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Jean Piaget developed a theory of cognitive development (1935) which explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.
Jean Piaget’s take on learning, viewed as a modification in the state of knowledge, coherently integrates itself in the group of piagetian research on the subject of intelligence development.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
Piaget's Intentions
What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice and so on emerged.
Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults.
According to Piaget (buy his books from Amazon), children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.
The Cognitive Theory
There are three basic components to Piaget’s cognitive theory:
1. Schemas – Building blocks of knowledge
2. Adaptation processes that enable the transition from one stage to another:
- Equilibrium
- Assimilation
- Accomodation
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Schemas
Imagine what it would be like if you did not have a mental model of your world. It would mean that you would not be able to make so much use of information from your past experience or to plan future actions.
Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world. Piaget (1952) defined a schema as:
A schema is a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning.
In more simple terms Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of organizing knowledge. Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.
Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata (the plural of schema) be thought of as ‘index cards’ filed in the brain, each one telling an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information.
When Piaget (buy his books from Amazon) talked about the development of a person’s mental processes, he was referring to increases in the number and complexity of the schemata that a person had learned.
Jean Piaget book recommendations
Adaptation Processes
Intelligence means adaptation, in Piaget’s view. The onthogenetic evolution of intelligence is seen as a preogressive construction which depends on both internal factors (the specific capabilities of the individual) and external factors (the characteristics of the environment in which the human being progresses).
Jean Piaget (1952) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:
Assimilation
Accomodation
Equilibration
This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
Equilibrium occurs when a child’s schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).
Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.
Stages of Cognitive Development
The Sensorimotor stage
Period: 0/18 months – 2 years old
The child’s intelligence is rooted in action and perception. He is absorbing all the information through sensing. in the course of this period decentering occurs. The main aquisition of the child is object permanence – the child’s capacity of representing objects even in their absence.
The Preoperational stage
- Substage of symbolic and preconceptual thinking
- Substage of intuitive thinking
In the substage of symbolic and preconceptual thinking a fundamental function is installed, which consists of the possibility to represent a “significant” using a symbol.
- Egocentrism – prisoner of his own perspective
- Centering – orienting to a single characteristics and ignoring the others
- The mixing of reality with imaginary fantasies
- Ireversibility – the inability to reverse mental operations
The Concrete Operational stage
Period: 7/8 – 11/12 years old
The child gradually observes the conservation of substance, weight and volume. Operational groupings are illustrated by logical-mathematical equations, of classifications, constructing numbers, all of them being named concrete operations.
The Formal Operational stage
In this period, the thinking of the child will liberate itself of the concrete. Formal thinking is a hypotethical-deductive reasoning which allows for the examination of consequences which derive from:
- liberating relations from order and series;
- liberating classifications of their concrete, intuitive links.
Conclusion
The great merit of the Piagetian theory is that it showed the way in which intelligence develops and the fact that is has its origin in the sensorimotor interactions with the environment even before language acquisition. The operational structures of intelligence are not inborn, they are being elaborated until approximately the end of the first two decades of life.
The theory is both constructivist and genetical, dealing with the steps required for intelligence to develop and, also, explaining the genesis and evolution of the cognitive processes.
