Jean piaget

JEAN PIAGET
BY WASIM
UNDER GUIDANCE OF
DR.PRADEEP.SHARMA

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) : History
• Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and
died in 1980 in Geneva, Switzerland.
• At age 11, he wrote a paper on an albino sparrow, which was
published and was the start of his famous career.
• After graduating high school, he attended the University of
Zurich, where he became interested in psychoanalysis.
• He married in 1923 and had three children, Jacqueline,
Lucienne and Laurent.
• Piaget studied his children’s intellectual development from
infancy.

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the 20th century's most
influential researchers in the area of developmental psychology.
• He was originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy
and considered himself a "Genetic Epistemologist".
(genetic epistemology as the study of the development of
abstract thought on the basis of a biological or innate substrate.)
• Piaget wanted to know how children learned through their
development in the study of knowledge.
• He administered Binet's IQ test in Paris and observed that
children's answers were qualitatively different.

• Piaget's theory is based on the idea that the developing child
builds cognitive structures.
• He believes that the child's cognitive structure increases with
the development.

Theory of Cognitive Development
• While studying his children, Piaget developed theories
concerning how children learn.
• His theory of Cognitive Development consists of four stages
of intellectual development.
• Each stage is a prerequisite for the following one, but the rate
at which different children move through different stages
varies with their native endowment and environmental
circumstances.

What is Cognition?
 The term cognition is derived from the Latin word “cognoscere” which means “to
know” or “to recognise” or “to conceptualise”.
 It refers to the mental processes an organism learns, remembers, understands,
perceives, solves problems and thinks about a body of information.
 Experts argue that cognition progresses in stages with increasing levels of
complexity and hence the phrase “cognitive development” which is the stages a
child goes through conceptualising the world at different age levels.

What is Cognitive Development?
 Cognitive Development describes how these mental processes develop from birth
until adulthood. In other words, what kind of cognitive skills is a 4 year old child
capable of compared to a 6 year old.
 The acquisition of the ability to think, reason, and problem solve.
 It is the process by which people's thinking changes across the life span.
 Piaget studied cognitive development by observing children in particular, to examine
how their thought processes change with age.
 He pioneered a way of thinking about how children grow psychologically
.
 It is the growing apprehension and adaptation to the physical and social environment.

How Cognitive Development Occurs?
 Cognitive Development is gradual, orderly, changes by which mental process
become more complex and sophisticated.
 The essential development of cognition is the establishment of new schemes.
 Assimilation and accommodation are both processing of the ways of cognitive
development.
 The equilibration is the symbol of a new stage of the cognitive development.

Key concepts
 Schema : an internal representation of the world. A schema describes both the
mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are
mental or cognitive structures which enables a person to adapt and to organise the
environment.
 Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the
world.
 Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behaviour – a way of
organizing knowledge (includes both a category of knowledge and the process of
obtaining that knowledge).
 Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one
aspect of the world, including objects, actions and abstract (i.e. theoretical) concepts.
As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change
previously existing schemas.

For example, at birth the schema of a baby is reflexive in nature such as sucking
and grasping. The sucking reflex is a schema and the infant will suck on whatever
is put in its mouth such as a nipple or a finger. The infant is unable to differentiate
because it has only a single sucking schema.
Slowly, the infant learns to differentiate where milk-producing objects are accepted
while non-milk objects are rejected. At this point, the infant has two sucking
schemas, one for milk-producing objects and one for non-milk producing objects.

 Assimilation : is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation. The process
of taking in new information into our previously existing schema’s is known as assimilation.
 A child sees a Zebra for the first time and immediately calls it a Donkey. Thus, the child has
assimilated into his schema that this animal is a Donkey.
 Why do you think this happened? The child seeing the object (Zebra), sifted through his
collection of schemas, until he found one that seemed appropriate.
 To the child, the object (Zebra) has all the characteristics of a Donkey– it fits in his Donkey
schema – so the child concludes that the object is a Donkey. The child has integrated the
object (Zebra) into his Donkey schema.

