Piaget’s stages of development

Piaget’s four stages of development

Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years)
 Use senses and movements to get around.
 Learn by linking those senses to objects (sucking/grabbing on things)
 Live only in present; no knowledge of space/time.
 Initially depend on reflex action but shift to controlled movements.
 At 4 months develop habit of repeating actions (drop a ball once, pick it up and drop
it again).
 At around 6 months they develop object permanence.
 At the end of this stage, they have a sense of existing separately from the rest of the
world.
Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
The symbolic function stage (2-4 years)
 Children start imitating others.
 They start using objects as symbols for other things.
 Symbolic play begins, which is when the child uses objects to represent other objects
(box as a stool)
 Animism can be seen, which is when the child believes objects can behave as living
creatures.
 Egocentrism is very prevalent here.
 Children start thinking in pictures and symbols, and start using words to represent
certain objects, which is the beginning of speech development.
Intuitive thought stage (4-7 years)
 The start of reasoning
 Children start asking lots of questions as they want to learn more things.
 Centration: during a complex task they focus on only one area of the problem and
ignore all other important ones.
 Conservation isn’t achieved yet: don’t understand that changing the appearance of
something doesn’t necessarily change the size/volume/weight.
 There is also irreversibility, when the child doesn’t know that an action can be
reversed (water in tall glass, filled till the top– water in wide class, filled up less –
water in tall glass, filled till the top).
Concrete operational stage (7-12 years)
 Start using rules and strategies to help in their cognition and using concrete objects
to help them understand.
 They still struggle with abstract ideas such as morality.

o Seriation starts, which is separating objects by different criteria.

o Classification is when the child starts naming and identifying objects by their
size/ appearance.
o Reversibility, which is the knowledge that 2+4=6, so 6-4=2
 o Conservation, which is the knowledge that length, quantity and number
aren’t related to how things look, so the water example for irreversibility
works here.
o Decentration is the ability to be able to focus on multiple areas of a complex
issue (conservation also relates to this).
Formal operational stage (12+)
 There is control over thoughts in this stage, rather than control over the world (in
the COS).
 They can think about more than one thing when describing others (e.g., gender,
height, race, etc.)
 They can think about how time progresses, and how things will change with time.
 They also have an understanding of morality.