Piaget's theory- Stages of cognitive Development

What is cognition? 
Well, the dictionary meaning of cognition is the art of knowing. Usually it is concerned with knowing, understanding, processing and using the information and these are considered as mental abilities or components of intelligence. Cognitive development refers to the stages and processes involved in child's intellectual development.
There are several theories of development of cognition. Among all the theories, Piaget's theory provides a comprehensive picture of cognitive development from birth to the age of 14 or 15 when cognitive development attains the peak. Piaget conceives of cognitive development as consisting of a series of stages, each characterized by certain kinds of behaviors  and certain way of thinking and solving problems. The descriptions of the characteristics of the child's behavior at each stage can be valuable in helping a teacher to understand the students's level of cognition. Knowing the cognitive status is very important as any form of learning is greatly influenced by the way a student thinks, reasons and processes information. All the age specific stages are grouped under four broad stages. Let's have a look at some of the major characteristics of each of these stages:

1. Sensorimotor(0-2 years):

• Intelligence related motor activities.
• Concerned with present and nearby incidents and objects.
• No language and no thought.
• No idea of objective reality.

  As we know, Piaget's theory tells that the child is born with a mental/cognitive structure which develops and attains maximum growth around the age of 14 04 15 years. During the first two years of life, the child performs activities mostly driven by sense organs and some motor activities. For an infant, objects exist when they can be seen, heard, touched or smelled and when they are removed from the infant's immediate sensory experience, they cease to exist.

2.Preoperational(2-7years):

• Egocentric thought.
• reason dominated by perception.
• Intuitive rather than logical solutions.
• Inability to conserve.

Towards the end of this sensorimotor period, the child can identify the objects around him/her and can imitate several actions of others. And t a later stage the child can imitate the actions in absence of the actions or objects (called deferred imitation). This indicates that the child can observe the actions minutely, internalize the actions and reproduce it signifying the early form of intentional action. Intentional actions are also part of intelligent activity.

3.Concrete Operations(7-11 or 12 years):

• Ability to conserve.
• Logic of class and relations.
• Understanding of numbers.
• Thinking bound to concrete objects and experiences.
• Development of reversibility in thought.

 Piaget defines 'operations' as mental activities subject to certain rules of logic. According to him, operations in true form do not appear before 7 years of age. But with development of language ability, the child tries to reason out in a crude way during the pre-operation period. These reasoning are mostly pre-logical-egocentric (everything moving around the self, and intuitive, mostly driven by emotion and passion.

4.Formal Operations(11 or 12-14 or 15 years):

• Complete generality of thought.
• Propositional thinking.
• Ability to deal with hypothetical ideas and situations.
• Development of strong idealism.

The intelligence as is commonly understood begins to appear towards the end of the pre-operation stage i.e., around age of 6 or 7 years ( incidentally this is the beginning of schooling). It is during the concrete operation period i.e. from 7-11 or 12 years of age, children make a fundamentally important transition from a pre-logical form of thought to logical thinking that apply to real, concrete objects and events. Three important mental abilities develop during this period with manipulation of concrete objects and events. They are conservation, classification and seriation.

Conservation is the realization that quantity or amount does not change when nothing has been added or taken away from an object or a collection of objects, despite changes in form or arrangement in space.

If these two arrangements of stars/balls  are shown to children in pre-operation stage, almost  all would say that collection (b) has more stars/balls, because they have not yet developed the ability of conservation of numbers. Similar conservation tasks in area, volume and mass have revealed that it is during the concrete operation stage, children develop this ability.

Classification is to group objects according to their similarities and differences. Classification involves comparing and contrasting the objects on different characteristics like size, shape, color, weight, use, material etc, A child in pre-operation stage is not capable of classifying objects and cannot compare more than two objects at a time.

Seriation is the ability to arrange similar objects in a definite order (increasing or decreasing).

The stage of formal operation is the final stage of cognitive development. It is formal because the subject matters with which children can now deal are mostly imaginary or hypothetical, abstract and free from concrete objects and events.