JEAN PIAGET’S

COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
THEORY
Kristha Joy V. Bauzon and Rico A. Apelado
BSSW AS12
Leyte Normal University
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Cognition – Mental processes by which
knowledge is acquired, elaborated,
stored, retrieved, and used to solve
problems.
Cognitive Development – Refers to the
changes that occur in children’s mental
skills and abilities over time.
Cognitive development refers to the manner
through which an individual comes to know and
understand the world.
• It refers to activities that involve thinking,
perceiving, and problem-solving.
• It is the development of knowledge or general
understanding.
• It is how we learn to think, know, remember,
and communicate.
 Jean Piaget
(1896-1980)
➢ Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland
on August 9, 1896, and began
showing an interest in the natural
sciences at a very early age.
➢ By age 11, he had already started his
career as a researcher by writing a
short paper on an albino sparrow.
➢ He continued to study the natural
sciences and received his Ph.D. in
Zoology from University of Neuchâtel
in 1918.
➢ Piaget later developed an interest in
psychoanalysis and after graduation, he
went to France to work on a method for
testing children’s aptitudes and abilities
and spent a year working at a boys'
institution created by Alfred Binet.
➢ While administering these tests, Piaget
began to notice how younger kids kept
giving wrong answers to certain
questions.
➢ He became fascinated by the fact that
children of a certain age consistently
made particular mistakes that older kids
and adults didn’t.
➢ “How does knowledge grow?”
➢ While his early career consisted of
work in the natural sciences, it was
during the 1920s that he began to
move toward work as a
psychologist.
➢ He married Valentine Châtenay in
1923 and the couple went on to
have three children. It was
Piaget's observations of his own
children that served as the
basis for many of his later theories.
CERTAIN ASSUMPTIONS:
Development is an unfolding of the growth
process of maturation.
Development is brought about by experiences with
the environment
Development is the result of explicit and implicit
teaching of the child by other people
Development is brought about by the process of
equilibration.
EQUILIBRATION

Equilibration is the active internal

process of organizing and coordinating
one’s intellectual development. It is a
form of self-regulation, where the child
must be able to constantly
accommodate to or assimilate the
changes in his environment.
TWO PROCESSES INVOLVED IN ACHIEVING
EQUILIBRATION:

ASSIMILATION is the process by which an individual

acquires information or knowledge or by which
experiences are integrated into an existing scheme.

ACCOMODATION is the process of creating a new

scheme by modifying an existing scheme after an
individual’s interaction with the environment.
SCHEMES/SCHEMAS

• are responses to stimuli, including a variety of

acts in many different circumstances.
• Psychological structures that organize
experiences.
• The organize pattern of thoughts or behavior.
• The mental framework that help interpret
information.
SCHEMES/SCHEMAS
characterized by
• MOBILITY OF SCHEMAS- that it can be applied to
a variety of objects even objects never encountered
before.
• SENSORIMOTOR SCHEMAS- involve overt actions.
• COGNITIVE SCHEMAS- include the number system,
concept of space, or the laws of logic.
FOUR TYPES OF ASSIMILATION
• REPRODUCTIVE ASSIMILATION – where the
schema tends to be repeated over and over
again, coming to function stably and smoothly in
the process. This is achieved by learning through
exercise.
• GENERALIZING ASSIMILATION– where
schemas accommodate to the range of specific
stimulus objects that occur in the child’s
particular environment.
FOUR TYPES OF ASSIMILATION
• RECOGNITORY ASSIMILATION– the fitting of a
schema to the demands of the objects and
acknowledging the familiarity of the object and
the fact that one has fitted.
• MUTUAL COORDINATION AND
ASSIMILATION OF SCHEMAS- two schemes
are interacting with each other and assimilating
each other.
• Piaget's theory, creates a state
of disequilibrium, or an imbalance
between what is understood and what is
encountered. People naturally try to
reduce such imbalances by using the
stimuli that cause the disequilibrium
and developing new schemes or
adapting old ones until equilibrium is
restored
STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• SENSORIMOTOR(0-2 YEARS)
• PREOPERATIONAL (2-7 YEARS)
• CONCRETE OPERATIONS (7-11)
• FORMAL OPERATIONS (11- ADOLESENCE)
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (0-2 YEARS)

