Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.

2. JEAN PIAGET
 (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist who became
leading theorist in 1930’s
 Developmental psychologist who introduced a 4
stage theory of cognitive development
 Believed these stages were BIOLOGICAL and
occurred in same order but environment &
culture could change how fast we progress
through them.
 Believed that children actively try to make sense
out of their environment rather than passively
soaking up information about the world.

3. WHAT IS COGNITION ?
 The term cognition is derived
from the Latin word
"cognoscere" which means
"to know" or
"to recognize" or
"to conceptualize".
 Cognition is "the mental
action or process of
acquiring knowledge and
understanding through
thought, experience, and
the senses."

4.  All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing,
and remembering.
 Children think differently than adults do

5. WHAT IS COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT?
 Cognitive Development is the emergence of the ability to think
and understand.
 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 changed
with age.
 It is the growing apprehension and adaptation to the physical
and social environment.

6. HOW COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OCCURS?
 Cognitive Development is gradual and orderly changes
by which mental process becomes more complex and
sophisticated.
 The essential development of cognition is the
establishment of new schemas.
 Assimilation and Accommodation are both the
processes of the ways of Cognitive Development.
 The equilibration is the symbol of a new stage of the
Cognitive Development.

7. Piaget’s Theory of
Cognitive
Development
Key elements :
 Schema
 Assimilation
 Accommodation
 equilibration

8.  Piaget believed that,
“children are active thinkers, constantly trying to
construct more advanced understandings of the world”
 These “understandings” are in the form of structures
he called schemas

9. CONTINUE…
Concepts or mental frameworks that people use to
organize and interpret information
A person’s “picture of the world”
For example;
my schema for Christmas includes:
Christmas trees, presents, giving, money,
green, red, gold, winter, Santa Claus etc.
Someone else may have an entirely different
schema, such as Jesus, birth, Church, holiday,
Christianity etc

10. ASSIMILATION
 Interpreting a new experience
within the context of one’s existing
schemas
 The new experience is similar to
other previous experiences
 For example, once a child has a
schema for birds based on the
types of birds they have seen in
their garden, they are able to
incorporate new types of birds
(e.g. parrots, seagulls) into their
existing bird schema.

11. ACCOMMODATION
 Interpreting a new experience by adapting or changing
one’s existing schemas
 The new experience is so novel the person’s schema must
be changed to accommodate it.
 This happens when the existing schema
(knowledge) does not work and needs to be
changed to deal with a new object or situation.I
 n Accommodation, the schema is altered; a new
schema may be developed.

12. ASSIMILATION/ACCOMMODATION

13. ASSIMILATION/ACCOMMODATION

14. ASSIMILATION/ACCOMMODATION
As children assimilate new information and experiences, they
eventually change their way of thinking to accommodate new
knowledge

15. EQUILIBRATION
 According to Piaget, cognitive development involves an
ongoing attempt to achieve a balance between
assimilation and accommodation that he termed
equilibration.
 The adjustment to the environment is nothing but
adaptation.
 Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal
with most new information through assimilation.
 Equilibrium helps explain how children are able to move
from one stage of thought to the next.

16. CONTINUE..
 As a child progresses through the stages of cognitive
development, it is important to maintain a balance
between applying previous knowledge ( assimilation)
and changing behavior to account for new knowledge
(accommodation).

17. HOW PIAGET DEVELOPED THE THEORY
 Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his
job was to develop French versions of questions on English
intelligence tests.
 He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their
wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking.
 He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important
differences between the thinking of adults and children.
 Children’s intelligence differs from an adult’s in quality rather than
in quantity. This means that children reason (think) differently from
adults and see the world in different ways.
 Children actively build up their knowledge about the world. They
are not passive creatures waiting for someone to fill their heads
with knowledge.
 The best way to understand children’s reasoning was to see
things from their point of view.

18. 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

21. SENSORIMOTOR 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 6 months infants act as if objects removed
from sight cease to exist
 Can be surprised by disappearance/reappearance of a face
(peek-a-boo)

23. OBJECT PERMANENCE
During this stage the infant
lives in the present.
It does not yet have a
mental picture of the world
stored in its memory therefore
it does not have a sense of
object permanence.
If it cannot see
something then it does not
exist.
This is why you can
hide a toy from an infant,
while it watches, but it will not
search for the object once it
has gone out of sight.

24. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (2–7 YEARS)
 The word operations refers
to logical, mental activities;
thus, the preoperational stage
is a prelogical stage
 Children can understand
language but not logic
 Emergence of symbolic
thought - ability to use
words, images, and symbols
to represent the world.

25. 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

26.  in early childhood refers to the tendency of young children
not to be able to take the perspective of others, and
instead the child thinks that everyone sees, thinks, and
feels just as they do.
 An egocentric child is not able to infer the perspective of
other people and instead attributes his own perspective to
situations.
 For example,
ten year-old Jenny’s birthday is coming up, so her
mom takes 3 year-old Joy to the toy store to choose a
present for his sister. He selects an Iron Man action figure
for her, thinking that if he likes the toy, his sister will too.

27. CONSERVATION
An understanding that certain properties remain
constant despite changes in their form
The properties can include mass, volume, and
numbers.

28. EXAMPLE
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.

29. CONSERVATION- EXAMPLE
• 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.

30. TYPES OF CONSERVATION TASKS

31. CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE
(7–12 YEARS)
Ability to think logically about concrete objects
and situations
Child can now understand conservation
Piaget labeled this stage as concrete
operational because he believed that children
were able to manage concrete objects, but not
yet think methodically about
the representations of objects.
It is only later that children are able to reflect
on abstract events and manipulate
representations of events.

32.  For example,
a child may implement the rule “if nothing is added or
taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.”
Applying systemic rules or ideas may help a child solve
simple tasks in the classroom, such as addition and
subtraction problems or scientific calculations.

33.  Ability to think logically about abstract principles and hypothetical
situations.
 Hypothetical-deductive reasoning (What if…. problems)
 The formal operational stage begins at approximately age twelve
and lasts into adulthood.
 As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think in an
abstract manner by manipulating ideas in their head, without any
dependence on concrete manipulation
 He/she can do mathematical calculations, think creatively, use
abstract reasoning, and imagine the outcome of particular
actions.
Formal Operational Stage
(age 12 – adulthood)

35. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF PIAGET'S THEORY
 A focus on the process of children’s thinking, not just its
products. In addition to checking the correctness of children’s
answers, teachers must understand the processes children use to get
to the answer. Appropriate learning experiences build on children’s
current level of cognitive functioning, and only when teachers
appreciate children’s methods of arriving at particular conclusions
are they in a position to provide such experiences.
 Recognition of the crucial role of children’s self-initiated, active
involvement in learning activities. In a Piagetian classroom the
presentation of ready-made knowledge is deemphasized, and
children are encouraged to discover for themselves through
spontaneous interaction with the environment. Therefore, instead of
teaching didactically, teachers provide a rich variety of activities that
permit children to act directly on the physical world.

36.  A de-emphasis on practices aimed at making children adult like in their
thinking.
Piaget referred to the question “How can we speed up development?” as
“the American question.” Among the many countries he visited,
psychologists and educators in the United States seemed most interested in
what techniques could be used to accelerate children’s progress through the
stages. Piagetian-based educational programs accept his firm belief that
premature teaching could be worse than no teaching at all, because it leads
to superficial acceptance of adult formulas rather than true cognitive
understanding (May & Kundert, 1997).

 Acceptance of individual differences in developmental progress.
Piaget’s theory assumes that all children go through the same developmental
sequence but that they do so at different rates. Therefore, teachers must
make a special effort to arrange classroom activities for individuals and
small groups of children rather than for the total class group. In addition,
because individual differences are expected, assessment of children’s
educational progress should be made in terms of each child’s own previous
course of development, not in terms of normative standards provided by the
performances of same-age peers.

37.  Use concrete props and visual aids whenever possible.
 Make instructions relatively short, using actions as well as words.
 Do not expect the students to consistently see the world from someone
else’s point of view.
 Be sensitive to the possibility that students may have different
meanings for the same word or different words for the same meaning.
Students may also expect everyone to understand words they have
invented.
 Give children a great deal of hands-on practice with the skills that
serve as building blocks for more complex skills like reading
comprehension.
 Provide a wide range of experiences in order to build a foundation for
concept learning and language.

38. THANK YOU