Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development

12 Key excerpts on "Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development"

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  Development Psychology

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter-2 Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence first developed by Jean Piaget. It is primarily known as a developmental stage theory, but in fact, it deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans come gradually to acquire it, construct it, and use it. Moreover, Piaget claims the idea that cognitive development is at the centre of human organism and language is contingent on cognitive development. Below, there is first a short description of Piaget's views about the nature of intelligence and then a description of the stages through which it develops until maturity. The Nature of Intelligence: Operative and Figurative Intelligence Piaget believed that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change, and as such is defined in reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems that change. Specifically, he argued that reality involves transformations and states. Transformations refer to all manners of changes that a thing or person can undergo. States refer to the conditions or the appearances in which things or persons can be found between transformations. For example, there might be changes in shape or form (for instance, liquids are reshaped as they are transferred from one vessel to another, humans change in their characteristics as they grow older), in size (e.g., a series of coins on a table might be placed close to each other or far apart) in placement or location in space and time (e.g., various objects or persons might be found at one place at one time and at a different place at another time). Thus, Piaget argued, that if human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and the static aspects of reality.

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  Foundations of Developmental Psychology

  • Richard C. LaBarba(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  PIAGET'S T H E O R Y ^ iaget's theory of cognitive development is the most am- O F C O G N I T I V E ]r bitious and influential statement about child development D E V E L O P M E N T in contemporary psychology. T h e complexity and breadth of Piaget's developmental psychology preclude any attempts to summarize the theory without a serious loss of appreciation for the magnitude of the work. O u r purpose here is merely to outline Piaget's theory and to give some preliminary under- standing of the principles and concepts that characterize Pi- aget's theory of development. Detailed treatments of Piaget's PIAGET'S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 297 theory are found in the works of his major interpreters such as Flavell (1963,1977), Inhelder, Sinclair, and Bovet (1974), Phillips (1975), and Sigel and Cocking (1977). If you are more ambitious, you may turn directly to the works of Piaget, with the warning that they are difficult to read and understand— even in English. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss psychologist who had originally been trained as a zoologist. A gifted observer, sci- entist, and scholar, Piaget turned his interests early in his career to philosophy and epistemology, the science of the origins, methods, nature, and limits of knowledge. His preoc- cupation with the origins of knowledge foretold his entrance into the field of child development. Having received some psychological training at various laboratories and psychiatric clinics in Europe, Piaget began working in the laboratory with Alfred Binet in Paris. There, Piaget worked with children, studying their performance on early tests of intelligence. Pur- suing his established interest in epistemology, Piaget found the processes leading to problem-solving in children to be more revealing than the tests themselves, particularly those processes leading to incorrect answers (Flavell, 1963).

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  Developmental and Educational Psychology for Teachers

  An applied approach

  • Dennis McInerney, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 , we look at elements relevant to adolescent education and the educational implications of Piaget and Vygotsky more broadly. We also consider some contemporary views of cognition. Both of these chapters should be read as a unit.

  Jean Piaget

  Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who has had a profound impact on the way teachers and other professionals think about children (Bibace, 2013). Piaget’s background included training as a biologist, and working with Theophile Simon in the Binet Laboratory in Paris. With Alfred Binet, Simon had earlier constructed the first intelligence test. Both of these experiences had an impact on the development of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. His theory has two key dimensions. First, Piaget emphasises that intellectual development occurs through a series of stages characterised by qualitatively discrete cognitive structures. Second, Piaget emphasises the notion that children construct their own understandings through interaction with their environment. Piaget viewed the child as a young scientist, constructing ever more powerful theories of the world, as a result of applying a set of logical structures in increasing generality and power (Inagaki & Hatano, 2006). As such his theory has dual and complementary perspectives that may be termed structuralism and constructivism (Fosnot, 2013; Morra et al., 2012).