 Accommodation : Another part of adaptation involves changing or altering our
existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as accommodation.
 Accommodation involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new
information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this
process.
 The boy who had assimilated the Zebra as a Donkey will eventually accommodate
more information and thus realize the different characteristics between a Zebra and a
Donkey.
 The child will learn that the Donkey is not a Donkey but a Zebra, an accommodated
ability

 Equilibration : Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a
steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
 Equilibrium is occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information
through assimilation.
 However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot
be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).
 Equilibration is a balance between assimilation and accommodation. Disequilibrium is
an imbalance between assimilation and accommodation
 As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to
maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing
behaviour to account for new knowledge (accommodation).
 Equilibration helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought
into the next.

 Adaptation: Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation.
 Piaget’s term for what most of us would call learning through which awareness of the
outside world is internalized.
 Although one may predominate at any one moment, they are two sides and
inseparable and exist in a dialectical relationship.

Stages of intellectual development
postulated by Piaget
1. Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 year)-infancy
2. Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 year)-Toddler and Early Childhood
3. Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 year)-Childhood and Early
Adolescence
4. Formal Operational Stage(11 year to above)-Early Adolescence
to end of adolescence

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years)
The first stage of Piaget’s theory starts from birth to approximately age 2 and is
centred on the infant trying to make sense of the world: Infants begin to learn through
sensory observation, and they gain control of their motor functions through activity,
exploration, and manipulation of the environment.
Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences
(seeing, hearing) with motor actions (reaching, touching).
Develop Object Permanence (memory) - Realize that objects exist even if they are out
of sight.
Infants progress from reflexive, instinctual actions at birth to the beginning of problem
solving (intellectual) and symbolic abilities (language) toward the end of this stage.
Piaget divided this stage into 6 sub-stages.

1.Reflexes (0-1 month): In the first month of life, infants’ behaviour reflect innate
reflexes—automatic responses to particular stimuli.
 The child understands the environment purely through inborn reflexes such as
suckling, grasping, knee-jerking.
 These behaviour are typically, quickly reinforced to provide food when hungry, grab
things in the environment, and pull away from potentially threatening sensations.
 If you put a nipple or pacifier in or near a newborn’s mouth, she will automatically suck
on it.
 If you put something against the palm of a newborn’s hand, his fingers will
automatically close around it.
 Many of these inborn reflexes are designed to keep the infant alive. The infant soon
begins to modify some reflexes to better accommodate to the environment—for
instance, by learning to distinguish between a nipple and the surrounding areas of a
breast or bottle. And other reflexes, such as the tendency to grab onto something
placed in the hand, fade away over time.

2.Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months): It involves coordinating sensation and
new schemas.
 In the first few months of life, infants’ behaviours are focused almost exclusively on
their own bodies (in Piaget’s terminology, the behaviours are primary) and are
repeated over and over again (i.e., they are circular).
 Infants also begin to refine their reflexes and combine them into more complex
actions.
 For example: A child may suck his or her thumb by accident and then later
intentionally repeat the action. These actions are repeated because the infant finds
them pleasurable.
3.Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months): In this stage the child become more
aware of and more responsive to the outside world (their behaviours become
secondary), and they begin to notice that their behaviours can have interesting effects
on the objects around them.

 The child becomes more focused on the world and begins to intentionally repeat an
action in order to trigger a response in the environment.
 For example: A child will purposefully pick up a toy in order to put it in his or her mouth.
4.Coordination of Reactions (8-12 months): The child starts to show clearly intentional
actions. The child may also combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect. After
repeatedly observing that certain actions lead to certain consequences, infants gradually
acquire knowledge of cause-effect relationships.
 For example: 1.A child might realize that a rattle will make a sound when shaken.
2.When an infant sees the twine of a pull-toy near her, rather than
crawling over to the toy she might instead reach out and grab the twine
and then purposely pull the twine in order to acquire the toy.

