PIAGET'S STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

INTELLECTUAL OR COGNITIVE DEVELOPM 

Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development

The most systematic and comprehensive theory of cognitive development was given by, a Swiss Biologist, Jean Piaget.  His approach is known as genetic epistemology.

Piaget’s Theoretical Concepts:

According to Piaget, the development of human intellectual abilities take place as a result of the organisation and reorganization of certain pattern of behavior called schema. Schemas are the basic structural units of human mind ie., the cognitive structure.  The process of organisation of these schemas take place by three different activities – Assimilation, Accommodation and Equilibration. These activities constitute the functional aspect of human mind, ie., the cognitive function or cognitive process.

Cognitive Structure:     According to Piaget, emergence of new cognitive abilities as a result of the modification of human behaviour patterns that are present at the time of birth. These behavioural patterns or the structural units of human mind are called schemas.

Schemas are the basic structural units of human mind. It is the biologically inherited reflexes or abilities to perform a particular task.  Sucking, looking, reaching, grasping etc.  are the primary schemas of an infant. The infant sucks the breast of his mother, he looks at the objects of his environment, listen different voices in his environment and finally try to reach whatever he sees. As the child grows, it develops different schemas in the form of organized experiences.

Cognitive Functioning:  The structure of an organism is said to play an important role in its functioning.  The individual has to adapt to his environment for survival as well as proper growth and development. The key to his cognitive development lies in his constant interaction with an adaptation to his physical and social environment. According to Piaget intelligence is a tool by which the individual organizes the schemas and adapt to the world. The process of adaptation or organisation of schemas are defined with three different activities – assimilation, accommodation and equilibration.

Assimilation: Assimilation refers to a kind of matching between the already existing cognitive structures and the environmental needs as they arise.  It is the process of transforming new experiences into familiar ones by means of organizing past experiences. It take place when a previous experience is used to comprehend a new experience in its familiar form.

Example 1. When a three month old infant is given a new toy, it is likely to respond by putting the toy in its mouth; because in this period his cognitive structure revolved around the sucking schema, and hence when he get the new toy he put it into his mouth as he suck his mothers breast.

Example 2. A child who has learnt only primary colours such as red, blue and green may identify a man wearing a pink-shirt as one wearing a red- shirt.

Accommodation: Accommodation is the modification of existing schemas or behaviour to deal with a new situation. It involves transformation of an old schema or learning a new schema , which is more appropriate for the new situation. In other words accommodation means modifying oneself so as to fit with existing characteristics of the environment. Through accommodation one tries to accommodate or adjust to new ways of thinking and behaving in place of assimilating or behaving in the same old fashion.

Example 1. When the new toy is too big to be picked up and is not able to place in the mouth, the boy will have to change his old ways of thinking and behaving in order to adjust to the new situation. Hence, instead of sucking, now he may respond by pushing or grasping the toy. This is called accommodation.

Example 2.  When the child learns to discriminate between red and pink colours, the pre-existing schema of red colour is accommodate with a new experience of identification of the shade of red, that is, pink colour.

Equilibration:  According to Piaget, the optimal level of intellectual functioning takes place when there is a balance between assimilation and accommodation. He stressed that the process of assimilation and accommodation helps the organism to adjust or maintain a harmonious relationship between himself and his environment. The process of maintaining this balance is called equilibration. In other words equilibration is the harmonious relationship between the individual and his environment either by assimilation or by accommodation. 

STAGES OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Cognitive development or intellectual development is the result of continuous interaction between the organism and the environment. It passes through a series of sequential stages. Based upon the nature of this interaction, Piaget divided the cognitive development into four distinctive stages.  Each of these stages are marked by the emergence of new patterns of intellectual activities.  They are as follows:-

1.     Sensori-motor Stage                     (0 – 2  years)

2.     Pre-operational Stage                             (2 – 7  years)

3.     Concrete-operational Stage           (7 – 11 years)

4.     Formal operational Stage             (12 – 15 years)

I Sensori-motor Stage

In the first two years, infant’s mental activities are completely given over to regularizing their sensations and controlling the motor activities. This pre-language period is marked by motor actions and sensations. Hence this period is called as sensory-motor period. Absence of language is one of the major characteristics of this period. The major characteristics of  this period are the following:        

At birth the infant exhibits a limited number of uncoordinated reflexes such as sucking, looking, reaching and grasping.                 

