Name: Anne Lusell S.

Pimentel
Course: Prof.Ed

REFLECTION ON JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY ON THE STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jean Piaget studied the 4 cognitive stages for child development. This theory is based on
his study about the way a child’s learning capacity develops from birth to adolescent.

The four stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal operational stages. In
infancy, motion and sensory information is the whole of the child’s thinking capacity. Infants
cannot engage in rational thoughts neither do they have any conception of time. Infants can’t
see things from another person’s point of view and so are naturally egocentric. Toddlers from
ages 2 to 7 perceive the world through magical thinking and animism (attributing human
emotions and characteristics to inanimate objects).They are acquiring motor skills during this
stage and a certain amount of decentering begins to occur. At this stage, the child is still unable
to think logically. At 7 to 12, children begin to understand logical or rational thoughts but only
concretely in relationship to things they can see or touch. They are also noticeably better at
seeing another’s point of view and considering others feelings. From the age of 12 on, they
begin to develop abstract reasoning skills and can thing logically and rationally, without having
to depend on visual aids. Complex abstract thought is now possible and cognition development
is complete. From the above considerations, we come to the fact that young adolescents
understands that objects and beings can change their outward appearance and yet stay the
same. Young children lack this intelligence. Piaget demonstrated the lack of this understanding
in young children by pouring liquids from a tall glass into a thick short glass right in front of
their eyes. The liquid became a different amount to the children because the liquids outwards
appearance changed. By the time they will reach the age of rational thinking, they would
realize that the quantity is same but the containers were different. Logical thinking
development is clear in adolescents understanding of the world around them example while
young children get confused and upset when they see a creature moving on sticks, adolescent
understands that it is a human balancing on it. Young children tend to focus only on one aspect
of a problem at a time. Thus, they thought that the amount of liquid changed because they
were focused on the height of the liquid or the width of the glass, not both. On the other hand,
they can understand that the shorter the height is made up for by the thicker glass, providing
the same amount of space overall.
 For a child to learn and properly adapt to any given rational or non-rational problem
correctly, the child needs to apply his basic building block of intelligent behavior which is the
schemas. This is a way of organizing knowledge. The schema is a unit of knowledge each
relating to one aspect of the world including objects, actions and abstract concepts. When a
child’s existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be
in a state of equilibrium; that is a state of cognitive balance. When the knowledge have been
organized there come accommodation which is the taking of new information in one’s
environment and altering the pre-existing schemas in order to fit in the new information. After
taking in this new information above then the human then perceive and adapt to the new
information. This is called assimilation, it is the process of fitting new information into pre-
existing cognitive schemas. It occurs when humans are faced with new or unfamiliar
information and refer to previously learned information in order to make sense of it. It is the
integration of external element in life.