1. JEAN PIAGET

2. Cognitive Development
Spent 60 years charting the intellectual growth of children
Children progress from one stage of thinking to another
Children’s thought processes are completely different at different ages

3. According to Piaget, intelligence is a life process that helps an organism adapt to its environment.
Children actively construct new understanding in their world based on their own experiences.
No inborn knowledge or ideas
Not given information by adults or taught how to think

4. Cognitive Scheme
A cognitive structure, or scheme, is an organized pattern of thought or action that is used to cope with or explain some aspect of experience.
Examples?

5. Cognitive Schemes
assimilation: new experiences interpreted in terms of current cognitive schemes
disequilibriums: contradictions between the child’s understanding and the facts
accommodate: child modifies existing schemes to adapt

7. FOUR STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
invariant developmental sequence: all children progress through the stages in the exact order in which they are listed
no stages are skipped
each stage builds on the previous stage and represents a more complex way of thinking

8. SENSORIMOTOR Birth-Age 2
Infants use sensory and motor capabilities to explore and gain a basic understanding of the environment
Acquire a primitive sense of “self” and “others”
Imitation: 8-18 months
Deferred Imitation: months
Object permanence
Begin to internalize behavioral schemes

9. Object Permanence

10. Object Permanence

11. Object Permanence

12. PREOPERATIONAL
Ages 2-7
Children use symbolism (images and language) to represent and understand aspects of the environment
Thought is egocentric: children think everyone sees the world the same way that they do
Conservation vs. Reversibility (not yet)
Imaginative in play

13. CONCRETE OPERATIONS Ages 7-12
Cognitive operations: children acquire and use components of logical thought
no longer fooled by appearances
understand basic properties and relationships
understand conservation and reversibility
can begin to infer motives by observing other’s behavior

14. Conservation

15. Conservation

16. Conservation

18. FORMAL OPERATIONS Age 12 –beyond
Thinking is now systematic and abstract
They can operate on operations, or “think about thinking”
Can ponder hypothetical issues
Systematic, deductive reasoning to problem solve

19. PIAGET Major influence in educating educators
“curious, active children”
“individualized discovery learning”
“…assessing the impact of Piaget on developmental psychology is like assessing the impact of Shakespeare on English literature or Aristotle on philosophy—impossible.” (Beilin, 1992)