Jean Piaget's Cognitive Develpoment & Conceptual Change


Piaget's (1936) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.
Piaget, concerned with children (rather than all learners) and focused on development (rather than learning).He proposed discrete stages of development.
Piaget believed that newborn babies have a small number of innate schemas. These schemas are cognitive structures underlying innate reflexes. In addition to creating new schemas, children can adapt their existing schemas based on new experiences.
  • Assimilation is using an existing schema and applying it to a new situation or object.
  • Accommodation is changing approaches when an existing schema doesn’t work in a particular situation.
  • Equilibration is the driving force that moves all development forward. Piaget didn’t believe that development progressed steadily. Instead, it moved in leaps and bounds according to experiences. Equilibration motivates a child to continue through the stages of cognitive development.
Criticisms of Piaget's Theory
Piaget's (1936) theory of cognitive development  is considered as a masterpiece to expose how the minds of children change in an orderly sequential way. However there are also some critics raised against his theory.

  • Piaget is criticized that his theory ignored cultural influences. Kids in different cultures do go through the stages but at different ages dependent on culture and some people never develop formal reasoning skills throughout their lives. Researchers have found that many adults display abstract-hypothetical thinking only in limited areas of knowledge, and that some adults never display formal operational thought processes at all. For example, college students may not display formal operational thought outside their area of major. Like when an English major is presented with a Physics question.
  • Piaget saw cognitive development as involving qualitative change: the very foundations of thought change and become more sophisticated as the child's intellect develops.This means 1. development is discontinious, 2.reasoning on different problems is consistent within a given stage. However there are studies showing that children sometimes develop skills of one or more stages at the same time so development is not considered to be in stages but more continuous process.
  • Another claim is that Piaget had underestimated children’s abilities (Wood. 2008) regarding the fact that he described tasks with confusing and abstract terms and used overly difficult tasks. .Researchers have found that young children are capable and can succeed on simpler forms of tasks requiring the same skills. For example object permanence may start sooner. Therefore there is evidence suggesting that children can perform certain cognitive tasks at a younger age than Piaget suggests is possible.
  • It is also claimed that  social environment and culture play a more significant and crucial role than Piaget proposed.
  • Finally Piaget is criticized that he used small research sample that therefore the results can not be generalized.


Alternative Perspectives on cognitive development
Some alternative Perspectives on cognitive development are proposed after Piaget.
These theories stated that Piaget’s theory is about the structure of the child's knowledge at each of the stages of cognitive development, and does not elaborate much on the processes underlying development.
Alternative information Processing theories of development try to specify the processes involved in cognitive development explicitly by applying models of memory. According to these theories
¢ Thinking is information processing
¢ Structure versus Process

Despite the critisims Piaget's theory is considered to be a masterpiece for many researchers and it had many contributions to the education field. Piaget made us conscious with the way children and adults think and made a revolution with the developmental psychology concentrating all his attention to the mental process and its role with behavior. The theory helped educators, parents and investigators to comprehend the capacity of children in their different stages.







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