  Biological model of cognitive development

  Piaget’s theory is complex. Our description highlights important elements for your consideration, but in doing so we run the risk of oversimplification. Piaget, as a biologist, was impressed by the way in which all species systematically organise their biological processes into coherent systems and are able to adapt, as necessary, to the environment through processes such as assimilation and accommodation

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  Theories of Human Learning

  Mrs Gribbin's Cat

  • Guy R. Lefrançois(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, largely because of its emphasis on the development of knowledge, it is also a theory of learning. As a theory of learning, it can be simplified and reduced to the following set of statements: • The acquisition of knowledge is a gradual developmental process made possible through the interaction of the child with the environment. • The sophistication of children’s representation of the world is a function of their stage of development. That stage is defined by the thought structures they then possess. Table 7.2 Piaget’s stages of cognitive development Stage Approximate age Major characteristics Sensorimotor 0–2 years World of the here and now No language, no thought in early stages Motoric intelligence No notion of objective reality Preoperational Preconceptual Intuitive 2–7 years 2–4 years 4–7 years Egocentric thought Reason dominated by perception Intuitive rather than logical solutions Inability to conserve Concrete operations 7–11/12 years Ability to conserve Logic of classes and relations Understanding of numbers Thinking bound to concrete Development of reversibility in thought Formal operations 11/12–14/15 years Complete generality of thought Propositional thinking Ability to deal with the hypothetical Development of strong idealism Adapted from Lefrançois, G. R. (2018). Psychology for Teaching (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, table 2.4. Used by permission. 272 Three Cognitive Theories • Maturation, active experience, equilibration, and social interaction are the forces that shape learning (Piaget, 1961). Maturation is a biologically based process related to the gradual unfolding of potential. Active experience refers to actual activities that enable the child to know and to internalize things. Social interaction (interaction with other people) permits the child to elaborate ideas about the world and about others. And equilibration is the tendency toward finding an optimal balance between assimilation and accommodation.

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  Child Psychology

  A Canadian Perspective

  • Alastair Younger, Scott A. Adler, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Adaptation occurs through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. Whenever we interact with the environment, we assimilate the environment to our current cogni- tive structures; that is, we fit it in or interpret it in terms of what we already understand. When children assimilate, they may distort reality to fit with the understanding they already possess. For example, a preschooler who is familiar with the category “fish” may insist that dolphins and whales are also fish—she is assimilating these aquatic animals into her current understanding of what “fish” are. Yet at the same time, we are continually accommodating our cognitive structures to fit with the environment; that is, altering our understanding to take new things into account. So, as a child learns more about the characteristics of fish and mammals, she changes her understanding of whales and dolphins to reflect their status as mammals. It is through innumerable instances of assimilation and accommodation that cognitive development occurs. The term development reflects one final influence from biology: organisms are not static. Rather, they change both across the lifetime of the individual and across the history of the species. One more task for the biologist, therefore, is to describe and explain the changes that occur. Intelligence, too, changes as the child develops, and the child psychologist must describe and explain these changes. For Piaget, there is no single organization or set of cognitive structures that defines childhood intel- ligence. As children develop, they construct qualitatively different structures, structures that allow a progressively better understanding of the world. These qualitatively different structures define the Piagetian stages of development. Thus, Piaget can be considered a stage theorist. Piaget divided development into four general stages, or periods: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

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  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Michael Wertheimer, Gregory A. Kimble(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  From 1921 until his death, Piaget was engaged in studying child psychology: the development of logic, causal reasoning, and thought; the growth of moral development; the child’s conception of the world; and the emergence of intelligence during infancy and early childhood. This work led to the evolution of his theory of intelligence and its development. During the 1920s and 1930s, this work was highly regarded in the United States. However, during the 1940s and 1950s, the period when psychology was dominated by the philosophy of logical positivism, it met with criticism. Subsequently, as Piaget’s later work appeared in English translation, interest in his work grew once again.

  Piaget remained an active scientist well into his 80s, revising his theoretical formulations throughout his entire career. He noted that he had provided only a rough sketch of human cognitive development and that later research would provide the parts that were lacking or that needed to be modified or abandoned. Today psychologists debate the merits of Piaget’s work even as they continue to respect his contributions to methodology and to an overarching theory of intellectual development. After a brief overview of the principle components of Piaget’s theory, this chapter discusses some of the controversial elements of his conceptual framework.