 For example: A child may try out different sounds or actions as a way of getting
attention from a caregiver.
5.Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months): Piaget believed this marks the
developmental starting point for curiosity and interest in novelty.
 Beginning sometime around their first birthday, infants show increasing flexibility and
creativity in their behaviour, and their experimentation with objects often leads to new
outcomes (the term tertiary reflects this new versatility in previously acquired
responses).
6.Early Representational Thought (18-24 months): Piaget proposed that in the latter
half of the second year, young children develop symbolic thought, the ability to represent
and think about objects and events in terms of internal, mental entities, or symbols.

 They may “experiment” with objects in their minds, first predicting what will happen if
they do something to an object, then transforming their plans into action. To some
degree, mental prediction and planning replace overt trial-and-error as growing
toddlers experiment and attempt to solve problems.
 The capacity for mental representation is seen in the emergence of deferred imitation,
the ability to recall and copy another person’s behaviour .Their newly acquired ability
to recall and imitate other people’s past actions enables them to engage in make-
believe and pretend play—for instance, by “talking” on a toy telephone or “driving” with
the toy steering wheel attached to their car seats.
 Another acquisition at this sub-stage is object permanence, means knowing that an
object still exists, even if it is hidden. According to Piaget, Object Permanence is a
child's awareness or understanding that objects continue to exist even though they
cannot be seen or heard.
 For example, when a caregiver hides an attractive toy beneath a pillow, the infant
knows that the toy still exists, also knows where it exists, and will attempt to retrieve it.
Before this stage, the child behaves as if the toy had simply disappeared.

Stage of Preoperational Thought (2 to 7 Years)
 This stage begins when the child starts to use symbols and language. This is a period
of developing language and concepts. So, the child is capable of more complex
mental representations (i.e, words and images). Still unable to use 'operations', i.e,
logical mental rules, such as rules of arithmetic. This stage is further divided into 2
sub-stages :
 Preconceptual stage (2-4 yrs) : Increased use of verbal representation but speech is
egocentric. The child uses symbols to stand for actions; a toy doll stands for a real
baby or the child role plays mummy or daddy.
 Intuitive stage (4-7 yrs) : Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. Here the
child base their knowledge on what they feel or sense to be true, yet they cannot
explain the underlying principles behind what they feel or sense.
 Preoperational thought is midway between socialized adult thought and the
completely autistic Freudian unconscious. Events are not linked by logic.

Key feature of this stage…
 Egocentrism: The child's thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e,
about themselves or their own point of view). Eg.: "if i can't see you, you also can't
see me". It is the inability to see the world from anyone else's eyes.
 Animism: Treating inanimate objects as living ones. Eg.: children dressing and
feeding their dolls as if they are alive.
 Concentration: The process of concentrating on one limited aspect of a stimulus
and ignoring other aspects. It is noticed in Conservation. Conservation on the other
hand is the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical
appearance of objects. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation.

 Early in this stage, if children drop a glass that then breaks, they have no sense of
cause and effect. They believe that the glass was ready to break, not that they broke
the glass.
 Children in this stage also cannot grasp the sameness of an object in different
circumstances: The same doll in a carriage, a crib, or a chair is perceived to be three
different objects.
 During this time, things are represented in terms of their function.
For example a child defines a bike as “to ride” and a hole as “to dig.”

 In this stage, children begin to use language and drawings in more elaborate ways.
From one-word utterances, two-word phrases develop, made up of either a noun and
a verb or a noun and an objective. A child may say, “Bobby eat,” or “Bobby up.”
 Children in the preoperational stage cannot deal with moral dilemmas, although they
have a sense of what is good and bad.
 For example when asked, “Who is more guilty, the person who breaks one dish on
purpose or the person who breaks 10 dishes by accident?” a young
child usually answers that the person who breaks 10 dishes by accident is more guilty
because more dishes are broken.
 Children in this stage have a sense of immanent justice, the belief that punishment for
bad deeds is inevitable.

