STAGES OF CHILD’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PIAGET’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Piaget categorizes the stages of cognitive development of the child into four development stage such as sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. As shown in the Table 1, every stage is associated with certain age. Hence, the development progressing ages are just a basic guidelines which labels the development of a child in general but it is not fixed for all human beings as it might vary for some.

However, Piaget believes every human being goes through those four stages exactly in the same sequential pattern and the developmental changes move on one stage after the other depending on the child’s situation and the mental capability. Thus, scholars like Ginsburg & Opper (1988) and Orlando & Machado (1996) discussed that child’s age does not relate or affect his/ her way of thinking. 

Table 1: Jean Piaget’s (1896 – 1980) Development Stages

1. Sensorimotor Stage: Infancy (0–2 years)	2. Preoperational: Early childhood to the Early elementary (2-7 years)
3. Concrete-Operational: Elementary to the Middle School Years: (7–11 years)	4.Formal Operational: Junior and Senior High School Years (11- adulthood)

Source: From Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive and Affective Development (5^th ed.) by B.J Wadsworth, 1996.

Figure 01: Stages of  Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive

The Sensorimotor Stage:  

This is the first stage of child’s mental development which mainly involves sensation and motor skills  such as hear, sight, feel, taste, move, manipulate, bite, chew and so on.  Throughout this stage a rapid changes occur in child’s development and this period is crucial to infant’s early cognitive development as they begin to learn simple things about the world and their surroundings through observation, repetition, imitation and thought.

In early stage of this period infant do not understand or differentiate themselves and the environment. For them an object exists only when it is physically present. However during this stage they begin to understand cause and effect relation and learn to recognize object permanence even if it is not present. 

The Preoperational Stage:  

In this stage children use their mental ability to represent events and objects in a various ways like using symbols, gestures and even communication, and so on thus their logical reasoning are not yet organized or developed. As discussed by Seifert & Sutton (2009) the children’s cognitive development during this stage shows through their play. Children at this stage often use symbols or action and real objects in more complex form while they play. For example, while they play cooking game they use their hand to cut the vegetable, pretend that the dish is hot and feed to their dolls these things shows their understanding of the related objects and their use.  

Another major accomplishment of preoperational stage is rapid development of language skills and extended vocabulary. Many Psychologist and Educationist believes that children at the age of 2 to 4, learn about 200 to 2000 words. The research shows almost 80% of children’s brain develops at the age of three.  In addition, when children moves through this period they develop imagination, think about the future and learn to reflect on the past. Although children’s at this period are still perception-bound, irreversible or egocentric and animistic throughout this stage they learn to delay gratification.

Furthermore, for preoperational children it is difficult to use reversible thinking such as understanding the conservation of matter. Which mean children at this phase are unable to understand that the amount or the quantity of something remains same even though the shape and arrangements are changed.  

The Concrete-Operational Stage:  

The third stage of development is usually start from elementary schools and it goes on till they reach middle school years. At this stage the child becomes more stable, think operationally and use logical reasoning rather than intuitive thought. From simple association children’s develops logical reasoning but unlike formal operational children their cognitive development is very basic and usually they use these skill unconsciously. 

One of the basic operation that children learn at this stage is knowing of the concept of conservation. As discussed by Satrock (2011), although children’s at this stage unknowingly follow a basic rule to solve certain problems such as using logic they understand when nothing is added or taken from something then the actual form will remain unchanged. This simple concept help them to learn mathematical operation such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Since these concept are directly relate to concrete objects or  events and it does not involves abstract thinking, Piaget’s called this as concrete operational stage. 

Another important accomplishment of this stage is classification or identifying and organizing different objects according to their interrelation. According to Furth & Wachs (1975), classification skill is mostly depends on the child’s ability of focusing on certain characteristics of the objects or events.  For instance, when the concrete operational child is given 20 shapes such as triangle, square and circle of assorted colours and ask them to categorize according to the characteristics, they can be able to invariably  sort it out and also if they are asked to reason out they will be able to that. 

In addition, unlike Preoperational stage children at this stage they have capabilities of differentiating others perspectives from their own perspectives deductive reasoning, making orderly arrangements and understand reversibility. However they are not yet able to deal with abstract, theoretical reasoning or contrary-to-fact ideas.

The Formal-Operational Stage:  

This is the fourth and final stage of Piagetian theory, where children become more systematic and reasonable and they can not only reason of tangible objects and events but also they possess capability of reasoning and thinking in more abstract, hypothetical and idealistic ones.  

At this level, the abstract quality of thinking and reasoning is clearly visible in their conversation and way of solving the problems. For example, when they are ask questions like “What if alien exist?” or “What if there is a planet like Earth where life is possible?”  They use hypothetical reasoning such as manipulating ideas, think various possibilities, form and test such hypotheses and organizes information before coming up with a conclusion.  

Throughout this stage children develop a special kind of formal thinking which involves scientific reasoning and use scientific experiments and understand the scientific concept to solve the problems. However, studies proved that this skill is usually not formed in many children as they do not use this type of thinking and problem-solving skills in their day to day life (Case & Okomato, 1996).