Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

• “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers” -Jean Piaget
• ean Piaget • He was born in Switzerland in 1896 • Received his doctoral degree at age 22 • He proposed that the thinking process will develop through each of the stages until a child can think logically • He identified four stages in which children develop cognitively
• PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

  • Two to 7 years old

  • Coincides the preschool years

  • Children start to use symbols such as language to represent objects

  • Children are unaware of another person’s perspective

  • EGOCENTRIC THOUGHT and LANGUAGE

  • Children lack the CONCEPT OF CONSERVATION
• Concept of Conservation - The knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects
• Seven Types of Conservation

  • Number

  • Length

  • Liquid

  • Mass

  • Weight

  • Area

  • Volume
• CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE

  • Seven to 11 years old

  • This stage represents the elementary grade years

  • The child begins to think logically

  • Operations are associated with personal experience

  • Operations are in concrete situations

  • Concrete operations allow children to classify several classes into a bigger group

  • Concrete operations allow children to order objects in terms of more than one dimension

  • Children can solve conservations tasks
• FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

  • Eleven years and beyond

  • Students have the ability to consider many possibilities for a given condition

  • They have the ability to use planning to think ahead

  • Students increase their ability to think abstractly

  • Formal Operational thinkers can recognize and identify a problem
• Schemas – the basic building block of intelligent behavior- a way of organizing knowledge
• Assimilation – the process of taking in new information into our already existing schemas
• Accommodation- changing or altering our existing schemas in

  light of new information
• Equilibration-a mechanism that balances between assimilation and accommodation
• Ten months- learn Object Permanence That objects continue

  to exist even when out of sight—can find partially hidden objects
• classification– the ability to understand that an object may fit into

  more than one category
• seriation —the ability to order groups of things by size, weight, or any

  common property
• Syncretic – a break in logic, changing set of criteria
• 2. Intuitive reasoning—They guess!!
• A focus on the process of children's thinking, not just

  its products

  Recognition of the crucial role of children's self-

  initiated, active involvement in learning activities

  A deemphasis on practices aimed at making children

  adult like in their thinking

  Acceptance of individual differences in developmental

  progress