 Children in this developmental stage are egocentric: They see themselves as the
centre of the universe; they have a limited point of view; and they are unable to
take the role of another person. Children are unable to modify their behaviour for
someone else;
 for example children are not being negativistic when they do not listen to a
command to be quiet because their brother has to study. Instead, egocentric
thinking prevents an understanding of their brother’s point of view.
 During this stage, children also use a type of magical thinking, called
phenomenalistic causality, in which events that occur together are thought to
cause one another (e.g., thunder causes lightning, and bad thoughts cause
accidents).
 children use animistic thinking, which is the tendency to endow physical events
and objects with life-like psychological attributes, such as feelings and intentions.

 Semiotic Function The semiotic function emerges during the preoperational period.
With this new ability, children can represent something—such as an object, an event,
or a conceptual scheme—with a signifier, which serves a representative function
(e.g., language, mental image, symbolic gesture).
 Children use a symbol or sign to stand for something else.
 Drawing is a semiotic function initially done as a playful exercise but eventually
signifying something else in the real world.

Stage of Concrete Operations (7 to 11 Years)
 The stage of concrete operations is so named because in this period children operate
and act on the concrete, real, and perceivable world of objects and events.
 Egocentric thought is replaced by operational thought, which involves dealing with a
wide array of information outside the child. Therefore, children can now see things
from someone else’s perspective.
 Children in this stage begin to use limited logical thought processes and can serialize,
order, and group things into classes on the basis of common characteristics.
 Syllogistic reasoning, in which a logical conclusion is formed from two premises,
appears during this stage;
For example, all horses are mammals (premise); all mammals are warm blooded
(premise); therefore, all horses are warm blooded (conclusion). Children are able to
reason and to follow rules and regulations. They can regulate themselves, and they
begin to develop a moral sense and a code of values.

 Children who become overly invested in rules may show obsessive-compulsive
behaviour; children who resist a code of values often seem willful and reactive.
 The most desirable developmental outcome in this stage is that a child attains a
healthy respect for rules and understands that there are legitimate exceptions to rules.
 The most important sign that children are still in the preoperational stage is that they
have not achieved conservation or reversibility.
 The ability of children to understand concepts of quantity is one of Piaget’s most
important cognitive developmental theories.
 Measures of quantity include measures of substance, length, number, liquids, and
area

The Concrete Operational stage is characterized by the appropriate use of logic.
Important processes during this stage are:
Seriation: the ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape or any other
characteristic. Eg.: if given different-shaded objects, they may make a colour gradient.
Transitivity: the ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial
order. Eg.: if A is taller than B and B is taller than C, then A must be taller than C.
Classification: the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance,
size or other characteristic, including the idea that one set of objects can include another
Decentering: where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve
it. For example, the child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to
contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup.

 Reversibility: is the ability to recognize that, although the shape of objects may
change, the objects still maintain or conserve other characteristics that enable them to
be recognized as the same.
 For example if a ball of clay is rolled into a long, thin sausage shape, children
recognize that each form contains the same amount of clay. An inability to conserve
(which is characteristic of the preoperational stage) is observed when a child
declares that there is more clay in the sausage-shaped piece because it is longer.
The child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their
original state. For this reason, a child will be able to rapidly determine that if 4+4 = t, t−4
will equal 4, the original quantity.
Conservation: understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to
the arrangement or appearance of the object or items. for example, ice and water.
Elimination of Egocentrism: the ability to view things from another's perspective.
However, in this stage child can solve problems that apply to actual
(concrete) objects or events only, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks.

Stage of Formal Operations
(11 through the End of Adolescence)
 The stage of formal operations is so named because young persons’ thinking operates
in a formal, highly logical, systematic, and symbolic manner.
 This stage is characterized by the ability to think abstractly, to reason deductively, and
to define concepts, and also by the emergence of skills for dealing with permutations
and combinations;
 young persons can grasp the concept of probabilities. Adolescents attempt to deal
with all possible relations and hypotheses to explain data and events during this
stage.
 Language use is complex; it follows formal rules of logic and is grammatically correct.
 Abstract thinking is shown by adolescents’ interest in a variety of issues—philosophy,
religion, ethics, and politics.

