Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is stage theories which suggest that all human beings move through an orderly and predictable series of changes. Piaget contended that biological growth combines with children’s interaction with their environment to take them through a series of separate, age-related stages. “Piaget believed that we go through four stages of development in the process of understanding the world around us. Each stage is closely related to the age and involves differences in ways of thinking” (Yunus, Razali, & Jantan, 2011). Let’s now take a closer look at the discrete stages of cognitive development Piaget describes.

Figure 2: Stages of Piaget’s cognitive development

Stage one: Sensorimotor (Occurs from birth to 2 years old)

According to the Piaget, in this stage the most striking characteristics behaviors occur in children life. “According to Piaget, infants can engage only in sensorimotor thought. That is, they know the world only in terms of their own sensory input (what they can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear) and their physical or motor actions on it (e.g., sucking, reaching, and grasping)”(Cook & Grey, 2005).  Which means during this stage children experience the world through movement and senses.  However, the sensorimotor stage is divided into six sub-stages. The below table show the characteristics and the examples of those six stages.

Sensorimotor sub-stage	Age	Characteristic	Examples
1. Basic Reflexes	0-1 month	The child use only inner reflexes.	Sucking, rooting
2. Primary circular reactions	1-4 months	In this stage children perform action repeatedly on themselves.	Sucking children on hand
3. Secondary circular reactions	4-10 months	Children learn by accidents and by trial and error.	Accidentally shaking a rattle and continuing to do so for the sake of satisfaction
4, Coordination of secondary schemes	10-12 months	Intentional action occurs in this stage.	Using stick to reach something.
5. Tertiary circular reactions	12-18 months	Children start to explore new things from the possible objects.	From a stick they can make sounds when it hit with ground or an object.
6. Transition to symbolic thought	18-24 months	These stage children begin to form symbolic representation of event.	Instant of opening a box with a stick children use hand to open it.

Stage two: Preoperational Stage (Occurs from 2-7 years of age)

This stage brings a market improvement in the child increased understanding of the world from the sensorimotor stage. During this stage, children though processes are developed, although those developments are still considered to be far from ‘logical thought’, in the adult sense of the world. In this stage children change babies to the toddlers. Moreover, pre-operational children are usually called as ‘ego centric’.  This means children’s are able to consider things from their own view point or thinking. However, preoperational stage also can be divided into two sub-stages. They are pre-conceptual thinking (2-4 years) and intuitive thinking (4-7 years).

One of the terms used for those types of thing is called conservation. Conservation means “understanding that the physical attributes of an object remain unchanged even though their appearance has changes” (Baron, Earhard, & Ozier, 1995).

In Piaget Conservation Task he showed two identical beakers (same as figure 3) filled to the same level of the water. Then he pours the contents of one beaker into a tall thing tube. And children were saying the water level of both tub and the beaker is not same. And those students who are in intuitive stages say that there is more water because the level is much higher in the tube. This shows the logical reasoning of the child.

Figure 3: conservation task experiment

Stage Three: The concrete operational stage (occurs from 7-11 years of age)

this is the age when students get enter to the school.  Moreover, they children think logically and concretely in this stage, because they struggle to apply concepts to anything which cannot be physically manipulated or seen.  And also they solve problems through trial and errors.

The rules for this stages are first, reversibility, emerges when children realizes that an action could be reveres and certain consequences will follow from doing it. Then the identity is the idea action that leave unchanged and Finlay compensation is a property defined by logical thing.

Stage four:The Formal Operational Stage (Occurs from age 12 onward)

Above the age of 12, Piaget suggested that most of the children enter the final stage of cognitive development. During this period, major features of adult though make their appearance. Moreover during this final stage, children’s are cable of what Piaget termed hypothetico-deductive reasoning.  This types of thinking involves the ability to generate hypotheses and to think logically about symbols, idea, and propositions. Furthermore, with the help of prepositions adolescents can focus on verbal assertions and evaluate their logical validity without making reface to real word circumstances.