After reading this article you will learn about:- 1. Subject-Matter of Cognitive Developmental Stages: Piaget 2. Piaget’s Developmental Stages 3. The Higher Mental Processes.
Subject-Matter of Cognitive Developmental Stages: Piaget:
The stages of cognitive development in a child has been best provided by Jean Piaget, a French-Swiss psychologist, who was originally trained as a biologist, but who has more than fifty years observed and analysed the behaviour of children.
Piaget observed that children at all ages attempt to solve a wide range of problems they face.
We shall discuss Piaget’s view in details in the following section.
Born in 1896, Jean Piaget till the 1970s continued his research and published extensively on the intellectual development of children, genetics, logic and epistemology. His early education was in biology, he published his first scientific article at the age of 10. Later he was working in Alfred Binet’s laboratory school in Paris, helping to standardize intelligence tests for French children.
Piaget became interested in pursuing the reasons for wrong response children made to the test items, rather than in the assessment of intellectual abilities. He left the laboratory school after a short period of time and established a center for the study of child development and epistemology in Geneva.
In course of his work on child development, his emphasis was mainly on its biological aspect and he described development as organisation, assimilation and accommodation—a process. He formulated some theoretical constructs and propositions to describe child development. Piaget indicates that individuals being active biological organisms, continuously interacts with their environments.
Through this interaction they gain their knowledge about external objects, the self and self/object relationships. The infant inherits the unique capabilities of the human species. These inherited capabilities, not independently, but interacting with the environment, determine the four successive stages in development.
In a very real sense developing individuals ‘construct’ themselves and the world around them. They do not like cameras, merely passively record what they sense. Instead they actively transform and organise sensory impressions into their cognitive structures.
This is a central proposition of Piaget’s continually emerging theory which he states as follows:
“….Actually, in order to know objects, the subject must set upon them, and therefore, transform them: he must displace, connect, combine, take apart, and reassemble them. From the most elementary sensory motors action’s (such as pushing and pulling) to the most sophisticated intellectual operations, which are interiorized actions, carried out mentally (e.g. joining together, putting in order, putting into one-to-one correspondence) knowledge is constantly linked with action or operations, that is with ‘transformation’ ….”.
Since objective knowledge is not acquired by a mere recording of external information but has its origin in interactions between the subject (person) and the objects, it necessarily implies two types of activity—on the one hand the coordination of actions themselves, and on the other, the introduction of interrelations between the objects. “These two activities are interdependent because it is only through action that these relations originate.
It follows that, objective knowledge is always subordinate to certain structures of action. But those structures are result of a ‘construction’ and are net given in the objects, since they are dependent on action; not on the subject, since the subject must learn how to coordinate his actions (which are not generally hereditarily programmed except in the case of reflexes or instincts)”.
The two primary mechanisms of life and growth in every organism are “organization” and “adaptation”. The former relates directly to the capability of transforming and combining discrete sensory inputs into structures. As noted this “structurization” involves the organizing of two or more elements into a whole, or totality. These structures are relatively stable and enduring and not transitory.
They do change with each successive stage of development of the individual’s life process by interacting with the environment he faces at every stage, and he interacts intelligently and rationally. Therefore structurization is, in fact, organization of piecemeal experiences into a rational whole.
“Adaptation” of an organism to its environment requires both assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’. Piaget states: “From a biological point of view, assimilation is the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures of an organism.
In its connotation, the assimilation of food consists of a chemical transformation that incorporates it into the substance of the organism. Chlorophyllian assimilation consists of the integration of radiation energy in the metabolic cycle of a plant”.
“Accommodation”, correctively, is the outgoing aspect of an operative process and denotes the modification that takes place in the individual’s make-up as a consequence of environmental intrusions. For example, a child knows and comprehends the cardinal meaning of 8 and 4 (this is due to assimilation), but he must make an ‘accommodation’ to deal with different forms while adding or multiplying these two digits.
The fundamental processes of organisation, assimilation, and accommodation are operationally effective throughout the life-span, thus providing the essential continuity across the stage of development. Therefore, they are called ‘invariant’, their manifestations may change with each successive stages of development.
