Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Who is piaget and what did he do?

• Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget produced an influential theory of cognitive development

• His contribution was that children do not simply know less than adults instead children think in entirely different ways than adults

• Piaget divided childhood into stages, each representing the development of new ways of reasoning. He also studied the role of motivation in development and the question of how knowledge develops

What is cognitive development?

The development of all mental processes, in particular, thinking, reasoning our understanding of the world

What are schemas?

They contain our understanding of an object, person or idea. Schemas become increasingly complex during development as we acquire more information on these

What is the motivation to learn?

• Disequilibrium and Equilibrium:

  • A key element of Piaget’s theory is the motivation to learn

  • According to Piaget, we are motivated to learn when our existing schema does not allow us to make sense of something new

  • This leads to the unpleasant sensation of disequilibrium

  • To escape disequilibrium we have to adapt to the new situation by exploring and learning what we need to know. By doing this we achieve equilibrium, the preferred mental state

What is Assimilation?

This takes place when we understand a new experience and equilibrate by adding new information to our existing schemas. For example, a child in a family with dogs can adapt to the existence of different dog breeds by assimilating them into their dog schema

What is Accomidation?

• It takes place in response to dramatically new experiences. The child has to adjust to this by either radically changing current schemas or forming new ones

• So a child with a pet dog may at first think of cats as dogs but then accommodate to the existence of a separate species called cats

• This will involve altering the animal/pet schemas to include cats and forming a new cat schema

What is Piaget’s theory’s application in education?

• Piaget’s idea that children learn by actively exploring their environment and forming their own mental representations of the world has revolutionised classroom teaching

• The old-fashioned classroom, in which children sat silently in rows copying from the board, has been replaced by activity-orientated classrooms in which children actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understanding of the curriculum

What is learning by discovery?

• In early years, children may for example, investigate the properties of sand and water

• A level discovery may take the form of flipped lessons where students read up before the lesson so the lesson can be focused on higher-level evaluation skills

What is the supporting evidence of Piaget’s theory?

• Piaget believed that children learn by forming their own mental representation of the world

• This suggests that even children who have similar learning experiences will form quite individual mental representations

• Howe et al. (1992) provide support for this:

  • Children aged between 9-12 in groups of 4 studied and discussed the movement of objects down a slope

  • Their understanding was assessed before and after

  • The children were found to have increased their level of knowledge and understanding

  • However, the children had not come to the same conclusions or picked up the same facts

• This supports Piaget’s idea that children learn by forming their own personal mental representation

What is an evaluation of Piaget’s theory?

• Piaget may have overplayed the importance of equilibration

• He saw learning as a motivated process in which children learn in order to equilibrate, as disequilibrium is unpleasant

• Actually, children vary greatly in their intellectual curiosity

• The children he studied were mainly from the nursery attached to his university and this was a biased sample of clever middle-class children