Jean Piaget and his Cognitive Development Theory One of the most seminal thinkers in childhood development is none other than Jean Piaget himself. Jean Piaget lived from 1896 to 1980 and based most of his psychological research on the development of children. Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on the 8th of August 1896. Even though Piaget was born in Switzerland and his parents were both of Swiss heritage he unusually spoke fluent French. Piaget as a child grew up enjoying biology and the natural world.
At the age of 10 Jean Piaget wrote his first scientific paper on the observations of an albino sparrow. He also gained an interest in zoology during his childhood which gave him a credible reputation by the age of 15 because he had written several in depth articles on mollusks. He went to the University of Neuchatel and earned a doctoral degree because of his intense mollusk research. During this period of time Jean Piaget published two papers on the direction of his thinking at the time. Jean Piaget finally became interested in psychoanalysis after he graduated from the University of Neuchatel.
He then taught at a school for boys which was run by Alfred Binet, the creator of the Binet intelligence test. Jean Piaget assisted Binet in his experiments but over a span of a few years started to see a pattern in the answers the children were getting wrong. He began to conclude that the children weren’t necessarily answering the questions wrong they just thought differently to older children and adults. His theory then began by concluding that children’s cognitive processes are different from that of an adolescent or an adult.
Jean Piaget started his idea of Cognitive Development Stages with a 2 step process. The first process was assimilation. Assimilation is the act of obtaining new information in an unorganized manor. For example take for instance a child reading a book they flip through the pages and find a picture of a zebra. At a young age most children would identify the zebra as a striped horse not an actual zebra. The other process was accommodation. This is where the child is obtaining new information in an organized manor. This is where they can identify that the picture is a zebra not a striped horse.
Using these concepts Piaget started the structure of his Cognitive Developmental Stages in 1963 with the Sensorimotor Period. This section of the Cognitive Development Stages occurs from birth to the age of 2. In this stage infants learn certain reflexes by seeing, touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn about themselves and the environment. Piaget conducted an experiment on different aged infants that involved a toy, and a blanket. He would show the infant the toy let them observe the toy and get attached to the toy.
Then he would show the infant that he was going to hide the toy underneath the blanket. Infants under 18 months old did not realize that the toy was still existent when under the blanket. To an infant this young the toy just seemed to disappear. But infants over the age of 18 months lifted the blanket and retained the toy that had been hidden from them. This is an example of object permanence. Object permanence is the idea that an object still exists after disappearing from sight and it still retains all of its physical features while doing so.
Piaget continued his development stages in 1956 with the creation of the Pre-Operational Period. This period consists of children being able to identify symbols, imagery, and language. Piaget conducted an experiment on young children of the ages from 2 till around the age of 6 or 7. He showed a child a model of a mountain, let the child walk around it so that he/she could observe the mountain and then placed a doll on the opposite side of the mountain from which the child was sitting. He then handed the child 10 photographs of the mountain from different angles.
The child was then asked to name things that he saw on his side of the mountain and what was on the dolls side of the mountain without being able to see the dolls view. The only thing the child had was the photographs of both sides. Piaget found that children at the age of 4 would only be able to identify the objects on his/her side of the mountain even with the photographs present. Children around the age of 7 were able to identify objects on both sides of the mountain by memory and referring to the photographs.
This explains the idea that children get to a certain age that they no longer think egocentrically. They obtain their own views and ideas on the environment surrounding them and increase their ability to memorize images. The next period that Piaget created was the Concrete Operational Period. This showed that children between the ages of 7 and 11 develop the ability to be able to take another person’s point of view and take account of more than one perspective simultaneously. Piaget conducted a few experiments that would explain this idea.
The first experiment was performed at a table with 2 cups or beakers of the same amount of liquid and multiple containers that were shaped and sized differently to the original cups or beakers that contained the liquid. Piaget would pour the contents of one of the cups into one of the differently shaped containers and ask the child if the original had more liquid, if the different sized container had more liquid, or if they had the exact same amount of liquid. Around the age of 7 children could identify that the containers had the same amount of liquid it just changed its state.
Before the age of 7 the children would always believe the different container or the original container had more liquid. The second experiment he conducted had 2 sticks of the same length placed on a table. One of the sticks was placed slightly forward compared to the first stick. He would ask the children which stick was longer or if they were the same length. Children before the age of 7 decided that the stick that was placed slightly forward was longer than the other based on the image in front of them. Children after the age of 7 could determine that the sticks were the same length.
This proved that a child can now focus on two things simultaneously and still succeed. The last period of Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Stage Theory is the Formal Operation Period. This period starts at the age of 11 and continues to develop for the rest of a person’s life. This shows that people starting at this age can start to think logically and abstractly. Piaget conducted 2 experiments on this period. He gathered a group of children and a group of recently turned adolescents and asked them a basic question. If you could have a third eye where would you place it and why. when asked this question, 9-year-olds all suggested that the third eye should be placed on their forehead. However, 11-year-olds were more inventive, for example suggesting that a third eye placed on the hand would be more useful for seeing around corners. ” (McLeod) This shows that the children can think logically and imagine useful ways for a third eye to be used. The last experiment is based on inferential reasoning. Piaget asked another basic question, “If Kelly is taller than Ali and Ali is taller than Jo who is tallest? (McLeod) Inferential reasoning “is the ability to think about things which the child has not actually experienced and to draw conclusions from its thinking. The child who needs to draw a picture or use objects is still in the concrete operational stage, whereas children who can reason the answer in their heads are using formal operational thinking. ” (McLeod) This shows that children over the age of 11 are capable of deductive reasoning. Through the creation of this structure of Cognitive Development Piaget has shown us that children do think differently compared to older children and adults.
Their reasoning and schema develops over a period of time. Many psychologists still study the work of Piaget and his “epistemological studies”(Wiki) with children. Some psychologists agree and some disagree with his viewpoint on the development of a child’s schema but in my opinion this version of developmental stages is most credible and the most known. Jean Piaget’s findings will still not be completely explored until decades to come but for now he still remains the most seminal thinker in childhood development.