In the Piagetian system, an individual’s particular cognitive event is a product of the elements of the environment he experiences at that particular time and it becomes functional invariants of assimilation and accommodation as well as of his cognitive structures.
“In turn, cognitive structures are organised and reorganised in systematic fashion from birth to maturity and form the basis for the qualitatively distinctive stages in development and the related “intelligence of the individual”.
The continuous interactions between assimilation, accommodation and adaptation are self-regulated. Piaget terms this as the construct of ‘equilibration’ to designate an “autoregulatory” mechanism.
Piaget says: “But on all levels of development actions are coordinated in ways that already involve some properties of order, inclusion, and correspondence…. what is more important, though is that coordination of actions involves correction and self- regulation….”
Thus it seems highly probable that the construction of structures is mainly the work of equilibration, defined not by balance between opposite forces but by self- regulation, that is equilibration is a set of active reactions of the subject (person) to external disturbances, which can be effective or anticipated to varying degrees.
Piaget views that development from one stage to another is based on the preceding constructs of one stage gradually merging to the next. This also ensures stability between and within stages. He also takes other classicators like maturation, experience of physical environment and the action of social environment into account, because maturation, according to him, influences the rate of development.
The experience of physical environment includes exercise with or on objects, extracting information from the objects by means of the process of abstraction as well as the logico-mathematical experiences. The social environment includes the educational and cultural environmental experiences the individual goes through.
He views cognitive development as a continuous process of unfolding which has the following recognisable stages or levels. Piaget’s stages of development followed an invariant order of succession and the structures which characterise each stage are not entirely predetermined by heredity but are also influenced by physical experience and social environment. All children, according to his theory, go through the stages in the same fixed sequential order, but chronological age at which children complete each successive stage varies somewhat.
Piaget’s Developmental Stages:
Stage 1: Sensory Motor Stage (Approximately 0-2 Years):
In this stage, corresponding roughly to the first two years of life, learning takes place primarily through “sensing the environment, manipulating objects and other motor actions. Sensory experiences, such as light, sound, touch and taste become coordinated.
By the end of the period young children’s motor actions are coordinated, they can even vary their actions. During the sensory motor period, the infant also begins to organise his environment. He learns to discriminate many objects in his environment and to view them as relatively permanent—depending upon his perceptual field and therefore, this phase of development is known as “object permanence”.
Though untutored by experience, the newborn infant is not completely helpless, because it is born with inherited reflexes which are the starting points of development gradually organising into sensory-motor stage. This stage is characterised by the child’s acquiring sensory motor control.
The principal features are: development of extensive trial and error-movements; development of bodily control, and eye-hand coordination. The perceptual field is organised as object related. Visual impressions improve when the experiences are repeated.
The sensory motor period has been described by Piaget in terms of 6 successive levels of development. These are:
Level I:
This level is estimated to occupy approximately the first month of life of the child and involves merely the increasingly smooth and systematic use of natural reflexes. The infant is said to be engaged mostly in “reflex exercise”. But even at this stage, only one month after birth, evolution towards greater sophistication can be observed. “Piaget sees evidence suggesting that there also are subtle and limited, but nonetheless genuine, accommodatory modifications in the reflex almost from the first hours of life”.
Level II:
During the second stage, from the first to approximately the fourth month of life, the infant begins to display a class of behaviour called “circular reaction”. It is a sequence of events consisting “first, of stumbling upon some experience as a consequence of some act, and second, of trying to recapture the experience by re-enacting the original movements again and again in a kind of rhythmic cycle. The importance of circular reactions lies in the fact that it is the sensory-motor device par excellence for making new adaptations and of course new adaptations are the heart and soul of intellectual development at any stage”.
Primary circular reactions are typical of Stage II. They are repetitive acts that center on the infant’s own body; thumb-sucking, for example, is frequent in 3-4 months old infant.
Level III:
At this level between the fourth to eight months of life appears “secondary circular reactions” of reflexes. The circular reaction needs the environmental events to be repeated and maintained so that coordination of two actions e.g. grasping and hearing can be achieved, supposing a rattle suspended above him had been shaken to produce noise.
