Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

MAJOR PERIODS, STAGES AND DESCRIPTIONS

Level I: The Sensorimotor Period (birth to Age 2)

Stage 1: 0 – 1 Month

Adaptation to Environment;

Period of Unlearned Reflexes (breathing, coughing, sucking, etc.).

Stage 2: 1 – 4 Months

Acquired Accommodations to Environment;

Primary Circular Reactions: Repetitive, purposeful actions (grasping and letting go, etc)

Stage 3: 4 – 8 Months

Distinguishing Self from Environment Intentional Acts;

Secondary Circular Reactions: Repetitive, purposeful actions which seem to focus upon reproducing a
result (e.g., shaking a rattle to get the enjoyable sound.)

Stage 4: 8 – 12 Months

First clear acts of intelligence; Anticipates people and objects;

Concept of object and person permanence.

Stage 5: 12 – 18 Months

Tertiary Circular Reactions: Repetitions in modified form ;achieving the same goal with new behaviors or
modifications of old behaviors

Stage 6: 18 Months – 2 Years

Beginning problem solving - - using stick, for example, to gain access to a toy which is out of reach.

Level II: Preoperational Thought Period: Age 2 – 7 Years

“Operations:” Ways of manipulating objects in relation to each other, such as arranging them in a series
according to size or sorting according to colors. If the objects are actually present, or if the object is a
real or imagined object with which the child has had experience, the operations were referred to as
“concrete operations.” If the objects are generalized rather than particular objects and only symbolized
by words or theoretical manipulations, the operations were referred to as “formal operations.”

“Operations,” have to be internalizeable, reversible and coordinated into systems that have laws that
apply to the entire system and not just to the single operation itself. Children below the age of 7,
typically, do not yet have these skills and so are described as functioning as the “preoperational” level

Language, according to Piaget, was the central issue in the development of cognition.

Language allows:

1) communication with others;

2) internalization of concepts in the form of thoughts;
3) internalization of action so the child does not have to depend on manipulating objects physically
to solve problems.

Stage I: Age 2 – 4 Years

Period of Egocentric Speech:

Centration - - When a child focuses on an object, the child focuses on only oneaspect of the object and
cannot consider two dimensions, such as height and width, for example, at the same time - - The classic
experiment is the same amount of water in two glasses of different shape.

Stage II: Age 5 – 7 Years

Period of Intuitive Thought;

Transition between depending solely on perception and depending on truly logical thinking.

Recognition of equivalence, without true understanding of quantities;

Move toward less centration, but not completed - - conservation, as a concept, is present, but
reversibility is not. An example is the bead and tube experiment. When beads on a string are inserted in
a tube in a given order of color (e.g., red, blue white), all children can predict the order in which they will
emerge from the other end. Few children, however, can tell you the order if you tip the tube backwards.

Level III: Concrete Operations Period (Ages 7 to 11 Years)

Operations on concrete objects can be performed at this stage.

The characteristics of operations are present in the child’s behavior. These include:

 Internalized: Operations carried out in thought;

 Reversible: Operations and actions can be inverted into their opposites. For example, a child can
combine to quantities of apples to form a whole and can reduce the whole (subtraction) to the
original forms;
  Reversible transformations are of two types:
o Inversions: Addition is the reverse of subtraction, and multiplication is the reverse of
division;
o Reciprocity: A > B is reciprocated by B < A.

Level IV: Formal Operations Period (Ages 11 to 15 Years)

Children’s problem solving not limited by what they see or hear. They can imagine the conditions of a
problem - - past present or future - - and develop hypotheses about what might logically occur under
different conditions.

“Transitivity” is a new skill in this Level. It means the ability to identify a relationship between two
elements or objects and carry it over to other elements logically related to the first two. For example,
“When A = B and B = C, then A = C.”

Cognitive development does not cease at the end of adolescence. Rather, according to Piaget, the
framework for thought is complete. Further learning relies upon the formal operational framework laid
in the first 15 years