Jean Piaget Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget

"Theory of Cognitive Development"

by Jescelle Mae Cordero & Veronica Cabading

Jean Piaget History​

​Born: August 9, 1896, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Died: September 16, 1980, Geneva, Switzerland

Full name: Jean William Fritz Piaget

Spouse: Valentine Châtenay (m. 1923–1980)

Children: Jacqueline Piaget, Laurent Piaget, Lucienne Piaget

Parents: Rebecca Jackson, Arthur Piaget

• ​Piaget received his Ph. D from University of Neuchatel in 1918.

• ​1896 - 1980, he was one of the 20th century's most influential researcher in the area of developmental psychology.

• ​He was originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy and considered himself a Genetic Epistemologist.

• ​Piaget wanted to know how children learned their development in the study of knowledge

• ​He administered Binet's IQ test in Paris and observed that children's answers were qualitatively different

• ​Piaget's theory is based on the idea that the developing child builds cognitive structures.

• ​He believes that the child's cognitive structure increases with the development

• ​Piaget's Theory of infant development were based on his observations of his own three children.

What is Cognition?

​The term cognition is derived from the latin word "cognoscere" which means "to know" or "to recognize" or "to conceptualize"

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​Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses

​What is Cognitive Development?

• ​Cognitive Development is the emergence of the ability to think and understand.

• ​The acquisition of the ability to think, reason and problem solve.

• ​It is the process by which people's thinking changes across the life span.

• Piaget studied Cognitive Development by observing children in particular to examin how their though processes changed with age.

• ​It is the growing apprehension and adaptation to the physical and social environment.

​How Cognitive Development occurs?

• ​Cognitive Development is a gradual and orderly changes by which mental process becomes more complex and sophisticated.

• ​The essential development of Cognition is the establishments of new schemes.

• ​Assimilation and accommodation are both the processes of the ways of Cognitive development

• ​The equilibrium is the symbol of a new stage of the Cognitive Development .

​Key Concepts of Cognitive Development

​Schema

​​Schema is an internal representation of the world. It helps an individual understand the worls they inhabit. They are cognitive structures that represents a certain aspect of the world, and can be seen as categories which have a certain pre-conceived ideas in them.

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​Example:

​My schema for Christmas includes : Christmas trees, presents, giving, money, green, red, gold, winter, Santa Clause, and etc..

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​Someone else may have an entirely different schema such as Jesus, birth, church, holiday, Christianity and etc..

​Assimilation

​It is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation. Here, the learner fits the new idea into what he already knows. In Assimilation, the schema is not changed, it is only modified

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​Example:

​A 2 year old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father's horror, the toddler shouts "clown, clown!"

​Accommodation

​This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work and needs to be chjanged to deal with a new object or situation. in accomodation, the schema is altered and may be developed.

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​Example:

​In the clown incident: The boy's father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown's, he wasn't wearing a funny costume and wasn't doing silly things to make people laugh.

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​- With this new knowledge, the boy was able to changes his schema of "clown" and make his idea fit better to a standard concept of "clown"

​Equilibrium

​Piaget believes that cognitive development did not prgress 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. As a child progresses through the stages of Cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to account for new knowledge (accommodation). Equilibrium helps explain how children a re able to move from one stage of though to the next.

​The Sensory Motor Stage (Birth - 2 years)

​Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (seeing, hearing) with motor actions (reaching, touching

​​Object Permanence (memory) - realize that object exist even if they are out of sight.

​Infants progress from reflexive, instinctual actions at birth to the beginning of problem solving (intellectual) and symbolic abilities (language) toward the end of this stage.

​Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

​This stage begins when the child start to use symbols and language. This is a period of developing language and concepts. So, the child is capable of more complex mental representations (i.e, words and images), He is still unable to use 'operations', i.e, logical metal rules, such as rules of arithmetic. This stage if further divided into 2 substages:

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​Preconceptual stage (2-4 years): Increased use of verbal representation but speech is egocentric. the child uses symbols to stand for actions: a toy doll stands for a real baby or the role plays mummy or daddy.

Intuitive Stage (4-7 years): Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. Here the child base their knowledge on what they feel or sense to be true, yet they cannot explain the underlying behind what they feel or sense.​

​Key Features of this Stage

​Egocentrism - the child's thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (about themselves or their point of view)

​"If I can't see you, you also can't see me". It is the inability to see the world from anyone else's eyes. It is well explained by Piaget as Three Mountain Task.

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​Animism - treating inanimate objects as living ones.

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​Centration - the process of concentrating on one limited aspect of a stimulus and ignoring other aspects. It is noticed in Conservation.

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​Conservation - is the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation.

​Egocentrism Example: A crying mother was given a teddy bear or a toy to make her feel better.

​Animism Example: Feeding the doll and carrying like a real baby.

​Centration Example: Lions and Tigers are not cats.

​Conservation Example: Water started with the same amount and when poured to a taller skinnier glass, they were able to identify that it is still the same amount of water

​Concrete Operation Stage (7-12 years)

​This stage is characterized by the appropriate use of logic

​Seriation: The ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape or any other characteristic.

​(if given different-sized objects, they may place them accordingly)

​Transitivity: The ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial order.

​(If A is taller then B and B is taller then C, then A must be taller then C)

​Classification: The ability to group objects together on the basis of common features. The child also beghins to get the idea than one set can include another

​(There is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)

​Decentring: The ability to take multiple aspects of situation into account

​(The child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to contain less than a normally wide taller cup)

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​Reversibility: The child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state.

​(the child will rapidly determine that 4+4 = 8 then 8-4=4, the original quantity)

Conservation: Understanding the quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or item.

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​Elimination of egocentrism: The ability to view things from another's perspective.

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​The child performs operations: combining, separating, m,ultiplying, repeating, dividing etc..

​Formal Operational Stage (12 years & above)

• ​The thought becomes incresingly flexible and abstract.

• ​The ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodological way

• ​Understands that nothing is absolute; everything is relative

• ​Develops that the rules of any game or social system are developed by a man by mutual agreement and hence could be changed or modified.

• ​The child's way of thinking is at its most advanced, although the knowledge it has to work with, will changes