The first coordination of vision and movement also takes place at this period. He repeats the gesture a number of times and each time the interesting result motivates the repetition.
Level IV:
This level involves the time between eighth and twelfth months of infant’s life when it is on the threshold of performing intelligent behaviour. Truly instrumental behaviour starts occurring at this stage and when an infant pushes the obstacle in its way to reaching an object, it is not accident now, rather an act recognized as necessary for reaching the goal.
The secondary circular reactions combine to launch new behaviour which is intentionally goal directed and the first glimmer of real intelligence appears.
Level V:
The fifth stage—twelve to eighteenth month—gives rise to “tertiary circular reactions”. In the second circular reaction the child tries to recapture an external object by activating the behaviour that is almost a stereotyped and mechanical devise. In the tertiary circular reaction, the child seems to be exploring the relationship between action and object.
The child experiments with objects in order to see, understand and pursue the novelty. The infants at this level actively search for new means through trial and error process.
Level VI:
During the sixth stage—eighteen to twenty four months of age—the ability to covertly plan without trial and error experimentation emerges. This new process is “insight”, the extremely important newly developed process represents the glimpse of intelligence.
Therefore, this newly developed process that underlies the emergence of insightful behaviour is called “representation”. In operating this process the child’s search is for and appropriate solution through the manipulation of internal symbols instead of physical objects.
In summary, the six substages of the sensory-motor period describe an orderly sequence of the different stretches of terrain through which the infant passes on a journey from automatic reflexive reactions to playful behaviour efficiently coordinated with the infant’s own goal and desires. It is the fumbling beginnings of the child with subsequent advances to acquire the knowledge of the world.
Now it is to be noted that the point of emergence at each stage varies with the concept, the method of instruction, the cultural -group studied and so on. The periods identified by
Piaget are accompanied by the concurrent development of several important mental processes which are required for adaptive and intelligent behaviour.
If a four or five month old baby, playing with a toy ball, rolls it out of sight (say behind a pillow), he will not search for it even it is within his reach. It is as if the object has ceased to exist once it leaves his field of vision. His schema for objects at this age does not include the realisation that they are parmanent. It takes the child to complete more than one and half years to realise the permanence of an object in the field.
Even though all children leaving the sensory motor stage can undertake a series of actions to reach the goal and have attained some order in the environment, their thinking is still limited primarily to immediate sensory experiences and related motor action with minimal amount of symbolic activity.
Stage 2: Preoperational Stage (2> to 4 to 7 Years of Life):
This 5 years period can be called the transitional period and is rather haphazard. No clear level of stability is reached in this period. This stage is characterised by the child’s learning names of objects, classifying things along a single dimension, and refining his/her sensory motor abilities. Gross relational concepts, such as bigger, older, taller, take form in this period.
A major and noticeable characteristic in the child of this period is the development and quick expansion of language. However, Piaget does not agree that the child’s use of the words indicate his perfect conceptualization. The child’s labelling of things is different from that of adults e.g. the word “car” is used by a child to indicate any moving vehicle like car, train, bus, truck, bicycle etc.
Therefore, Piaget calls this kind of concept a ‘pre-concept’. Another characteristic of the preoperational child is his ‘egocentricism’.
He believes the world as he sees it and does not take what the adults say. In a group of children between two to four year old, they are likely to vigorously produce their own thinking in quite unrelated monologues in their own ways.
Parallel play is common, yet each will be playing with his own things. The child’s world centers round his own ego. Preoperational children fail to decenter i.e. they can think of objects in only one way, rather than multiple ways.
The best-known characteristic of the preoperational child as shown by Piaget with his classical experiments in this regard, is the child’s inability to ‘conserve’. Since a preoperational child’s thinking is closely tied to his visual perceptions, he does not conserve. He, at this stage, does not think logically (in an adult’s eyes), but rather thinks intuitively on the basis of how things appear to them.
At the age from 2-4 the child is extracting concepts from experience. Words heard are associated with objects. Concepts are formed for recurring experiences. Judgements are generally intuitive and direct perceptual comparisons are accurate. Associated concepts are confused for them and, therefore, cannot react to complex situations as the situation is unanalysable for them.
