Piaget's theory of cognitive development
To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganisation of mental processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience.
He believed that children construct an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment, then adjust their ideas accordingly.
It involves all actions, overt or covert, undertaken in order to follow, recover, or anticipate the transformations of the objects or persons of interest.
[20] Various teaching methods have been developed based on Piaget's insights that call for the use of questioning and inquiry-based education to help learners more blatantly face the sorts of contradictions to their pre-existing schemas that are conducive to learning.
But where his theory differs involves his addition of a fourth factor, equilibration, which "refers to the organism's attempt to keep its cognitive schemes in balance".
As humans, we have a biological need to make sense of the things we encounter in every aspect of our world in order to muster a greater understanding of it, and therefore, to flourish in it.
[33] In this stage, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences (such as vision and hearing) from physical interactions with objects (such as grasping, sucking, and stepping).
[35] Peek-a-boo is a game in which children who have yet to fully develop object permanence respond to sudden hiding and revealing of a face.
By the end of the sensorimotor period, children develop a permanent sense of self and object and will quickly lose interest in Peek-a-boo.
During the pre-operational stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information.
For example, young children whose symbolic play is of a violent nature tend to exhibit less prosocial behavior and are more likely to display antisocial tendencies in later years.
Piaget coined the term "precausal thinking" to describe the way in which preoperational children use their own existing ideas or views, like in egocentrism, to explain cause-and-effect relationships.
Children in this stage can, however, only solve problems that apply to actual (concrete) objects or events, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks.
On the other hand, children at this age have difficulty using deductive logic, which involves using a general principle to predict the outcome of a specific event.
[52] They use hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which means that they develop hypotheses or best guesses, and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem.
Finally, by age 13 and 14, in early to middle adolescence, some children more clearly understood the relationship between weight and distance and could successfully implement their hypothesis.
That is, their knowledge "consists of assimilating things to schemas" from their own action such that they appear, from the child's point of view, "to have qualities which, in fact, stem from the organism".
[65] First note the distinction between 'schemes' (analogous to 1D lists of action-instructions, e.g. leading to separate pen-strokes), and figurative 'schemas' (aka 'schemata', akin to 2D drawings/sketches or virtual 3D models); see schema.
In 1967, Piaget considered the possibility of RNA molecules as likely embodiments of his still-abstract schemes (which he promoted as units of action) — though he did not come to any firm conclusion.
The one exception is that such ultra-micro sites would almost certainly have to use optical communication, and recently studies have demonstrated that nerve-fibres can indeed transmit light/infra-red (in addition to their acknowledged role).
Anyhow the current situation[76] opens the way for more testing, and further development in several directions, including the finer points of Piaget's agenda.
For example, recent studies have shown that children in the same grade and of the same age perform differently on tasks measuring basic addition and subtraction accuracy.
[81] However, the application of standardized Piagetian theory and procedures in different societies established widely varying results that lead some to speculate not only that some cultures produce more cognitive development than others but that without specific kinds of cultural experience, but also formal schooling, development might cease at certain level, such as concrete operational level.
On the other hand, an experiment on the effects of modifying testing procedures to match local cultural produced a different pattern of results.
[83] Piaget's water level task has also been applied to the elderly by Formann and results showed an age-associated non-linear decline of performance.
[85][86] Piaget's operative intelligence corresponds to the Cattell-Horn formulation of fluid ability in that both concern logical thinking and the "eduction of relations" (an expression Cattell used to refer to the inferring of relationships).
Piaget's operativity is considered to be prior to, and ultimately provides the foundation for, everyday learning,[12] much like fluid ability's relation to crystallized intelligence.
Notwithstanding the different research traditions in which psychometric tests and Piagetian tasks were developed, the correlations between the two types of measures have been found to be consistently positive and generally moderate in magnitude.
[8] Furthermore, studies have found that children may be able to learn concepts and capability of complex reasoning that supposedly represented in more advanced stages with relative ease (Lourenço & Machado, 1996, p. 145).
[93][94] More recent work from a newer dynamic systems approach has strongly challenged some of the basic presumptions of the "core knowledge" school that Piaget suggested.
