THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jean Piaget

The principle of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating
what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discovers.

Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory of development is truly a classic in the field of educational psychology.
This theory fueled other researchers and theories of development and learning. Its focus is on how
individual construct knowledge.

Piagetian Tasks.
Piaget called his general theoritical framework “ genetic epistemology” because he was interested in
how knowledge developed in human beings.

Piaget was initially into biology and he also had a background ih philosophy. Knowledge from both these
disciplines influenced his theories and research of child development. Out of his researches, Piaget came
up with the stages of cognitive development.

Piaget examined the implications of his theory not only to aspects of cognition but also to intelligence
and moral development.

Basic Cognitive Concepts

Schema - Piaget used the term schema to refer to the cognitive structures by which individuals
intellectually adapt to and oragnize their environment. It is an individual way to understand or create
meaning about the thing or experience. It is like a mind has a filing cabinet and each drawer has folders
that contain files of things he has had experience with.

Assimilation - The process of fitting new experience into an existing or previously created cognitive
structure or schema.

Accomodation - the process of creating a new schema. He now adds a new file in his filing cabinet.

Equilibration _ it is achieving proper balance between assimilation and accomodation.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Stage 1 - Sensori-motor Stage - corresponds from birth to infancy. The term sensori-motor focuses on
the prominence of the senses and muscle movement through which the infant comes to learn about
himself and the world. In working with children in the sensori-motor stage, teachers should aim to
provide a rich and stimulating environment with appropriate objects to play with.

Stage 2 - Pre-Operational Stage - it covers from about two to seven years old, roughly corresponding
to the preschool years. Intelligence in this stage is intuitive in nature. At this stage , the child can now
make mental representation and is able to pretend, the child is now ever closer to the use of symbols.
This stage is highlighted the following:
A. Symbolic function. This is the ability to represent objects and events. A symbol is a thing that
represents something else.
B. Egocentrism. The tendency of the child to only see his point of view and to assume that everyone
also has his same point of view.
C. Centration. Refer to the tendency of the child to only focus on one aspect of a thing or event and
exclude other aspects.
D. Reversibility. Pre-operational children still has the inability to reverse their thinking.
E. Animism. This is the tendency of children to attribute human like traits or characteristics to
inanimate objects.
F. Transductive reasoning. This refers to the pre-operational child type of reasoning that is neither
inductive nor deductive.

Stage 3. Concrete-Operational. This stage is characterized by the ability of the child to think logically but
only in terms of concrete objects. This covers approximately the ages between 8-11 years or the
elementary school tears. The concrete operational stage marked by the following:

Decentering. Refers to the ability of the child to perceive the different features of objects and situations.
Reversibility. The child can now follow that certain operation can be done in reverse.
Conservation.This the abilty to know that certain properties of objects like number, mass, volume or
area do not change even if there is a change in appearance.
Seration. This refers to the ability to order or arrange things in a eries based on one dimension such as
weight, volume or size.

Stage 4. Formal Operational Stage Covering ages betwen 12 1nd 15 years, thinking becomes more
logical. They can now slve abstract problems and can hypothesize. This stage is characterized by the
following:
Hypothetical Reasoning. This is the ability to come up with different hypothesis about a problem and to
gather and weigh data in order to make a final decision or judgement.

Analogical reasoning. This is the ability to perceive the relationship in one instance and then use that
relationship to narrow down possible answers in another similar situation.
Deductive reasoning. This is the ablity to think logically by applying a general rule to a particular instance
situation.

Happy Learning …
Questions to answer:

1. Explain the advantages of learning the concepts of this theory?

2. In what way does basic cognitive concepts help us teachers in determining students learning?
3. State the relationship of assimilation and accomodation.
4. What is the role of schema?
5. Why there’s a need for a teacher to familiarize the four stages and there respective age bracket of
cognitive development? How this can be helpful in our teaching learning process?
6. Discuss the advantages of knowing the development of each stages of cognitive development .j
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