 Hypotheticodeductive Thinking. Hypotheticodeductive thinking, the highest
organization of cognition, enables persons to make a hypothesis or proposition and to
test it against reality.
 Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the particular and is a more
complicated process than inductive reasoning, which moves from the particular to the
general.
Because young persons can reflect on their own and other persons’ thinking, they are
susceptible to self-conscious behaviour. As adolescents attempt to master new
cognitive tasks, they may return to egocentric thought, but on a higher level than in the
past.
 For example adolescents may think that they can accomplish everything or can
change events by thought alone.
 Not all adolescents enter the stage of formal operations at the same time or to the
same degree.
 Depending on individual capacity and intervening experience, some may not reach the
stage of formal operational thought at all and may remain in the concrete operational
mode throughout life.

 The thought becomes increasingly flexible and abstract, i.e, can carry out systematic
experiments.
 The ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodological way.
 Understands that nothing is absolute; everything is relative.
 Develops skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning as well as inductive
reasoning and systematic planning etc.
 Understands that the rules of any game or social system are developed by a man by
mutual agreement and hence could be changed or modified.
 The child's way of thinking is at its most advanced, although the knowledge it has to
work with, will change.

Clinical applications
 Hospitalised children.
 Adult under stress.
 Foundation of cognitive revolution in psychology
 Developmentally based psychotherapy integrates cognitive , affective , drive &
relationship based approaches.

Educational Implications
 Emphasis on discovery approach in learning.
 Curriculum should provide specific educational experience based on children's
developmental level.
 Arrange classroom activities so that they assist and encourage self learning.
 Social interactions have a great educational value for Piaget. Positive social actions,
therefore should be encouraged.
 Instruction should be geared to the level of the child. As the level of the child
changes at each stage, the level of instruction or exploratory activities should also
change.
 Simple to Complex and Project method of teaching.
 Co-curricular activities have equal importance as that of curricular experiences in
the cognitive development of children.
 Major Goals of education according to Piaget are critical and creative thinking.

Contribution to Education
 Piaget's theory helped educators, parents and investigators to comprehend the
capacity of children in their different stages.
 He made us conscious with the way children and adults think.
 A lot of school programs have been redesigned taking as base Piaget's discoveries.
 Piaget made a revolution with the developmental psychology concentrating all his
attention to the mental process and his role with behaviour.

Strength
 Active rather than passive view of the child.
 Revealed important invariants in cognitive development.
 Errors informative.
 Perceptual-motor learning rather than language important for development.
 Tasks.

Limitation of jean piaget’s
cognitive development theory
1) Underestimated children's intellectual abilities.
2) Research has shown that performance on Piagetian problems can be improved
though training, challenging Piaget's assumption that learning through individual
discovery is better than learning through direct instruction.
3) Paid too little attention to social and cultural influences on children development.
4) Lack of clear explanation of how children move from one cognitive stage to the next.
5) Failure of theory to distinguish competence from performance (i.e. getting correct by
chance does not equal performance.)

Critiques of Piaget
 Today, Piaget's theory is mostly of historical importance
 For all of his seminal experiments is has been shown that infants and children can
solve them earlier than Piaget thought (object permanence, A-not-B-task, etc.)
 Piaget's main research method (the “clinical method“ of inquiring the child on a
certain problem) has been shown to be ecologically invalid and to drastically
underestimate children's actual understanding
 Piaget's conception of language development (being dependent on the sensori-
motor phase) has been vehemently rebutted by Chomsky.
 Dynamical and connectionist researchers have shown that Piaget's stage concept of
development does not imply any logical nor innate ordering – rather, stages emerge
spontaneously in the course of development, due to the overall dynamics of the
cognitive system.

Jean piaget

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