Piaget: Developmental Growth

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) developed significant pioneering insights into children’s
cognitive, moral, and language development. Instead of philosophical speculation, Piaget used clinical
observation to discover how children construct and act on their ideas.
Piaget discovered that children construct their concepts about reality by actively exploring their environment.
According to Piaget, intelligence develops through a series of stages, characterized by the child’s set of mental
structures and operations at a particular age. With each new stage, children develop new mental abilities that
enable them to reconstruct the concepts they constructed at an earlier stage into a more complex cognitive map
of the world. Based on his stage-learning theory of development, Piaget identified four qualitatively distinct but
interrelated periods of cognitive growth:
1. The sensorimotor stage, from birth to two years when children learn by actively exploring their
immediate environment. Children begin their earliest environmental explorations using their senses—
their mouths, eyes, and hands. Displaying a largely nonverbal intelligence, they learn to coordinate.
Their senses and to construct simple concepts of space, time, and causality at the visual, auditory, tactile,
and motor levels. These rudimentary concepts, however, are limited to children’s immediate situations.

2. The preoperational stage, from two to seven years, when intuition combines with speech to lead to
operational thinking involving concepts of space, time, and cause-and-effect relationships that extend
beyond the immediate situation. Children now reconstruct their concepts by grouping and naming
objects. They use signs and symbols to represent their ideas and experiences as they reorganize the
mental structures and networks constructed in the first stage into a more complex, higher-order, view of
reality

3. The concrete-operational period, from seven to eleven years, when children begin thinking in a
mathematical and logical way. They become adept at recognizing such general characteristics as size,
length, and weight and use them in more complex mental operations. As before, they reconstruct the
concepts arrived at in earlier stages into more abstract and complex levels. Coinciding with the years of
elementary school, children in the concrete-operational stage exercise their reasoning skills and deal
with clock and calendar time, map and geographical space, and experimental cause and effect

4. At the formal-operational period, from age eleven through early adulthood, individuals deal with
logical propositions and construct abstract hypotheses. They now understand and interpret space,
historical time, and multiple cause and-effect relationships. They use such multivariate thinking to
construct possible plans of action. Now that adolescents understand cause-and-effect relationships, they
can use the scientific method to explain reality and can learn complex mathematical, linguistic, and
mechanical processes

Piaget’s stage-learning theory of development has many important applications to education. Viewing the world
differently than adults, children are constantly reconstructing and re-patterning their view of reality as they
move through the stages of development. Thus, children’s conception of reality often differs from the kinds of
curriculum and instruction adults frequently impose on them.
Early childhood and elementary education should be based on how children develop and act on their own
thinking and learning processes. As they move through the stages of development, children have their own
readiness for new learning based on the cognitive level they have reached. This, in turn, determines their
readiness for new and higher-order learning experiences. Although a rich environment can stimulate readiness,
we cannot force learning on children.
Piaget accentuated their environment as children’s setting for learning. Outside of school, children learn directly
and informally from their environment. The most effective teaching strategies replicate the informal learning
children use in their everyday out-of-school lives. As they interact with their environment, children build their
knowledge of their world through a process of creative invention known as constructivism. As they discover
inadequacies between their existing concepts and the new situations they encounter as they explore their
environment, children reconstruct or re-conceptualize their existing knowledge with their new information to
construct more complete higher-order concepts. To stimulate children’s explorations, teachers can design their
classrooms as learning centers that are stocked with materials that engage children’s curiosity. The following
principles from Piaget can guide teachers’ pre service preparation and classroom practice:
1. Encourage children to explore and experiment.
2. Individualize instruction so that children can learn at their own level of readiness.
3. Design the classroom as a learning center stocked with concrete materials that children can touch,
manipulate, and use.
Piaget’s cognitive psychology connected how children learn to think and reason with teaching and learning in
schools. His theory generated revolutionary changes in early childhood and elementary education, not only in
the United States, but throughout the world. His ideas stimulated a movement to make classroom settings more
informal and more related to how children learn. Contemporary constructivist education originated with
Piaget’s pioneering assertion that children do not copy but rather construct reality