  Major Principles of Piaget’s Theory

  Perhaps Piaget’s most significant contribution was to demonstrate the fundamental differences between the intellectual functioning of children and that of adults. At birth, infants are not conscious of themselves or objects as independent structures. From this primitive level, children’s cognitive systems change to become more adaptive and to provide a more realistic understanding of the world. Central to Piaget’s theory is the view that knowledge of the world is not simply an internalized replica of what is external to the self. Rather, acquisition of knowledge is a creative event that depends on and is limited by the cognitive processes that the child has developed. For example, a 2-month-old baby has only a few ways of knowing—by sucking, by touching, and by focusing on round, facelike objects. The infant’s understanding of the world cannot go beyond what is provided by these first cognitive resources.

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  Theories of Development

  Concepts and Applications

  • William Crain(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fifth, Piaget, like other rigorous stage theorists, claimed his stages unfold in the same sequence in all cultures. This proposal frequently puzzles readers. Don’t different cultures teach different beliefs, particularly with regard to morals? We will take up this issue in the next chapter, but in general the Piagetian answer is that the theory is not concerned with specific beliefs but with underlying cognitive capacities. So young children, regardless of their cultural beliefs on matters such as sex or fighting, will base their views on what they think authority condones or punishes. It is not until adolescence, when young people acquire formal operations, that they will give abstract, theoretical treatises on moral matters, whatever their specific beliefs.

  In summary, then, Piaget advanced a rigorous stage theory, which means he believed his stages (1) unfold in an invariant sequence, (2) describe qualitatively different patterns, (3) refer to general properties of thought, (4) represent hierarchic integrations, and (5) are culturally universal.

  Movement from Stage to Stage

  Piaget devoted a great deal of attention to the structures of his stages and far less attention to the problem of movement through them. Nevertheless, he had definite views on this topic.

  He acknowledged (1964b) that biological maturation plays some role in development. For example, children probably cannot attain concrete operations without some minimal maturation of the nervous system. However, Piaget said that maturation alone cannot play the dominant role because rates of development depend so much on where children live. Children who grow up in impoverished rural areas frequently develop at slow rates, apparently because they lack intellectual stimulation. The environment is also important.

  However, it is easy to exaggerate the role of the environment, as learning theorists do. Generally speaking, learning theorists believe the child’s mind is primarily a product of external reinforcements and teaching. Piaget-ian concepts, they assume, must be taught by parents, teachers, and others. However, it is not at all clear that this is the case, as we will discuss in the last section of this chapter.

  In Piaget’s view, the environment is important, but only partly so. The environment nourishes, stimulates, and challenges the child, but children themselves build cognitive structures. As children seek out the environment, they encounter events that capture their interest

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  Theoretical Approaches in Psychology

  • Matt Jarvis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  qualitatively different—i.e. children simply do not think in the same way as adults.

  This idea was extremely radical when Piaget started out, but it has now become generally accepted in cognitive-developmental psychology. In fact you may regard this as common sense. Piaget was interested both in how children learnt and in how they thought. We can have a look at these issues.

  How children learn

  Piaget saw intellectual development as a process in which we construct an internal model of reality. In order to gain the information to construct this internal representation of the world we spend much of our childhood actively exploring ourselves and the outside world. You may have noticed that even very young children are inquisitive about their own abilities and about their surroundings. Piaget proposed that the child’s mental world contains two types of structure, schemas and operations.

  Schemas

  Schemas are packets of information, each of which relates to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions and abstract concepts. Piaget believed that we are born with a few innate schemas which enable us to interact with others. During the first year of life we construct other schemas. An important early schema is the ‘me-schema’ which develops as the child realises during its first few months that it is a separate object from the surrounding world.

  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. However, whenever the child meets a new situation that cannot be explained by its existing schemas it experiences the unpleasant sensation of disequilibrium. We are all instinctively driven to gain an understanding of the world and so escape disequilibrium. Piaget identified two processes by which equilibration takes place: assimilation and accommodation.

