Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive concept about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was formulated by a Swiss psychologist and philosopher. His name was Jean Piaget. It deals with the nature of knowledge itself and with how people gradually begin to acquire, construct and use it. Piaget's theory is mainly known as the theory of stages of development.
The merits of a psychologist
Piaget was the first psychologist to systematically study cognitive development. His contribution includes the child’s stage theory of cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to identify various cognitive abilities.
Piaget did not want to measure how well children can count, write, or solve problems. Most of all he was interested in the way such fundamental concepts appeared, such as the idea of ​​number, time, quantity, causality, justice, and so on.
Prior to Piaget's work in psychology, it was widely believed that children are simply less competent thinkers than adults. The scientist showed that young children think differently compared to adults.
According to Piaget, children are born with a very simple mental structure (genetically inherited and developed), on which all subsequent knowledge is based. The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which a child develops in an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.
main idea
According to Piaget, growing up is the development of mental processes that arise as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. He believed that children create an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment, and then adjust their ideas accordingly. Language depends on knowledge and understanding acquired as a result of cognitive development. Piaget's early works received the most attention.
disadvantages
Piaget's theory, despite its universal approval, has some limitations. Which the scientist himself recognized. For example, his concept supports the acute stages, and not continuous development (horizontal and vertical decals).
Philosophical and theoretical foundations
Piaget's theory notes that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change. Reality is determined with reference to two conditions. In particular, he argued that reality includes transformations and states.
Transformations apply to all methods of change that a thing or person can undergo. States relate to conditions or phenomena.
People change in their characteristics as they grow older: for example, the baby does not walk and does not run without falls, but after 7 years the child’s sensory-motor anatomy is well developed and now acquires new skills faster. Thus, Piaget’s theory states: if human intelligence must be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and static aspects of reality.
He suggested that operational intelligence is responsible for representing and manipulating the dynamic or transformational aspects of reality, and imaginative intelligence is responsible for representing the static aspects of reality.
Operational and imaginative intelligence
Operational intelligence is an active aspect of intelligence. It includes all actions, explicit or hidden, taken in order to track, restore or anticipate the transformation of objects or persons of interest. Piaget’s development theory insists that the figurative or representative aspects of intelligence are subject to its operational and dynamic aspects. And therefore, this understanding essentially stems from the operational aspect of intelligence.
At any time, operational intelligence forms an understanding of the world, and it changes if the understanding is not successful. The development theory of J. Piaget claims that this process of understanding and change includes two main functions: assimilation and adaptation. They are the driving force behind the development of the mind.
Pedagogy
Piaget's cognitive theory is not directly related to education, although later researchers have explained how the features of the concept can be applied to teaching and learning.
The scientist had a huge impact on the development of educational policy and teaching practice. For example, a survey of primary education by the British government in 1966 was based on Piaget's theory. The result of this review led to the publication of the Plowden report (1967).
Learning through learning — the idea that children learn best by doing and actively learning — was seen as central to the transformation of the primary school curriculum.
Periodic topics of the report are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the central role of the game in teaching children, the use of the environment, discovery-based learning and the importance of assessing children's progress — teachers should not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.
Since Piaget's theory is based on biological maturation and stages, the concept of “readiness” is important. It refers to when certain information or concepts should be taught. According to Piaget's theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.
According to the scientist (1958), assimilation and adaptation require an active student, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot be learned, they must be discovered.
First stage
According to the theory of Jean Piaget, the development of the constancy of the object is one of the most important achievements. The constancy of the object is the child's understanding that the object continues to exist. Even if they cannot see or hear it. Peek-a-boo - a game in which children who have yet to fully develop the constancy of the object, react to the sudden concealment and disclosure of the face.
Second stage
The preoperative stage is rare and logically inadequate in relation to mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts, as well as magical beliefs. Thinking at this stage is still egocentric, which means that it is difficult for the child to see the point of view of others.
The preoperative stage is divided into a sub-step of symbolic function and a sub-step of intuitive thinking. The first is when children can understand, imagine, memorize and depict objects in their mind without having an object in front of them. And the intuitive stage of thinking is when children tend to ask questions: “why?” and "how did it happen?" At this stage, the children want to understand everything. Piaget's theory of intelligence is very interesting in just such conclusions.
