PIAGET'S

STAGES OF
COGNITIVE
DEVELOPME
NT
ED 7 | Group Piaget | 3-E
Good morning, students!
 PRAYER
Dear Lord and Father of all,
Thank you for today.
Thank you for ways in which you provide for us all.
For Your protection and love we thank you.
Help us to focus our hearts and minds now on what we are about
to learn.
Inspire us by Your Holy Spirit as we listen and write.
Guide us by your eternal light as we discover more about the
world around us.

We ask all this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.
 Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the presentation, the learners should be able to:
1. Familiarize themselves with basic cognitive concepts.
2. Enumerate Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development with your explanation, and
then conduct one example of a Piagetian Task with children and write a report on it.
3. Integrate the knowledge when monitoring and handling situations involving a
child at a specific stage of cognitive development.
4. Suggest at least five (5) ways in which Piaget's theory can be helpful for teaching
and curriculum design.
Introduction Jean Piaget's Cognitive Theory of
Development is truly a classic in the
field of educational psychology. This
theory fueled other researches and
theories of development and learning.
Its focus is on how individuals construct
knowledge.
Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)
• Jean William Fritz Piaget was born in Switzerland on August
9, 1896, and began showing an interest in the natural sciences
at a very early age.
• Swiss Psychologist, worked for several decades on
understanding children’s cognitive development.
• He is most famously known for his theory of cognitive
development that looked at how children develop
intellectually throughout the course of childhood.
• He is also credited as a pioneer of the constructivist theory,
which suggests that people actively construct their knowledge
of the world based on the interaction between their ideas and
experiences.
• Also best known for developing the term "genetic
epistemology" (the study of the origins of knowledge).
Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Schema: Piaget used the term "schema" to refer to the cognitive

structures by which individuals intellectually adapt to and
organize their environment. For instance, if a child sees a dog for
the first time, he creates his own schema of what a dog is. it has
four legs and a tail. It barks. It furry. The child then "puts this
description of a dog 'on file' in his mind." When he sees another
similar dog, he "pulls" out the file (his schema of a dog) in his
mind, looks at the animal, and says, "four legs, tails, barks, furry...
That's a dog!"
Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Assimilation: This is the process of fitting a new

experience into an existing or previously created cognitive
structure or schema. If the child sees another dog, this time
a little smaller one, he would make sense of what he is
seeing by adding this new information (a different-looking
dog) into his schema of a dog.
Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Accommodation: This is the process of creating a new schema. If

the same child now sees another animal that looks a little bit like a
dog, but somehow different. He might try to fit it into his schema
of a dog, and say, "Look mommy, what a funny looking dog. Its
bark is funny too!" Then the mommy explains, "That's not funny
looking dog. That's a goat!" With mommy further descriptions' the
child will now create a new schema, that of a goat. He now adds a
new file in his filing cabinet.
Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Equilibration: Piaget believed that people have the natural need to

understand how the world works and to find order, structure, and
predictability in their life. Equilibration is achieving proper
balance between assimilation and accommodation. When our
experiences do not match our schemata (plural of schema) or
cognitive structures, we experience cognitive disequilibrium. This
means there is a discrepancy between what is perceived and what
is understood. We then exert effort through assimilation and
accomodation to establish equilibrium once more.
PIAGET’S FOUR STAGES OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• The Sensorimotor Stage
• The Pre-Operational Stage
• The Concrete Operational Stage
• The Formal Operational Stage
 STAGE 1:
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

• The first stage corresponds from birth to infancy.

• This is the stage when a child who is initially
reflexive in grasping, sucking and reaching
becomes more organized in his movement and
activity.
• The term sensorimotor focuses on the prominence
of the senses and muscle movement through which
infant comes to learn about himself and the world.
• In working with children in sensorimotor stage,
teachers should aim to provide a rich and
stimulating environment with appropriate objects to
play with.
 STAGE 1:
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

• Object Permanence: This is the

ability of the child to know that an
object still exists even when out of
sight.
• "Acquiring the sense of object
permanence is one of the infant's
most important accomplishments,
according to Piaget."
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

• This stage covers from about two to seven years

old, roughly corresponding to the preschool
years.
• Intelligence at this age is intuitive in nature.
• At this stage, the child can now make mental
representations and is able to pretend, the child
is now ever closer to the use of symbols.
• This stage is highlighted by the following:
Symbolic Function, Egocentrism, Centration,
Irreversibility, Animism, and Trandsuctive
reasoning.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

SYMBOLIC FUNCTION:
• This is the ability to represent objects
and events.
• A symbol is a thing that represents
something else. A drawing, a written
word, or a spoken word comes to be
understood as representing a real object
like a real MRT train.
• Symbolic function gradually develops in
the period between 2 to 7 years.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