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  Parenting Behaviour and Children's Cognitive Development

  • Sara Meadows(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The big divide, I think, is between those models where development is largely asocial and predominantly endogenous, and those where it is socially constituted or exogenous. There is a basic philosophical divide here which places Hegel on one side and Kant on the other (see, e.g. Markova, 1982); or, in contemporary work, at one extreme we have nativist theories postulating innate ideas (e.g. Fischer & Bidell, 1991; Fodor, 1981, 1983; and see also Plomin, 1994b; Plomin & McClearn, 1993) and at the other we are essentially constituted by our society (e.g. Bronfennbrenner & Ceci, 1993; Mayall, 1994). Most developmental psychologists agree that "cognitive development" involves change from a starting point which includes some innate predispositions, if not ideas, towards later states which vary in their content and in their sources, and that this change comes about largely through an active engagement of the individual with the physical and social worlds; however, emphases within this general agreement differ considerably. The debate in the psychology of cognitive development is embodied in the work of Piaget and Vygotsky. Each acknowledged that cognitive development is both endogenous and influenced by the outside social world, and each admired the other's work even when there were disagreements, but they developed different emphases, particularly regarding the role of adult-child interaction in the development of the child's cognition (Glassman. 1994; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). I will outline their theories in turn. Piagetian theory has been understood as marginalising the role of adults in children's cognitive development, and so might be judged to be irrelevant to this essay, but an understanding of this child-centred approach is essential for an appreciation of the strengths and the problems of theory which takes the alternative approach and centres on adults' contributions to children's cognition.

  Piagetian Theory and Adult-Child Interaction in the Development of the Child’s Cognition

  Piaget emphasised the biological nature of cognition, seeing it as one form of the general struggle for "adaptation" to the environment which is characteristic of all living organisms and at the heart of evolution, with the motive forces for this struggle being seen as predominantly endogenous. The Piagetian organism owes its development primarily to an innate and inevitable drive to adapt to its environment, through assimilating new information to the structures of knowledge which have already developed, and accommodating its existing structures of knowledge to accumulating new information. It is equipped with a need to "equilibrate"; that is, to maximise consistency, to eliminate contradiction and to ensure coherence in what it knows. It develops through equilibration's orchestration of three disparate things: physical maturation, primarily of the brain; reflection on its experience of the physical world and of the logical rules which can be applied to it; and finally and marginally, social interaction. The last factor is the least emphasised in Piagetian theory. The main form of social interaction which he saw as contributing to cognitive development was conflict with one's peers. This could lead to a recognition that one's own ideas were disagreed with by someone like oneself, and therefore might potentially be disagreed with by oneself too. (Equilibration is also, and more importantly perhaps, driven by the recognition that one actually disagrees with oneself, in an entirely endogenous cognitive conflict.) This recognition of a potential internal conflict is what prompts further reflection, and the revision of old ideas. Piaget (1932, 1968, 1983) implied that disagreement with someone unlike oneself would not have this effect of sparking off an internal disagreement, because it would not be recognised as potentially one's own problem. Disagreement with an adult, especially correction by an adult, would have little benefit for true cognitive development both because adults are viewed as different by children and because the power difference complicates things; the Piagetian child may bow to the adult's authority to the extent of parroting the correction, but will not internalise it. The result of adult instruction in the Piagetian model is limited; it gives rise to passive copying of what the adult has said is right, which does not become integrated with what the child has worked out independently, and may be even more damaging in that it may prevent the child from discovering for him or herself what the adult has taught.

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  A Students' Guide to Piaget

  • D. G. Boyle(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, the child still looks on things from the point of view of their relations with himself, that is to say, he shows a marked degree ofegocentri- city. The Pre-operational Phase The pre-operational phase comprises the child's development from the close of the sensorimotor phase up to the time when his thought becomes operational (in Piaget's technical sense of this term). The child is beginning to take an interest in the people and things around him, though essentially from his point of view rather than theirs, and this egocentrism is characteristic of this phase of development. The child believes, for instance, that everyone has the same view of things as himself and (to take a specific example) if he is seated at one side of a table, in the middle of which is a model showing houses and hills, and an experimenter is seated at the other side, the child will be unable to make a drawing of what the model will look like to the experimenter. A hill may cut off the view of a house from the experimenter's side of the table, but as long as the child can see the house he believes that everyone else will also be able to see it. Of course, the child's understanding of relationships and points of view improves as he grows older and becomes less egocentric, and it is this increase in understanding that we observe in the pre-operational phase. The egocentrism of this phase is an intermediate step between the autism of the sensorimotor phase and fully intelligent 42 A Students 9 Guide to Piaget understanding. To make the progression the child requires play and imitation, as before, and also the use of language, which develops rapidly in the pre-school period and the early school years. It is usual to divide this phase into two stages, the precon- ceptual stage (from 2 to 4 years) and the stage of intuitive think- ing (from 4 to 7 years); of these, the latter is richer in its yield of data.

