Jean Piegets theory and educational implication

1. Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)
• “How
intelligence
develops”
• a biologist
who moved
on to
psychology
• studied his
own 3
children

2. Presented by Dr. Sudhir Sahu

3. Before Piaget…
 belief that child’s
mental ‘machinery’
same as an adults,
just lacking exposure
to the world
 a passive model of
education
 (filling up empty
vessels)
Piaget Introduction 3

4. “Cognitive Aliens”
 Piaget’s idea…
 the child is
profoundly
different from
adults in its
thinking
Piaget Introduction 4

5. PIAGET’S THEORY
 Child’s intellect develops in
steps/stages
 (like evolutionary theory in
biology)
 Child must pass through
each stage in order
 Each stage depends on the
one before to develop
Piaget Introduction 5

6. Piaget’s Theory
Piaget originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy
and considered himself a “genetic epistemologist.”
He was mainly interested in the biological influences on “how
we come to know.”
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the 20th centuries most
influential researchers in the area of developmental
psychology.
He was a child prodigy who published his first article in a
refereed journal at the age of 11.

7. Piaget’s Theory
While working in Binet’s test lab in Paris, Piaget became
interested in how children think.
He noticed that young children's answers were qualitatively
different than older children.
This suggested to him that the younger children were not less
knowledgeable but, instead, answered the questions
differently than their older peers because they thought
differently.
This implies that human development is qualitative (changes
in kind) rather than quantitative (changes in amount).

8. Piaget’s Theory of
Cognitive Development
 Piaget believed that “children are active
thinkers, constantly trying to construct more
advanced understandings of the world”
 Understanding of the World change from
stage to stage.
 These “understandings” are in the form of
structures he called schemas

9. Schemas
 Concepts or mental frameworks that
people use to organize and interpret
information
 Sometimes called schemes
 A person’s “picture of the world”

10. Schemes
 Mental representations that organize
knowledge
 Baby’s schemes = sucking,
looking, grasping
 Older children’s schemes = planning and
problem solving

11. Assimilation
 Interpreting a new experience
within the context of one’s
existing schemas
 The new experience is similar to
other previous experiences

12. Accommodation
 Interpreting a new experience by
adapting or changing one’s existing
schemas
 The new experience is so novel the
person’s schemata must be changed
to accommodate it

13. Assimilation/Accommodation

14. Assimilation/Accommodation

15. Assimilation/Accommodation
As children assimilate new information and
experiences, they eventually change their way of
thinking to accommodate new knowledge

16. Mental Process/
Process of Concept Formation
 Schemas - are frameworks that develop to help
organize knowledge
 Assimilation- process of taking new
information or a new experience and fitting
it into an already existing schema
 Accommodation- process by which existing
schemas are changed or new schemas are
created in order to fit new information
 Equilibration- process of developing new
schemas for unknown new experiences

17. Piaget’s Approach
 Primary method was to ask children to
solve problems and to question them about
the reasoning behind their solutions
 Discovered that children think in radically
different ways than adults
 Proposed that development occurs as a
series of ‘stages’ differing in how the
world is understood

18. Piaget’s 4 Cognitive Developmental
Stages
1. Sensory-motor stage,
– from birth to age 2
2. Preoperational stage
– from age 2 to age 7
3. Concrete operational stage
– from age 7 to age 11
4. Formal operational stage
– begins during adolescence and continues into
adulthood.
 Each new stage represents a fundamental shift
in how the child thinks and understands the
world

20. Simple Reflexes
 First month after birth
 Rooting and sucking reflexes

21. Sensori-motor Stage (birth – 2)
 Information is gained directly through the
senses and motor actions
 In this stage child perceives and
manipulates but does not reason
 Symbols become internalized through
language development
 Object permanence is acquired - the
understanding that an object continues to
exist even if it can’t be seen

22. Object Permanence
 The awareness that things continue to exist even
when they cannot be sensed
 Occurs as babies gain experience with objects, as
their memory abilities improve, and as they
develop mental representations of the world,
which Piaget called schemas
 Before 8 months infants act as if objects removed
from sight cease to exist
– Can be surprised by
disappearance/reappearance of a face
(peek-a-boo)
– “Out of sight, out of mind”

23. Object Permanence

24. Object Permanence

25. Object Permanence

26. Preoperational Stage
 2-7 years of age
 This is Piaget’s 2nd stage
 Cognitive world of the preschool child:
– Creative
– Free
– Fanciful
 Piaget described the preschool child’s cognition
as preoperational

27. Pre-operational Stage
Pre-operational
Stage
Ego Centic
(2-4)
(Imagination)
Intuitive Phase
(4-7)
(Perceptual Logic)

28. Preoperational Stage (2–7 years)
 The word operations refers to logical, mental activities;
thus, the preoperational stage is a pre-logical stage
 Children can understand language but not logic
 Emergence of symbolic thought - ability to use words,
images, and symbols to represent the world.
 Centration - tendency to focus, or center, on only one
aspect of a situation, usually a perceptual aspect, and ignore
other relevant aspects of the situation
 Egocentrism - inability to take another person’s
perspective or point of view
 Lack the concept of conservation - which holds that two
equal quantities remain equal even if the appearance of one
is changed, as long as nothing is added or subtracted
 Irreversibility - child cannot mentally reverse a sequence
of events or logical operations back to the starting point

29. Egocentrism
 The child’s inability to take another
person’s point of view
– Child on the phone says, “See the
picture I drew for you Grandpa!” and
shows the picture to the phone.
 Includes a child’s inability to
understand that symbols can represent
other objects

30. Conservation
 An understanding that certain
properties remain constant
despite changes in their form
 The properties can include mass,
volume, and numbers.

