Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory is all about how a person or a child learn, how a person
makes their own perception to the thing in their surroundings and develop his/her cognitive
thinking and its stages. He believes that learning is caused by the 3 concept that he introduced
which are the SCHEMA, ASSIMULATION AND ACCOMODATION. It simply means that to
understand a new notion, children must reflection their previous experience, then change their
assumption to include the new experience. This indicates that children are constantly creating
knowledge base on new concept, resulting in long term changes.
Example;
A child saw a kind of animal which is a cow with the horn so the existing schema is when the
child saw an animal with the horn so possible the child thinking that all horned animal is cow
but if someone tells that not all horned animal is cow, they start to realize that he/she is wrong
because some kind of animal is not a cow, so this is what we called schema, assimilation and
accommodation.
FOUR STAGES which are sensorimotor, preparational, concrete operational, and formal
operational stage.
1. Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years) - When a child learns to repeat activities that he or she
enjoys, to actively explore their surroundings and engage with objects.
Ex.
When you hide something under the table, such as a toy, and the child attempts to find it.

2. Preoperational stage (2-7 years)- During this stage, children continue to develop
abstract mental processes while building on sensorimotor stage. This means they can consider
things other than the physical world, like as events in the past.
Ex.
A child can use an object to portray something else, such as a broom for a horse.

3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)- According to Piaget, thinking in this stage is
characterized by logical operations, such as conservation, reversibility or classification, allowing
logical reasoning.
Ex.
A child will recognize that both candy bars have the same quantity of sugar.
4. Formal Operational Stage (12 years and up)- they gain the ability to think in an abstract
manner by manipulating ideas in their head, without any dependence on concrete
manipulation.
Ex.
When younger child will believe that the candy bar that has more pieces is larger than the one
with only two pieces.