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  Advances in Cognitive—Behavioral Research and Therapy

  Volume 2

  • Philip C. Kendall(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Review of Educational Research, 1975, 45, 1-41. Ennis, R. H. An alternative to Piaget's conceptualization of logical competence. Child Development, 1976, 47, 903-913. Enright, R. D., Enright, W. F., & Lapsley, D. K. Distributive justice development and social class: A replication. Developmental Psychology, 1981, 17, 826-832. Erikson, E. H. Childhood and society. New York: Norton, 1963. Farnham-Diggory, S., & Nelson, B. Cognitive analyses of basic school tasks. In F. Mor-rison, C. Lord, & D. P. Keating (Eds.), Advances in applied developmental psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Academic Press, 1983, in press. Feldman, D. F., & Toulmin, S. Logic and the theory of the mind. In W. J. Arnold (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 23). Lincoln, Nebraska: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975. Feldman, D. H. Beyond universals in cognitive development. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1980. Fischer, K. W. A theory of cognitive development: The control and construction of hier-archies of skills. Psychological Review, 1980, 87, 477-531. Fischer, K. W. (Ed.). Cognitive development. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 1981. 234 Bruce L. Bobbitt and Daniel P. Keating Fischer, K. W., & Bullock, D. Pattern of data: Sequence, synchrony, and constraints in cognitive development. In K. W. Fischer (Ed.), New directions for child development (Vol. 12). San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 1981. Flavell, }. H. The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget. Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1963. Flavell, J. H. Developmental studies of mediated memory. In H. W. Reese & L. P. Lipsitt (Eds.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 5). New York: Academic Press, 1970. Flavell, J. H. Stage-related properties of cognitive development. Cognitive Psychology, 1971, 2, 421-453. Flavell, J. H. An analysis of cognitive-developmental sequences. Genetic Psychology Mon-ographs, 1972, 86, 179-350. Flavell, }. H. Cognitive development. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

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  Childhood and Adolescence

  Voyages in Development

  • Spencer Rathus(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  What Are Young Children’s Ideas About How the Mind Works? Piaget might have predicted that preoperational children are too egocentric and too focused on misleading external appearances to have a theory of mind. But research has shown that even preschool-age children can accurately predict and explain hu-man action and emotion in terms of mental states. They are beginning to understand where knowledge comes from, and they have a rudimentary ability to distinguish appearance from reality (Lecce et al., 2015; Marcovitch et al., 2015). Let us consider these developments. On False Beliefs: Just Where Did Those Crayons Go? One important indication of the young child’s understanding that mental states affect behavior is the ability to understand false beliefs. This concept involves chil-dren’s ability to separate their beliefs from those of another person who has false knowledge of a situation. It is illustrated in a study of 3-year-olds by Louis Moses and John Flavell (1990). The children were shown a videotape in which a girl named Cathy found some crayons in a bag. When Cathy left the room briefly, a clown entered the room. The clown removed the crayons from the bag, hid them in a drawer, and put rocks in the bag instead. When Cathy returned, the children were asked whether Cathy thought there were going to be rocks or crayons in the bag. Most of the 3-year-olds incorrectly answered “rocks,” demonstrating their difficulty in understanding that the other person’s belief would be different from their own 8. Cognitive _______ is temporary support provided by a parent or teacher to a child who is learning to perform a task. 9. Caldwell and her colleagues found that the children of parents who are emotionally and verbally _______ show advanced social and language development. 10. Molfese and her colleagues found that the _______ was the single most important predictor of scores on IQ tests among children.

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