Figure 1

The two drawings in Figure 1 illustrate the change in a boy’s drawings of himself between ages 6 and 11. When we look at the way in which children’s drawings change from an early scribble to the intricate drawings of the adolescent, we are seeing an expression of the many cognitive changes which children experience as they mature.

The drawings you have collected will have some similarities because the learners in your class group should be within a year or two of each other. (If you have a wide age range in your class, though, the differences you see may be much greater). Piaget carefully watched his own children’s cognitive development, and then worked on a series of tasks which were done with children of various ages in order to look at the differences between them. We will not look at the tasks at this point, but rather consider the four basic stages identified by Piaget after many years of gathering information about children’s development.

However, before we look at the developmental stages, we need to make links with some of the terms we discussed in the introduction to Piaget's theory. You will remember the terms ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘equilibration’. These refer to a feature of cognitive organisation which Piaget called the ‘functions’. He believes that these functions remain the same throughout the child’s development – that these are the ways in which the human adapts to the environment. You will also remember that we referred to the term ‘schema’. These schemas form the basis of the cognitive structures – and it is these that change as the child matures.

Piaget believed that cognitive development was an ongoing process of organisation and reorganisation of structures and schemas. As long as we are faced with new situations and experiences in our lives, we will need to continually organise and adapt our existing schemas to make room for this new information. People are involved in a life-long process of cognitive development. Obviously, the content of thought does differ with age. A child has fewer and more simple schemas in its early stages of life. As a child gets older, s/he develops more and more schemas and these become ever more expanded and complex.

Piaget noticed that in certain age ranges, children’s thinking changes quite substantially, because of the reorganisation and expanding of understanding that occurs in their natural development. Piaget believed that the structure of a child’s schemas undergo systematic change at particular points in development.

Piaget thus chose to break up the course of development into four stages, which we will now explore. These stages reflect the changes in the type of schemas available as a child develops and the way these schemas are organised into cognitive structures.

According to Piaget, the rate at which an individual progresses through these stages is variable, but the sequence of the stages is the same for all children.

Piaget

Piaget recognised that learners don’t all learn at the same rate or the same pace.

What implications does this belief have for teachers in the classroom?

All learning and teaching, therefore, needs to be flexible and learner-centred. This means that the learners dictate the pace and rate of their own learning. Teachers, then, need to provide learners with the appropriate (suitable) time and the appropriate (suitable) support (dictated to by the individual needs of the learner), so that the learner’s individual potential can be fulfilled at their own pace.

1. The Sensorimotor Stage (0 – 2years)

From the title of this stage – the sensorimotor stage – we can work out that this stage in a child’s development involves two important developmental processes at this time:

• the development of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell),
• and motor development (the child learns to sit, crawl, walk and then run).

The child begins to form simple schemas involving his/her senses and exploratory movement. You will have seen babies exploring the world by touching objects, smelling them and trying to put them into their mouths. This is their way of making sense of their world at this stage of cognitive development, and should therefore be encouraged.

Characteristics of this stage include:

• The child’s early random actions change to become more organised activities in this time, as the child shifts from total dependence on caregivers to becoming gradually more independent.
• The child learns to see the self as separate from others.
• The child seeks stimulation and likes to touch and explore objects. The child learns about its physical environment by using the senses.
• The child learns about objects as constant even though the objects may move places, for example, realising that a toy still exists even when it is out of sight behind a piece of furniture.
• The infant’s world is described as consisting only of his/her own actions, with objects only being seen as a part of his/her motor schema’s.

2. The preoperational stage (2 – 7 years)

Characteristics of this stage include:

• The development of language is the crucial change which leads to development in this stage. Children start talking from about two years onward (although they might start to use words from a bit earlier). The child’s experience and exposure to others is crucial to his development.
• The child’s construction of knowledge about the world is assisted by the development of symbols (which include gestures, words, drawings and signs).
• The child’s world becomes more stable as the child realises that things are more permanent.
• The child starts to deal with objects and events using a memory which becomes rapidly more complex.
• The child is still quite self-centred. A child at this stage still believes that everyone else sees things in exactly the same way that s/he does. The child is unable to see another person’s point of view, or even to see the physical world from a different perspective.
• S/he can start to group objects on the basis of one feature – like things which are yellow, or metal; s/he learns to see similarities and differences.
• The child gradually begins to be able to work with ordering things in sequence from smallest to biggest, and begins to work with the idea of number.

If you were to fill two identical drinking glasses to the same level with cold drink and place these in front of a child who was in the pre-operational stage of development, and ask the child whether there is a different amount of cold drink in each glass, s/he would probably respond that there was the same amount of cold drink in both glasses.

If you were then to carefully pour the contents of one of these glasses into a taller, thinner glass, while the child is watching, and then ask him/her which of the glasses now contains more cold drink, s/he would most likely respond that the taller, thinner glass had more cold drink in than the other.

This example illustrates that simple, visible changes can easily mislead a child at the pre-operational stage into thinking that much more fundamental changes have occurred. As the cold drink is poured from the short, fat container into the tall, thin container, the child believes that there is now a different volume of cold drink.

Similarly, we would find that a pre-operational child presented with the situation illustrated above, would believe that there is a different quantity of sweets in the two rows. The child would think that the longer, more widely spaced row of sweets has more sweets than the shorter more closely spaced row. This perception would occur even if the child could see that the same sweets were being moved from one grouping to the other.

3. The concrete operations stage (7-12 years)

Characteristics of this stage include:

• They become more and more able to think logically, step by step – hence they can perform a sequence of operations.
• Information is managed if it is concrete – that is, based on real objects and events which the child experiences.
• Children learn to manipulate figures and symbols (which are representations of reality), and begin to solve problems in a more orderly way (though they may use trial and error for a while).
• They realise that certain changes can be made without altering everything, and that these changes can be mentally reversed to the original condition. A child at this stage of cognitive development would not be mislead by the glasses of cold drink or the rows of sweets in the previous illustrations.
• At this stage they develop the ability to classify. They are able to group objects according to a number of characteristics.
• The child develops a better understanding of time and space.
• The child has now developed a logical way of thinking. However, this is still limited compared with adult thinking.

4. The formal operations stage (13 years onward)

Characteristics of this stage include:

• At this stage a person is able to make generalisations about the world, and is able to engage in mental trial and error before taking any physical actions.
• This is the stage where the learner becomes more and more able to work with ideas and abstract thinking. (Adolescents enjoy thinking about ‘what if …?’ questions, and playing with hypotheses.) The focus shifts from what is, to what may be, where situations don’t have to be actually
  experienced for them to be imagined.
• In the concrete operations stage, the child always starts with experience, while formal operations thinking begins with possibilities and then checks these against reality. Clearly, many of life’s problems and many of the tasks demanded in further and higher education, cannot be carried out when a learner’s thinking is limited to concrete operations.
• It is important to realise that these do not replace the already developed concrete operations, but become available in addition to them.
• It is important to realise that learners move into this stage gradually, and it may only be in their late teenage years that learners are fully able to think in this way.

We do not study theorists because we believe that their theories and ideas are ‘gospel’, to be followed unquestioning, rigidly and absolutely. Remember that theories act as guides. We need to look carefully and critically at them and see them as merely ways in which we could better understand our learners, and as offering suggestions for our teaching practices.

We must be prepared to use Piaget’s theory of stages flexibly, and not expect sudden, clear-cut changes in cognition to occur at predetermined ages.