31. Conservation
Number
In conservation of number tests, two equivalent rows
of coins are placed side by side and the child says
that there is the same number in each row. Then one
row is spread apart and the child is again asked if
there is the same number in each.

32. Conservation
• Length
In conservation of length tests, two same-length
sticks are placed side by side and the child says
that they are the same length. Then one is moved
and the child is again asked
if they are the same length.

33. Conservation
• Substance
In conservation of substance tests, two identical
amounts of clay are rolled into similar-appearing
balls and the child says that they both have the
same amount of clay. Then one ball is rolled out
and the child is again asked if they have the same
amount.

34. Conservation

35. Conservation

36. Conservation

37. Types of Conservation Tasks

38. Concrete Operational Stage
(7–12 years)
 Ability to think logically about concrete
objects and situations
 Child can now understand conservation
 Classification and categorization
 Less egocentric
 Inability to reason abstractly or
hypothetically

39. Formal Operational Stage
(age 12 – adulthood)
 Ability to think logically about abstract
principles and hypothetical situations
 Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
(What if…. problems)
 Adolescent egocentrism illustrated by the
phenomenon of personal fable and
imaginary audience

41. An Overview of Piaget’s Stages
Piaget's theory identifies four developmental
stages and the processes by which children
progress through them. The four stages are:
 Sensorimotor stage (birth - 2 years)
The child builds a set of concepts about reality
and how it works through physical interaction
with their environment. This is the stage where
a child does not know that physical objects
remain in existence even when out of sight
2. Preoperational stage (ages 2-7)
The child is not yet able to think abstractly and
needs concrete physical situations.

42. Stages Cont’d…
3. Concrete operations (ages 7-11)
As physical experience accumulate, the child
starts to conceptualize, creating logical
structures that explain their physical
experiences. Abstract problem solving is also
possible at this stage. For example, arithmetic
equations can be solved with numbers, not just
with objects.
4. Formal operations (beginning at ages 11-
15)
By this point, the child's cognitive structures are
like those of an adult and include conceptual
reasoning.

43. How does Knowledge Grow?
 An essential element of Piaget's developmental
theory of learning and thinking is that both
involve the participation of the learner
 Knowledge is not merely transmitted verbally
but must be constructed and reconstructed by
the learner
 Piaget asserted that for a child to know and
construct knowledge of the world, the child must
act on objects. So action/ activities are the base
of knowledge development.

44. Piaget’s Readiness Theory
 Readiness approaches in developmental
psychology emphasize that children cannot
learn something until maturation gives them
certain prerequisites.
 The ability to learn any cognitive content is
always related to their stage of intellectual
development .
 Children who are at a certain stage cannot be
taught the concepts of a higher stage

45. Intellectual Growth Cont’d…
 When a child experiences a new event,
disequilibrium sets in until they are able to
assimilate and accommodate the new
information.
 For Piaget, equilibration is the major factor in
explaining
– why some children advance more quickly in
the development of logical intelligence than
do others?

46. Mechanism of Intellectual Growth
Intellectual growth involves three fundamental
processes: assimilation, accommodation, and
equilibration
 Assimilation: involves the incorporation of new
events into pre-existing cognitive structures
 Accommodation: existing structures change to
accommodate to the new information. This dual
process, assimilation-accommodation, enables
the child to form schema.
 Equilibration: involves the person striking a
balance between them self and the environment,
between assimilation and accommodation.

47. Principles
Piaget outlined several principles for building
cognitive structures
 During all development stages, the child
experiences their environment using whatever
mental maps he or she has constructed so far.
 If the experience is a repeated one, it fits easily
into the child's cognitive structure so that he or
she maintains mental balance.
 If the experience is different or new, the child
loses balance, and alters his or her cognitive
structure to accommodate the new conditions
This way, the child establishes more and more
sufficient cognitive structures

48. Principles Cont’d…
 1. Children will offer different explanations of
reality at different stages of cognitive
development
 2. Cognitive development is made possible by
providing activities or situations that connect
learners and require adaptation (i.e. assimilation
and accommodation).
 3. Learning materials and activities should
involve the appropriate level of motor or mental
operations for a child of given age.
 4. Use teaching methods that actively involve
students and present challenges.

49. Educational Implication
 Curriculum
Educators must plan a developmentally appropriate
curriculum that enhances their students' logical and
conceptual growth.
 Instruction
Teachers must emphasize the critical role that experiences,
or interactions with the environment play in student learning.
For example, instructors have to take into account the role
that fundamental concepts, such as the permanence of
objects, play in establishing cognitive structures.
 Use of Audiovisual aids
– All kind of audio-visual aids like pictures, maps, sound,
hard and soft materials should be used in the
classroom. (to apply Principle of Object Permanence )

50. Educational Implication
 Readiness in Learning
– Teaching should based on motivation, maturation,
cognitive stage, need and interest of the students,
 Previous Experience based Learning
– Previous experiences should involved in gaining of
new experience (as assimilation and accommodation
principle)
 Hierarchical Learning
– Learning should in hierarchical order from lower to
higher stage.
 Active and Cooperative Classroom
– Classroom should be active and co-operative.
students should encouraged to share their
experiences and do participate in various activities for
new accommodation and equilibration.

51. Critique of Piaget’s Theory
 Underestimates children’s abilities
 Overestimates age differences in thinking
 Vagueness about the process of change
 Underestimates the role of the social
environment
 Lack of evidence for qualitatively
different stages
 Some adults never display formal
operational thought processes

52. Thank You! 