Third stage (operational)
At the age of 2 to 4 years, children still cannot manipulate and transform thought forms, think in images and symbols. Other examples of mental ability are language and pretense of play. In addition, the quality of their symbolic play may have consequences for their further development. For example, young children, whose symbolic games are violent, are more likely to show antisocial tendencies in subsequent years. This is proved to us by the intellectual theory of Piaget.
Third Stage and Animism
Animism is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of action and have life qualities. An example is a child who believes that the sidewalk has gone crazy and made him fall. Artificiality refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human actions or interventions. For example, a child may say that it is windy on the street because someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because someone painted them in that color. Finally, prejudiced thinking, according to Piaget's theory of intellectual development, is classified by transduction thinking.
The fourth stage (formal operational, logical)
At the age of 4 to 7 years, children become very curious and ask a lot of questions, starting to use primitive reasoning. There is an interest in reasoning and the desire to find out why things are the way they are. Piaget called it an “intuitive sub-step” because children understand that they have a huge amount of knowledge, but do not know how they acquired it. Centering, conservation, irreversibility, inclusion in the class, and transitional conclusion are all characteristics of preoperative thinking.
Centering
Centering is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or measurement of a situation, while ignoring all the others. Conservation is the realization that changing the appearance of a substance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are not aware of conservation and exhibition concentration. Both centering and conservation can be more easily understood by familiarizing yourself with the hypothesis in practice. And you can do this simply by observing your children after reading this article.
Criticism
Are the listed stages of development real? Vygotsky and Bruner would prefer to regard development as an ongoing process. And some studies have shown that the transition to the formal stage of operation is not guaranteed. For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students do not cope with formal operational tasks, and Dassin (1994) claims that only a third of adults ever reach the formal operating stage.
Since Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he did not take into account the influence that social conditions and culture can have on cognitive development. Dasen (1994) cites studies that he conducted in remote parts of the central Australian desert with aborigines 8-14 years old. He found that the ability to preserve appeared in Aboriginal children later - at the age of 10 to 13 years (unlike 5 to 7 years, according to the Swiss model of Piaget). But the ability to spatial awareness developed in Aboriginal children earlier than in Swiss children. Such a study shows that cognitive development depends not only on maturation, but also on cultural factors - spatial awareness is crucial for nomadic groups of people.
Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is crucial for cognitive development. According to him, teaching a child always takes place in a social context in collaboration with someone more skilled. This social interaction provides language opportunities, and language is the basis of thinking.
Piaget's methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. The scientist made thorough, detailed naturalistic observations of the children, and from them he wrote diary descriptions reflecting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who could understand questions and conduct conversations. Since Piaget made observations alone, the data collected is based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would be more reliable if the scientist made observations with another researcher and compared the results subsequently to check whether they are similar (that is, whether they have validity between the estimates).
Although clinical interviews allow the researcher to examine the data more deeply, the interviewer's interpretation may be biased. For example, children may not understand the question, they have a short attention span, they cannot express themselves very well and may try to please the experimenter. Such methods meant that Piaget could draw inaccurate conclusions.
As some studies have shown, the scientist underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to understand (e.g., Hughes, 1975). Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what the child is capable of) and work (what the child can show when performing a certain task). When tasks were changed, productivity and therefore competency were affected. Therefore, Piaget could underestimate the cognitive abilities of children.
The concept of a scheme is incompatible with the theories of Bruner (1966) and Vygotsky (1978). Behaviorism also refutes Piaget's theory of schemes, because it cannot be observed directly, since it is an internal process. Therefore, they argue that this cannot be objectively measured.
The scientist studied his children and the children of his colleagues in Geneva in order to derive the general principles of the intellectual development of all children. Not only was his sample very small, it consisted entirely of European children from families with high socio-economic status. Therefore, researchers questioned the universality of his data. For Piaget, language is seen as secondary to action, that is, thought precedes language. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the development of language and thinking go together and that the reason for reasoning is more connected with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world.