1.     Absence of language is one of the major characteristics of this period. The child in this period cannot use any language to communicate with his environment.

2.      Action schema:   At birth the infant exhibits a limited number of uncoordinated reflexes such as sucking, looking, reaching and grasping. Gradually these uncoordinated reflexes are coordinated into simple schemas and the infant is able to react to the out objects. Thus they come to know everything around by means of different actions. Piaget called these as action schema.

3.     Absence of object permanence: As we know a new born baby does not realize that objects are permanent. For him “what is out of sight is purely out of mind”.  For example, if the infant is playing with a toy and you pick it up and hide it somewhere, just after a moment the infant forget about it. For him the hidden toy has disappeared and is no more.

Gradually the concept of object permanence evolves in the cognitive structure of the infant. He begins to realize that the objects continue to exist even though he cannot see or experience them. Thus he begins to search for the hidden objects.

II PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE (2 – 7 years)

During the pre-operational stage the child begins to replace direct action in the form of sensory or motor exploration with symbols. The learning of language helps him in his primary communication. He begins to utter words to ask for something rather than just reaching out to get it. This stage can be further sub-divided into the Pre-conceptual phase and the Intuitive phase.

Pre-conceptual phase: (2-4 years)    This is the period of rudimentary concept formation.  During this period the child develops the ability to identify and classify objects. The following are the important characteristics of this stage:

1. Identify objects by their names:  In the early part of this stage, children seems to identify objects by their names, but usually makes mistakes in identification and concept formation.

For example, to a child “all men are daddy and all women are mummy”.

2. Transductive reasoning:    The mode of thinking and reasoning is quite illogical at this stage. It is neither inductive or deductive but rather transductive in nature, he reasons from the particular to the particular.

For example, the child at this stage knows that “cows are big animals with four legs and a long tails”. After that whenever  he saw a bull, a horse or an ass he thinks that ‘this animal is also big and has four legs and a tail, therefore it is a cow’.

3. Representational thought: The child develops the ability to form mental symbols to represent objects or events that are not present. His thinking is sometimes too imaginative and far removed from reality. More over they are unable to distinguish between living and non-living objects. The symbolic function of cognitive development can be seen in two ways:

1.      Deferred imitation:  The child shows the ability to imitate actions performed earlier by adults.  An infant might have keenly watched somebody blowing out a candle. The next day he would imitate the same. Since it is delayed one or two day, the infant must have some memory of actions and hence Piaget calls this as deferred  imitation.

2.     Symbolic play:  This may be seen in their play activities. While playing with a piece of wood, it is turned into a riding horse or a motor cycle , a stick may be used as a gun and a doll into a baby.

4.  Ego-centrism:           One of the major characteristics of this stage is the ego-centric nature of the child.  By ego-centrism Piaget means that the child can see the world only from his own views.  He thinks that the sun and moon are following him, the stars twinkles to surprise him, the rain falls to delight him, and obviously what exists in the external environment is specifically meant for him.

Intuitive Phase: (4 – 7 years)            During this stage the child progresses towards the formation of various concepts at a more advanced level. For example, now the child will realizes that apples, oranges, bananas etc. are all fruits despite the difference in their shape, colour or taste. But his thinking is based on intuition rather than on systematic logic.  The most important characteristic of this stage is as follows:

Thinking is not logical but contradictory:         During this period the thought process of the child is not logic and systematic but it is full of contradictions.  It is due to the absence of reversibility and conservation. Conservation means the ability to see an object as permanent even though its length, width or shape changes.

Reversibility: It is the ability to reverse or think reversely or vice versa. For example, when a child realizes that not only he has a brother but his brother also has a brother in him, we can say that the child has developed the reversible quality in his cognitive operation. But in the pre-operational stage children are not able to think like this. For them moving from A to B is possible but at the same time movement from B to A is not possible. In another situation, if we teach a child simple mathematics as 2 + 3 = 5, but he cannot comprehend that 5 = 3 + 2 or 5 – 3 = 2. This is due to the absence of reversibility.

Conservation:      As mentioned earlier conservation is the ability to see an object as permanent even though its length, width or shape changes. During this stage children lacks the ability to conserve objects in terms of quantity as well as number. 

For example, a five or six year old child is shown to identical containers filled with the same quantity of water. Now he will agree that both have the same amount.

But after that if we pour the water from one of the containers into a taller but narrower container, the child will reply that the taller container contains more water than the other.

