Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

During this stage, the child can engage in symbolic play, and have developed an imagination. This child may use an object to represent something else, such pretending that a broom is a horse. An important feature a child displays during this stage is egocentrism. This refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. To test whether or not children are egocentric, Piaget used the ‘Three Mountain Task’. Piaget concluded that the four-year olds thinking was egocentric, as the seven year olds was not. Children, at this stage, do not understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

The teacher could place two cups that have the same amount of liquid in the cups but because one of the cups is taller than the other the child is going to think the taller glass has more liquid in it. The third stage is the concrete operational stage which occurs during ages seven to eleven. The term concrete operational means the child can reason only about tangible objects presents. So the child can conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. Thinking becomes less egocentric with increased awareness of external events. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage which occurs during ages eleven to fifteen. This stage focuses on hypothetical thinking and scientific reasoning. Piaget believed that only children can learn when they are ‘ready’ to learn. He also believed that development couldn 't be ‘sped up.’ Piaget believed that children learned through the resolution of disequilibrium (self discovery, active participation). He believed that teachers should ‘bend’ to children’s needs, provide an appropriate environment, promote self discovery, exploratory learning, self-motivated learning, and set challenges to existing schemes.

During the Sensorimotor stage (between birth and the age of two), Piaget claims that sensory and motor skills are developed, as well as claiming that infants are unable to grasp object permeance until eighteen to twenty-four months; Piaget argued that if a child could not see the item, it no longer existed to them. When the child’s age was between nine and ten months, more experiments were done into object permeance, resulting in the 'a not b ' test, in which one object was hidden underneath an item, and then switched. Despite the obvious difference in sizes underneath the two objects, the child would still believe the item to be under where it was originally found. Furthermore, Aguiara and Baillargeon (2002), suggested the violation of expectation; using the example of a doll moving between two opaque objects and reappearing in the centre – the child will then be surprised, as to them the object had no longer existed.

His views of how children and young people’s minds work and develop have been enormously influential particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation and increasing the capacity to understand their world, they can’t undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. The research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigations his importance comes from his overall vision. Today Piaget’s theories have helped to change how people viewed the child or young person’s world and the way they study them he has inspired many theorist to improve on his studies. Piaget’s ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating, particularly in education. What he didn’t consider was the effect in the

The Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development is also known as the stage theory. It introduces that, in the expansion of our thinking, we act through an organized and certain sequence of steps. However, the theory focuses not only on compassionate how the children obtain knowledge, but likewise on the discernment of the substance of intelligence. According to the Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, there are two stages in the thinking pattern of a 3-year old preschooler and 9-year-old student. They are the preoperational stage for the 2 to 7 year old and the concrete operations stage for the 9 year old. The preoperational stage (three years old preschooler), this is where a new child can intellectually perform and signify to the objects and issues with the quarrel or the images, and they can act. The concrete operations (nine year old student), where a child is at the stage and deliver the ability to maintain, reserve their thinking, and analyze the objects in conditions of their many parts. However, they can also assume logically and understand comparison, but only about the concrete events.

Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children 's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve ', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if ' something was to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational ' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility '. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

Jean Piaget was not a psychologist but a philosopher with a biological background. He was interested in epistemology which is the nature of knowledge.”He was a towering figure internationally” (Bliss, 2010, p. 446, cited by Slater and Bremner, 2011, p. 50).Likewise, Lev Vygotsky was a psychologist from Russia who was interested in child development. He also worked at the same time as Paiget but they never met. Vygotsky died at the age of 37 from Tuberculosis (Berk, 2013). Piaget and Vygotsky are two influential developmental psychologists’ .Their contributions to developmental psychology are remarkably similar and different at the same time (Lourenco, 2012).