• During this first month, the behavior of an

infant is purely reflexive. He is unable to
discriminate between himself and the
environment.
• In this stage, the child begins to organize
visual images and to control his physical
motions.
PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS
• Repetitive acts that center on the infant’s
body
INTERNATIONAL BEHAVIOR
• The infant’s behavior becomes oriented toward
objects and events outside his body.
• Repeats behavior to make interesting events
continue or recur.
OBJECT PERMANENCE
• The awareness that an object has a existence
that is independent of his own actions and
perceptions.
• One aspect of early understanding of space.
The child begins to anticipate events to search
for objects that have disappeared.
REPRESENTATION
• Utilizing trial and error behavior at the beginning,
the child eventually manifests the ability to solve
problems through a process underlying
insightful behavior.
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
(2-7 YEARS)
• Period of representational and pre-logical thoughts
• The child acquires language, learns to make and
interpret pictures and uses one object to represent
another in an imaginative play.
• A child still thinks in a very different way form an adult.
 Limitations of Preoperational Thought
❑ IRREVERSIBILITY
- Inability to mentally reverse a physical action to return
an object to its original state
❑ CENTRATION
- Inability to mentally hold changes in two dimensions
at the same time
❑ EGOCENTRISM
- Inability to consider another point of view.
 CONCRETE OPERATIONAL (7-11YEARS)

❖ According to Piaget, children enter a new stage

of cognitive development: concrete operations.
❖ Children are less egocentric or experience
decentration and can use thinking (mental
operations) to solve concrete (actual) problems.
❖ They can now think logically because they can
take multiple aspects of a situation into account
rather than focus on only one aspect, as they did
in the preoperational stage.
 CONCRETE OPERATIONAL (7-11YEARS)
❖ Increased ability to understand other people’s
viewpoints helps them to communicate more
effectively and to be more flexible in their moral
judgments.
❖ However, according to Piaget, children in this
stage are still limited to thinking about situations
in the here and now.
❖ They cannot yet think in hypothetical terms,
about what could be rather than what is. This
ability to think abstractly does not develop until
adolescence.
ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Conservation
• The ability to recognize that the
amount of something remains the
same even if the material is
rearranged, as long as nothing is
added or taken away.
• Concrete operational children
can work out the answers in their
heads; they do not have to
measure or weigh the objects.
ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Reversibility
• The reverse of transformation of
something and restore to its
original shape.
• Refers to the ability to recognize
that numbers or objects can be
changed and returned to their
original condition.
ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Classification
• Children’s ability to classify,
or sort items into categories,
enables them to organize
and understand their world.
• Class inclusion is the ability
to see the relationship
between a whole and its
parts.
ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Seriation and Transitive Inference
• Children show that they can
understand seriation when
they can arrange objects in
a series by placing them in
order according to one or
more dimensions such as
weight (lightest to heaviest)
or color (lightest to darkest).
ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Distinguishing Reality from Fantasy
• To some extent,
preoperational children can
tell the difference
between what is real and
what is imaginary, but this
ability becomes more
sophisticated during the
stage of concrete
operations.
FORMAL OPERATIONS STAGE(11-onwards)
• The last stage of Piaget’s Cognitive
Development Theory.
• During this stage, the young person
develops full patterns of thinking.
• A person is able to use logic and symbolic
processes.
• As he reaches the later adolescent age,
most of the additional structures necessary
for logical, mathematical, and scientific
reasoning are completed.
FORMAL OPERATIONS STAGE(11-onwards)
• There is a decrease in egocentric which
allows him to solve problems from a
number of approaches.
• Adolescents’ more sophisticated thinking is
also shown in their ability to make
appropriate conclusions from facts, which
is known as deductive reasoning.
• Deductive reasoning – drawing
conclusions from facts; characteristic of
formal-operational thought.
Combinatorial
Thinking
• Able to conceive
possibilities and
organize situations and
problems.
Hypothetic Thinking / Hypothetic-
Deductive Reasoning
• Reasoning, logical
inferences, and
understanding causal
relationships are
established at this stage.
Problem solving
abilities and logical
reasoning comprise.
 PIAGET’S FOUR STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
STAGES APPROX. AGES ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Trial and Error learning
SENSORIMOTOR BIRTH-2 YEARS through sensorimotor
behavior
Use or words, images
PREOPERATIONAL 2-7 YEARS and signs to represents
objects internally, but
thinking remains rigid
Use or reversible
CONCRETE 7-11 YEARS mental activities that
OPERATIONS leads to more organize
and rational thinking
FORMAL OPERATIONS Attainment of Abstract,
11 -onwards Hypothetical and
Logical reasoning
WHAT WE SEE CHANGES
WHAT WE KNOW,
WHAT WE KNOW
CHANGES WHAT WE SEE
~JEAN PIAGET
thankyou