 The inability to conserve in terms of quantity makes the child think that there is more water in the taller container even though the child has observed that same amount of water has been poured into the taller container; because the level of the water is higher in the taller bur narrower container.

Example 2: A child is shown a set of beads arranged in one-to-one order as shown below.

then arrange these beads as adjacent ones as shown below and ask the child which row contains more beads.

The child is likely to say that the first row has more beads. This is due to the absence of the conservation of number concept. Here the child is unable to realize that a mere change in appearance or arrangement of some objects cannot increase or decrease their number.

Animistic Thinking:     Another characteristic of this stage is animism. It is the belief that all things are living. While playing with dolls they feed them milk and food as if they has life.

III  CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE  (7 – 11 years)

This stage shows marked developments in the cognitive functioning of the child. Here he develops the ability for logical thinking. The major characteristics are described below:

1.  Here the child learns to deals with concepts and ideas that exist only in mental terms. Now he can think about things and figure out of discrepancies and relationships. For example, now he is able to discriminate between cows and bullocks; as both have four legs and long tails and between a goat and a sheep.

2.  He begins to think in terms of a set of interrelated principles. For example, as we know Distance, Velocity and Acceleration are inter related terms, ie, Velocity = Distance divided by Time and Acceleration = Velocity divided by time.

3. Thinking becomes logic and systematic: Now  the child is able make use of inductive and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning means ‘using particular facts and examples to form general rules and principles or from specific to general’. For example: ‘All rocks are solids, so Igneous rocks (Aagneya Shila), Sedimentary rocks (Avasada Shila)  Metamorphic rocks (Kayandhariga  Shila) etc, are solids.

Deductive reasoning means ‘from general to specific’. For example, as mentioned above ‘Igneous rocks, Sedimentary rocks, Metamorphic rocks, etc. are solids, so we can say ‘all rocks are solids’.

 4. Ability of conservation: The child develops the ability to conserve both in terms of quantity and number of objects. Now he is able to think that the change in appearance of an object does not alter either its quantity or its number.

5. Reversibility of thought. At this stage the child learns to carry a thought backward and forward in time. For example, as mentioned earlier movement of A à B and B à A or A   ↔ B is possible. Or a girl who has a sister now clearly realizes that her sister also has a sister.

6. Absence of Ego-centrism: The child now is no longer ego-centric in his thinking.  He is able to think that people may have different opinions and may differ in their modes of thinking and conclusions. Now he is able to appreciate others thoughts and viewpoints.

7. Classification and Serialization:  Now the child is able to classify objects on the basis of their merits.  For example, by giving a list of objects such as banana, bat, rose, cat, foot ball, elephant, jasmine, dog, apple, lotus, orange, monkey, etc. the child is able to classify them under the category of Fruits, Animals, Play materials, Flowers etc.

He also develops the ability of serialization like arranging things from largest to smallest and vice versa. The number concept is also developed and is able to recognize the even number, odd number, cardinal number, ordinary number, etc.

FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE  (12 – 15 Years)

The intellectual development and cognitive functioning of the child takes a very sophisticated shape. The thought process becomes quite systematic and reasonably well integrated. Following are the major characteristics of this stage:

1.  Ability to deal with abstraction: Adolescents can think not only in general terms but also in abstract terms .The  child learns to utilize the tools of symbolism in the process of thought and learns to deal with abstraction by logical thinking. He begins to construct relationships between concrete operations and between symbols.

2. Hypothetico-deductive reasoning:  The child at the formal operational stage starts a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. When faced with a problem, he starts with a general theory of all possible factors. Then they test these hypotheses in an orderly fashion to see which one work in the real world. Now the child is able to :-

a)   Build up multiple hypotheses and a number of alternate solutions

b)   Verify all possible solutions in a systematic and logical way

c)  Generalize and arrive at abstract rules that cover many specific solutions

3. Systematic  problem solving ability:  The individual begins to look at problems in many ways and explore various solutions in a systematic and logical way. He develops the ability to build multiple hypotheses and a number of alternate solutions.

For example: If a child is shown five colourless, odourless liquids in test tubes and is asked to find out what combination of the five will produce a red liquid.  By adopting a systematic approach he combines the first and second, first and third and so on. By using trial and error method he can simply find out which is the most suitable combination for getting the red colour.

4. Ability to trans:  The development of formal operations enables the adolescent to transfer understanding from one situation another situation.  

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