EGOCENTRISM:
• This is the tendency of the child to only
see his point of view and to assume that
everyone also has his point of view.
• The child cannot take the perspective of
others.
• For instance, you see this in five-year-
old boy who buys a toy truck for his
mother's birthday. Or a three year-old
girl who cannot understand why her
cousins call her daddy "uncle" and not
daddy.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

CENTRATION:
• This refers to the tendency of the child to
only foucs on one aspect of a thing or
event and exclude other aspects.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

IRREVERSIBILITY:
• Pre-operational children still have the inability to reverse their thinking.
• Example: They can understand the 2 + 3 is 5, but cannot understand that
5 - 3 is 2. Likewise, a child may be able to perform multiplication, but
can't divide.

• Example: A child can't imagine pouring

the juice from the tumbler back into the
the bottle
• Irreversibility is a factor that contributes to a
child's inability to conserve quantities.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

ANIMISM:
• This is the tendency of children to
attribute human like traits or
characteristics to inanimate objects.
• Example: When at night, the child is
asked, where the sun is, she will reply,
"Mr. Sun is asleep."
• Children's' belief their toys are alive
and have human qualities.
 STAGE 2:
PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

TRANSDUCTIVE REASONING:
• This refers to the pre-operational child's type of reasoning that is
neither inductive nor deductive.
• Reasoning appears to be from particular to particular i.e., if A causes
B, then B causes A.
• For example, since her mommy comes home everyday around six
o'clock in the evening, when asked why it is already night, the child
will say, "because my mom is already home."
 STAGE 3:
CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

• 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 years.
• The concrete operational stage is marked
by the following: Decentering,
Reversibility, Conservation, and Seriation.
 STAGE 3:
CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

DECENTERING:
• This refers to the ability of the child to perceive the different
features of objects and situations.
• No longer is the child focused or limited to one aspect or
dimension.
• This allows the child to be more logical when dealing with
concrete objects and situations.
 STAGE 3:
CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

REVERSIBILITY:
• During the stage of concrete operations, the child can now follow
that certain operations can be done in reverse.
• For example, they can now comprehend the commutative property
of addition, and that subtraction is the reverse of addition.
• They can also understand that a ball of clay shaped into a dinosaur
can again be rolled back into a ball of clay.
 STAGE 3:
CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

CONSERVATION:
• This is the ability to know that certain
properties of objects like number,
mass, volume, or area do not change
even if there is a change in
appearance.
• The children progress to attain
conservation abilities gradually being
a pre-conserver, a transitional thinker
and then a conserver.
 STAGE 3:
CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL STAGE

SERIATION:
• This refers to the ability to order or
arrange things in a series based on
one dimension such as weight,
volume, or size.
 STAGE 4:
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

• In the final stage of formal operations

covering ages between 12 and 15
years, thinking becomes more logical.
• They can now solve abstract problems
and can hypothesize.
• This stage is characterized by
Hypothetical Reasoning, Analogical
Reasoning, and Deductive Reasoning.
 STAGE 4:
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

HYPOTHETHICAL 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.
• This can be done in the absence of
concrete objects.
• The individuals can now deal with
"What if" questions.
 STAGE 4:
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

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 or problem.
• The individual in the formal
operations stage can make an analogy
and understand relationships through
reflective though and even in the
absence of concrete objects.
 STAGE 4:
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

DEDUCTIVE REASONING:
• This is the ability to think logically by
apply a general rule to a particular
instance or situation.
• For example, all countries near the
north pole have cold temperatures.
Greenland is near the North pole.
Therefore, Greenland has cold
temperature.
 From Piaget's findings and comprehensive theory, we can derive
the following principles:

2. Cognitive development is 3. Learning materials and activities

1. Children will provide facilitated by providing
activities or situations that
different explanations of
engage learners and require
reality at different stages of
adaptation (i.e., assimilation
cognitive development. and acommodation).
should involve the appropriate level
of motor or mental operations for a
child of given age; avoid asking
students to perform tasks that are
beyond their current cognitive
capabilities.

4. Use teaching methods that actively

involve students and present
challenges.
 THANK
[GROUP PIAGET - 3E]
YOU
Leader: Guevarra, Meg M. See you next time!
Members:
• Arago, Jennaliza, A.
• Cabrera, Kasandra C.
• Cisneros, Bernard V
• Domalaon, Myra B.
• Gondra, Ma. Cristina C
• Goto, April Joy L.
• Jimenez, Cherrylyn, C.
Reference:
Corpuz, B. et al. (2018). The Child and Adolescent Learners and Learning
Principles. LORIMAR Publishing, Inc. Quezon City, Metro Manila