In the first stage, Piaget looked at understanding object permanence which is recognizing if an object still exist even when it is out of sight (Cardwell & Flanagan,2004). Children below the age of two failed to grasp the concept. Next, Piaget examined if children, in pre- operational stage, could understand the logic. He did this by seeing if children could understand that despite the change of the appearance of an object, it would remain the same (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2004). In his conservation experiment, Piaget showed children identical glass full of equal amount of liquid. He then pours the liquid of one the glasses in a taller narrow glass. After which, he would ask the child, "what glass has more?". Inevitably, the child would say the tall the narrow glass, believing it contained more liquid because of the height of the glass (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2004). Piaget believed that this was caused by centration , and was based on perception instead of logic (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2004).

In the concrete operational stage between the ages of seven and twelve, children become capable of logical thought, they also start to be able to think abstractly. However they are best suited to visible or concrete objects and things they can see (Lee and Gupta). Once the child has reached the formal operations stage from twelve years onwards it becomes more practiced at abstract processing, carrying out problem solving systematically and methodically thus completing the cognitive development process.

Piaget considered the process of equilibrium an important factor in the cognitive growth and development of a child.(Piaget , 1952) This was the ground were he was criticize because he said that children must be allowed to do their own learning(Piaget,1952). Lourenco & Machado (1996)in defense of Piaget theory realized that Piaget has took into consideration the fact that humans progressively develop or mature to higher states of cognitive development and realized that children acquire knowledge transmitted by parents, teachers ,and books, Piaget called this "social transmission." Piaget believed that when a child hears contradictory statements that challenge established schemes, equilibrium is disturbed. Piaget called such a disruption in equilibrium cognitive conflict or disequilibrium. When children experience cognitive conflict they set out in search of an answer that will enable them to achieve states of equilibrium.(Lourenco & Machado,1996)

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), acknowledged as the most significant scholar of child development, was the first psychologist to study cognitive development in a systematic and methodical approach (Martin, Carlson & Buskist, 2013).

Jean Piaget is considered to be very influential in the field of developmental psychology. Piaget had many influences in his life which ultimately led him to create the Theory of Cognitive Development. His theory has multiple stages and components. The research done in the early 1900’s is still used today in many schools and homes. People from various cultures use his theory when it comes to child development. Although there are criticisms and alternatives to his theory, it is still largely used today around the world.

Next, the "pre-operational stage" is the second stage of Piaget’s theory. This stage lasts from around 2 - 7 years. In this stage, Piaget proposed that a child fails to understand the concept “conservation” - the belief that things remain constant in terms of number, quantity and volume irrespective of variations in appearance. In experiments to test number conservation, Piaget showed the child two sets of checkers, which had exactly the same number of checkers in each set. He then changed one of the checker sets, keeping the same amount of checkers in it, so that it was only different in appearance. When the experiment ended, the results showed that the children believed that the sets were of different quantity, thereby, proving Piaget’s theory factual. (Piaget 1952)

On Piaget's task for conservation of length, Piaget shows the subject two pencils equal in length and subject knows the pencils are the same length. But once one of the pencils is moved longer than the other one, the subject fails to recognize that they were the same. Piaget's task for conservation for liquid, he shows the young child two identical glasses, then he pours the same amount of water both glasses. The subject knows that the two glasses of water are equal. But if water from one glass is poured into a longer thinner glass, the subject couldn’t comprehend this glass contains the same amount of water as the original two identical glasses. Piaget's explains that children's thinking is "perception bound" in preoperational stage, so they can’t focus their attention on two aspects of the new glass, they were attentive only to one aspect which is that one glass is taller than the other two; failing to realize the taller glass had the same amount of liquid.

In the twentieth century some of the psychologists became interested of mental activities studies in humans, including information processes, memory and communication. This new direction received the name of cognitive psychology. One of the pioneers, who established this path in psychology science, was Swiss biologist, Jean Piaget. Piaget’s discoveries and principles have made a significant contribution in expansion of cognitive psychology ideas. His research and concepts that were based on kids learning and progressing helped him to form his famous theory of four developmental stages, which later found supporters and critics among many psychologists. Although much of his work included analyses of child’s development, he described himself as “genetic epistemologist”, not child psychologist. He emphasized that his studies were devoted to the epistemological question: How do we get the knowledge? (Milton Schwebel, Piaget in the classroom, 1973, p. 74)