Piaget’s stages of intellectual development

• Piaget’s stages:

  • sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
  • pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
  • stage of concrete operations (7-11 years)
  • stage of formal operations (11+)
• Sensorimotor stage:

  According to Piaget, a baby‘s early focus is on physical sensations and on developing some basic physical co-ordination. Babies learn by trial and error that they can deliberately move their body in particular ways and eventually that they can move other objects. They also develop an understanding that other people are separate objects and they acquire some basic language.
• Sensorimotor stage:

  By around 8 months, the baby is capable of understanding object permanence. Piaget noticed after 8 months babies continued to look for the object after it disappeared from view.
• Pre-operational stage:

  A toddler is mobile and can use language but still lacks adult reasoning ability. This means that they display some characteristic errors in reasoning.
• Conservation = the understanding that quantity remains constant even when the appearance of objects changes
• Conservation:

  Piaget placed two rows of 8 identical counters side by side. Even young children correctly reasoned that both rows contained the same number of counters. However, when the counters in one of the rows were pushed closer together, pre-operational children struggled to conserve and usually said there were fewer counters in that row.
• Conservation:

  In his liquid procedure, Piaget found when two identical containers were placed side by side with the contents at the same height, most children spotted they contained the same volume of liquid. However, if the liquid was poured into a taller, thinner vessel, younger children typically believed there was more liquid in the taller vessel.
• Egocentrism = this means to see the world only from one’s own point of view.
• Egocentrism:

  Piaget and Inhelder showed children 3 model mountains, each with a different feature: a cross, a house or snow. A doll was placed at the side of the model so it faced the scene from a different angle from the child. The child was asked to choose what the doll would ‘see‘ from a range of pictures. Pre-operational children tended to find this difficult and often chose the picture that matched the scene from their own point of view.
• Class Inclusion = classification- the idea that objects fall into categories
• Class Inclusion:

  Most pre-operational children can classify pugs, bull terriers and retrievers as dogs. However, Piaget and Inhelder found children under 7 struggle with the more advanced skill of class inclusion, the idea that classifications have subsets. When they showed 7-8 year olds pictures of 5 dogs and 2 cats and asked ‘are there more dogs or animals?’ children tended to respond that there are more dogs. He interpreted this as meaning younger children cannot simultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog class and the animal class.
• Stage of concrete operations:

  Piaget found children from around 7 have concrete operations (egocentrism and class inclusion) which can be applied to physical objects in the child’s presence. However, children still struggle to reason about abstract ideas and imagine objects/situations they cannot see.
• Stage of formal operations:

  Children become capable of formal reasoning. This means they are able to focus on the form of an argument and not be distracted by its content. Piaget believed that once children can reason formally they are capable of scientific reasoning and become able to appreciate abstract ideas.
• However, Piaget’s conservation research was flawed as the children may have been influenced by seeing the experimenter change the appearance of the counters or liquid. McGarrigle and Donaldson set up a study in which the counters appeared to be moved accidentally by a naughty teddy who knocked the counters closer. 72% correctly said there were the same number of counters as before. This suggests Piaget was wrong about the age at which conservation appears.
• Class inclusion findings are contradicted by newer research. Siegler and Svetina gave 100 five-year-olds from Slovenia ten class-inclusion tasks. In one condition they received feedback that there must be more animals than dogs because there were only 6 animals but 9 dogs. In another condition they were told there must be more animals because dogs are a subset of animals. The scores improved more for the latter group, suggesting the children had acquired a real understanding of class inclusion. So Piaget underestimated what younger children could do.
• Hughes tested the ability of children to see a situation from two people’s viewpoints using a model with two intersecting walls, 3 dolls, a boy and two police officers. Children as young as 3 1/2 years old could position the doll where one police officer could not ‘see’ him 90% of the time, and four-year-olds could do this 90% of the time when there were two police officers to hide from. This means children are able to decentre and imagine other perspectives much earlier than Piaget proposed.
• However, all of these limitations are criticisms of the age at which a particular cognitive stage is reached, not a criticism of the characteristics of the stage itself. For example. Hughes’ point is that children were able to decentre at a younger age than Piaget had claimed. However, it is still the case that this ability is not present in very young children and the ability improves with age. Therefore the core principles of Piaget’s stages remain unchallenged but the methods he used meant the timings of his stages was wrong.