Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development is one of the theories used as the basis behind our Pre-School philosophy and Play Based programme.

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, he described four stages of cognitive development. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development - Let’s take a look at these four Piaget’s stages.

Sensorimotor Stage Children at the sensorimotor stage are explorers. They want to see, hear, taste, and touch everything around them. They generally don’t appear to be thinking about what they do – no obvious rationale underlies their motives. Children at this stage are reveling in sensory experience and enjoying their rapidly-improving abilities to move around and take in new experiences. They use language to catalog objects in their environment (e.g. “doggie!”, “horsey”) and make demands of their caregivers. Sensory stimuli are paired up with voluntary motor responses, and sensory/body coordination is established. Syntax and grammar have not yet been developed, and relations between concepts are vaguely understood at best. During the late sensorimotor stage of cognitive development, children begin to learn the concept of “object permanence”. In other words, they learn that objects still exist even if they cannot see them. 

Preoperational Stage Around age two, children enter the preoperational stage where they learn how to think abstractly, understand symbolic concepts, and use language in more sophisticated ways. During this stage of cognitive development, children become insatiably curious and begin to ask questions about everything they see. They can imagine people or objects that do not exist (such as a lizard with wings) more readily than younger children, and they like to make up their own games. 

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, children at this stage understand object permanence, but they still don’t get the concept of conservation. They don’t understand that changing a substance’s appearance doesn’t change its properties or quantity. In one experiment, Piaget poured the exact same amount of water into two identical glasses and asked children whether the glasses contained the same amount of water. The children said that both glasses contained the same amount of water. Piaget then poured the water in one glass into a tall, narrow beaker and repeated the question. This time, the children said there was more water in the cylinder because it was taller. 

Concrete Operational Stage By the time they are 7 years old, children can understand much more complex abstract concepts, such as time, space, and quantity. They can apply these concepts to concrete situations, but they have trouble thinking about them independently of those situations. As Jean Piaget pointed out in his theory of cognitive development, the children’s ideas about time and space are sometimes inconsistent at this stage, but a basic logic is present that governs their cognitive operations. Children can learn rules fairly easily, but they may have trouble understanding the logical implications of those rules in unusual situations. 

Formal Operations Stage Starting at around 11 years old, children become capable of more abstract, hypothetical, and theoretical reasoning. They can apply rules to a variety of situations, and engage in counterfactual “if-then” reasoning. “Counterfactual” refers to the fact that the “if” is known to be untrue. For example “if dogs were reptiles, they would have cold blood.” Children at the formal operations stage can accept this as valid reasoning, even though the premise is obviously false. At this stage of cognitive development, formal logic becomes possible and verbal explanations of concepts are usually sufficient without demonstration. Strategy-based games become more enjoyable, whereas rote games like “chutes-and-ladders” become repetitive. 

Piaget’s stages of cognitive development have been the basis for a number of other famous psychological ideas, including Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.