.

The Four Jean Piaget Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage
Age Range: Birth to 2 years old
According to the Piaget theory, children like to explore at the sensorimotor stage. They
want to watch, hear, taste, touch things around them. They learn about their
environment by sensation: watching, grasping, sucking and manipulating objects they
can get their eyes and hands on. They generally don’t appear to be thinking about what
they do.
As infants become toddlers, children enjoy their rapidly improving abilities to move
around and take in new experiences. They focus on making sense of the world by
linking their experiences to their actions.
Piaget further divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages, each sighted with at
the establishment of a new skill.
 Reflexes (0 – 1 month): Understanding of environment is attained through
reflexes such as sucking and crying.
 Primary Circular Reactions (1 – 4 months): New schemas and sensations are
combined, allowing children to engage in pleasurable actions deliberately, such
as sucking their thumb.
 Secondary Circular Reactions (4 – 8 months): Children are now aware that their
actions influence their environment and purposefully perform actions in order to
achieve desired results. For example, they push a key on a toy piano to make a
sound.
 Coordination of Reactions (8 – 12 months): Children explore their environment
and often imitate the behavior of others.
 Tertiary Circular Reactions – (12 – 18 months): Children begin to experiment and
try out new behavior.
 Early Representational Thought (18 – 24 months): Children begin to recognize
and appreciate symbols that represent objects or events. They use simple
language to catalog objects, e.g., “doggie”, “horsey”.
During the late sensorimotor stage, children begin to learn the concept of object
permanence. In other words, they know that an object will continue to exist even if they
can no longer see it.
The practical knowledge developed during the sensorimotor stage will form the basis for
children’s ability to form mental representations of objects in later Piaget stages.

Preoperational Stage
Age Range: 2-7 years old
Around age two, children enter what Piaget called the preoperational stage where they
learn how to think abstractly, understand symbolic concepts, and use language in more
sophisticated ways. They learn to use words to describe people, their feelings and their
environments.
Now that children can express themselves better, they become insatiably curious and
begin to ask questions about everything they see. They can imagine people or objects
that don’t exist (such as a lizard with wings) more readily than younger children, and
they like to make up their own games.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that at this stage, children are so
engrossed in egocentric thoughts that they believe their view of the world is shared by
everyone else. They can’t understand that there are other ways of looking at the world
and interpreting information. For example, a child in a game of hide and seek may
simply close his eyes and believe that others can’t see him (since he can’t see others).
At the preoperational stage, children understand object permanence very well.
However, they still don’t get the concept of conservation. They don’t understand that
changing an object’s appearance doesn’t change its properties or quantity. To illustrate
this, Piaget performed an experiment on children who were at the preoperational stage:
In the experiment, Piaget poured the exact same amount of water into two identical
glasses and asked the children whether the glasses contained the same amount of
water. The children said that both glasses contained the same amount of water. Piaget
then poured the water in one glass into a tall, narrow beaker and repeated the question.
This time, the children said there was more water in the cylinder because it was taller.

Concrete Operational Stage


Age Range: 7-11 years old
By the time they reach the concrete operational stage, children can understand much
more complex abstract concepts, such as time, space, and quantity. They can apply
these concepts to concrete situations, but they still have trouble thinking about them
independently of those situations.
Piaget pointed out that at this stage, children’s ideas about time and space are
sometimes inconsistent. They can learn rules fairly easily, but they may have trouble
understanding the logical implications of those rules in unusual situations.
In addition, at the concrete operational stage, children are able to use inductive logic –
the type of reasoning that starts from a specific idea and leads to a generalization. They
can also distinguish facts from fantasies, as well as formulate judgements about cause
and effect.
Another important child development milestone at this stage is the idea of reversibility –
children understand that some objects can be altered and then shaped back to their
original shape. For example, a deflated balloon can be filled with air again to become an
inflated balloon.
Formal Operational Stage
Age Range: 11 years old and older
At the final stage of the Jean Piaget stages of cognitive development, children are
capable of more abstract, hypothetical, and theoretical reasoning. They are no longer
bound to observable and physical events. They can approach and resolve problems
systematically by formulating hypotheses and methodically testing them out.
Children can now apply their reasoning to a variety of situations including counterfactual
“if-then” situations, meaning in situations where the “if” is known to be untrue. For
example, “if dogs were reptiles, they would have cold blood.” They can accept this as
valid reasoning, even though the premise is obviously false.
As children grow older, formal logic becomes possible and verbal explanations of
concepts are usually sufficient without demonstration. They can consider possible
outcomes and consequences of their actions without actually performing them. In
addition, strategy-based games become more enjoyable, whereas rote games like
“chutes-and-ladders” become too repetitive and boring for them.
The Jean Piaget theory of cognitive development has been the subject of some criticism
over the years, particularly from cross-cultural psychologists who question whether the
Piaget stages are unique to Western children.
Regardless of the criticism, the Piaget theory has proven to be invaluable and formed
the basis for a number of other famous psychological ideas, including Kohlberg’s theory
of moral development.

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