Brittan Kennedy

Professor Salini
Psychology 1100
April 18, 2012
Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development
We dont just wake up one day and know how to do things. We
arent born knowing the process on how our world works. We gradually
acquire knowledge through a series of stages. Jean Piaget, a
developmental psychiatrist, is best known for his four stages on
cognitive development. Two processes underlie this cognitive
construction of the world: organization and adaptation. We organize
our experiences to make sense of the world. Then in addition, we adapt
and adjust to new environmental demands (Santrock, 2012).
Piaget suggested we go through four stages, each age-related,
and each consisting of a distinctive way of understanding.
The first stage is the sensorimotor stage, which is from birth to
two years of age. In this phase, children learn through physical
movements and sensations they make, along with hearing and seeing
things-- hence the word sensorimotor (Santrock, 2012). They learn that
they exist apart from the people and objects around them, that they
can cause things to happen, and that things exist and will continue to
go on even when they cannot see them.

The next stage is the preoperational stage. This phase lasts from
age two to seven years of age. Children go further than just connecting
sensory information with physical actions. They acquire language and
are able to use symbols. Children now represent the world with
pictures, images, drawings, and words. They are able to understand
things like counting, color similarities, and past-present-future but they
are only focused on the concrete, rather than abstract. Their thinking is
still egocentric in this stage. They assume everyone sees things as
they see it, through their viewpoint. Also, preschoolers are still unable
to accomplish operationsinternalized mental actions that allow
children to do mentally what they previously could only do physically
(Santrock, 2012).
The concrete operational stage lasts from age seven to eleven
years of age. Children can achieve operations that involve objects, and
they can reason logically about specific or concrete examples. They
can also see things from different views and envision events that
happen apart from their own lives. Concrete operational thinkers can
put objects in order by color, size, etc. However, they cannot
understand the concept of completing an algebraic equation because
that requires a level of thinking that is too abstract for them (Santrock,
2012).
Now we have the last stage. This is called the formal operational
stage, lasting from the age of eleven to fifteen and continues to

develop throughout adulthood. Here we have individuals that move

beyond the concrete world into thinking abstractly. Teens develop an
ideal life, they might have and idea of the perfect parent, the perfect
grades, etc. They begin to think into the future. In solving, they
become more methodical, creating hypotheses about why something is
happening the way it is, and then they begin to test it (Santrock,
2012).
Learning about Piagets theory on the stages of cognitive
development really caught my attention. I loved being able to
understand what is going on in the mind of an infant, child, and an
adolescent. Now when I am introduced to a baby or a toddler, I always
think to myself what stage they are in and what is going through their
brain. Now that I am aware of these phases, I believe it will help me
tremendously when I am raising kids. I will now know that when my
future kids open up a marker and write all over everything, they arent
doing it to be a pain. Ill understand that they are in the sensorimotor
stage. That is their way of becoming familiar with an object and they
are just learning about what it does.