They draw conclusions on superficial impressions. But gradually—as he grows older and by the time he reaches 6 to 7 years of age—concrete operations, associated concepts appear and logical thinking through conservation replaces the primitive mode of thinking.
Stage 3: The Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years):
The period of concrete operations is characterized by an orderliness of thinking which gives rise to the ability to decenter and recognize transformation, awareness that some transformations are reversible, and, of course, a grasp of concrete conservation. Concrete operational thoughts appear at this stage.
The integrated cognitive system of which Flavell writes “is an organized network of operations”. What kind of mental work is an operation? It is an act of representation, such as adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. Piaget has elaborately detailed nine different groupings of logical operations which define the system of concrete operations. Piaget uses the term operations to describe cognitive actions closely organized into a strong network or system. As Flavell says, “the preoperational child operates wholly on a new plane of reality, the plans of representation as opposed to direct action”.
The accomplishments of the concrete operational stage are many. Besides the ability to conserve, the child has lost much egocentricism and gains in sensitivity to contradictions inherent in his/her own thought. The child’s ability to represent the world symbolically is greatly advanced, but they are unable to produce. formal, abstract hypotheses. They cannot understand that possible events are not real events and thus cannot solve abstract problems.
At this stage operations performed by the child are closely connected to concrete objects and actions. Logical thinking does occur, but usually only if concrete objects are available or if actual past experiences can be drawn upon. During this period, as the child’s egocentricism wanes, he becomes able to take other’s viewpoint, becomes increasingly socialized. Conservation of numerousness, length, area and, ultimately, volume occurs. Additionally decentering becomes possible; he can think of multiple dimensions of a single object.
The idea of reversibility is understood. The child at this stage has the ability to classify, form concepts, and to group the same object along different dimensions, for example, chickens as animals and also as cooked food. Therefore, this period in the child’s life is characterized by forming concepts, concretization of objects that are perceived and manipulated. Concrete operational thoughts require that information is presented concretely. Operations at this stage can be imagined and results anticipated. Associated concepts like height and width are distinguished, that one can be moving while the other stays fixed—all these operations emerge during the concrete operational stage.
Stage 4: Formal Operational Period (11 Years through Adulthood):
As the child reaches adolescence he/she enters the most advanced stage of cognitive operations. He is now able to deal with more than the concrete, real life situations of the previous stage. Beginning with preadolescence, people begin to display the ability to engage informal reasoning on an abstract level.
They can draw hypotheses from their observations, imagine hypothetical as well as real events or deduce or induce principles regarding the world around them. They can think logically about abstract things—things existing only in their own mind. Even without direct experience of an object, a child of this period can construct theories and reach logical conclusions about their consequences, he now can adopt almost adult way of abstracting.
Having mastered decentralization, reversibility and now abstract thinking, the child is able to solve abstract problems, thinks logically as is observed in the fifth or sixth grade children in the elementary schools. Fully concrete operations appear during junior school period. Throughout the adolescent years, intellectual development primarily involves increasing sophistication in the handling of formal operations.
Concrete operational children approach any problem unsystematically and soon fail or give up because their chaotic approach leave them without any real clue to the answer. Formal operational children, on the other hand, handle the problem very systematically and methodically.
The Higher Mental Processes:
The course of cognitive development charted by Piaget is accompanied by the concurrent development of several important mental processes which are required for adaptive and intelligent behaviour. Of these processes the important ones are mental representation, concept formation, reasoning, selective attention and memory. The central theme of Piaget’s theory is the process of mental representation of the world for the child.
According to Piaget, a major advance in the child’s ability to represent the events mentally occurs at about two years of age, corresponding closely with the onset of preoperational period. At this time the child begins to distinguish what Piaget calls “signifiers” (internal symbols and signs) from ‘significates’ (the actual objects, events and actions to which signifiers refer).
Piaget distinguishes between two kinds of signifiers symbols and signs in the development of mental representation. Symbols correspond to the events that they represent and also physically: signs, on the other hand, does not resemble the object or event, but are’ shared by other members of the environment (e.g. formal language).
Piaget argues that representational thoughts does not have its beginning in social language, but rather in private symbols which form the basis for later acquisition of language.