Piaget's developmental theory

Besides psychology, Piaget was interested in epistemology. Piaget used something he called the clinical method. This was research in which he gave children a series of tasks or problems, asking questions about each one. He then tailored his interviews to the particular responses that each child gave. His follow-up questions varied from child to child. This methodology was very different from the methods of contemporary behaviorist research.

Piaget's ideas about human learning:People are active processors of information. Instead of being passive respondents to environmental conditions, human beings are actively involved and interpreting and learning from the events around them.

Knowledge can be described in terms of structures that change with development. Piaget proposed the concept of schema. As children develop, new schemes emerge, and are sometimes integrated with each other into cognitive structures.

Cognitive development results from the interactions that children have with their physical and social environments. As a child explores his world, and eventually they began to discover that they hold a perspective of the world uniquely their own.

The process through which people interact with the environment remains constant. According to Piaget, people interact with their environment through to unchanging processes known as assimilation and accommodation.

In accommodation, an individual either modifies an existing scheme or forms a new one to account for the new event.

In assimilation an individual interacts with an object or event in a way that is consistent with an existing scheme.

People are intrinsically motivated to try to make sense of the world around them. According to this view, people are sometimes in the state of equilibrium, they can comfortably explain new events in terms of their existing schemes. However at times they can encounter events they cannot explain our make sense of this is called disequilibrium, a mental discomfort. Through reorganizing thought people are able to then understand the previously un-understandable and return to equilibrium.

Cognitive development occurs in distinct stages, with thought processes at each stage being qualitatively different from those and other stages.

Piaget's four stages:

Sensorimotor stage:

Preoperational stage:

Concrete Operations:

                                      Formal Operations:

Sensorimotor stage: from birth until about two years of age. At this age children are only aware of objects that are directly before them, thus the saying, "out of sight, out of mind."  (Example: The game of "peek-a-boo" is enjoyed only by infants.  Their joy in this game comes from their "finding" the adult -- who"hides" by blocking the child's view and thus "disappears" and "re-appears" as the child experiences it.)

Preoperational stage: emerges when children are about two years old until they are about six to seven years old. This is the stage of language development. Expanding childrens’ vocabularies reflect the many new mental schemes that are developing. This stage is characterized by a logical thinking, but not according to adult standards. A classic example is how young children cannot understand conservation of liquid. They will usually think that a taller glass has more water than a short glass even though both have been demonstrated to have the exact same amount of water.

Concrete operations: this  third stage of cognitive development appears when children are six or seven years old and continues until they are about 11 or 12 years old. Children begin to think logically about conservation problems and other situations as well. However, they typically can apply their logical operations only to concrete, observable objects and events.

Formal operations: the fourth and final stage usually appears after children are 11 or 12 years of age and continues to evolve for several years after that time. During this time the child develops the ability to reason with abstract, hypothetical, and contrary-to-fact information.