The document outlines various approaches to understanding intellectual development in children, emphasizing Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development from infancy to adulthood. The stages include sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, each characterized by specific cognitive abilities and learning processes. Additionally, it briefly discusses behaviorist and psychometric approaches to studying learning and development in children.

1. Intellectual Development

2. • Piagetian Approach
• Behaviorist Approach
• Psychometric Approach
Classic Approaches

3. What is Intellectual Development?
This refers to the way that a child’s mind and brain function develops.
It includes:
• Their ability to communicate
• To think in creative and abstract terms
• Learning to solve problems
• Pay attention
• Make sense of the world around them
• Be able to make judgments and conclusions

4. Jean Piaget
• Born in 1896 in Neuchatel, Switzerland, and died in 1980
in Geneva, Switzerland.
• After graduating high school, he attended the University
of Zurich, where he became interested in psychoanalysis.
• He married in 1923 and had three children,
Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent
• Piaget studied his children’s intellectual development
from infancy.

5. Theory of Cognitive Development
• He formulated stages that showed how
children learn.
• Use of schemas
• .
accommodation
assimilation
“Children are like little scientists
trying to make sense of the world
rather than simply soaking up
information passively”
- Jean Piaget

6. Stages of Cognitive Development

7. • Sensorimotor Stage
A period of time between birth and age two during which an infant’s
knowledge of the world is limited to his or her perceptions and motor activities.
• Preoperational Stage
A period between ages two and six during which a child learns to use
language. During this stage, mental representations and logic begin but they don’t
fully understand logical processes.
• Concrete Operational Stage – a period between ages seven and eleven
during which children gain a better understanding of mental representations.
• Formal Operational Stage – a period between twelve to adulthood when
people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts. Skills such as logical
thought, deductive reasoning and systematic planning also emerge during this
stage.

8. Infants begin to learn using their sensory system and reflexes.
• Birth to 1 month (Reflexive Action)
 Innate reflexive action –
 Spends a lot of time watching and playing with their own hands
Can focus and reach for objects, identify their parent’s face and
voice
Begins to modify reflections to accommodate the environment
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE
sucking, grasping, crying

9. 1 – 4 months
(Primary Circular Reactions)
 Behaviors that are not previously present in stage 1 appears
(habitual thumb sucking)
Behaviors focus on own body
Acquired adaptations
Reflexive actions gradually being replaced by voluntary actions
(repeatedly putting hand in mouth)
Circular reactions resulting in modifications of existing schemes

10. 4 – 8 months
(Secondary Circular Reactions)
Infants who hit an object by chance making it move about will
often repeat this action to keep the movement going
Increased awareness of and responses to people and objects in
the environment
Ability to initiate activities
Fascination with the effects of actions
Beginning of object permanence

11. 8 – 12 months
(Coordination of Secondary Schemes)
Knowledge of cause and effect relationship
Increased deliberation and purposefulness in responding to people
and objects
Continued development of object permanence
Actively searching for hidden objects
Comprehends meaning of simple words
Combines new behavior to achieve goals
Behaves in particular ways to achieve results; likes push-pull toys

12. 12 – 18 months
(Experimentation; Tertiary Circular Reactions)
Do some trial and error, leading to new outcomes
Much time spent experimenting with objects to see what happens;
insatiable curiosity
Realizes that “out of sight” is not “out of reach” or “out of existence”
Initial understanding of space, time, and causality

13. 18 – 24 months
(Representational Intelligence)
Beginning of representational intelligence; child
mentally represents objects
Engages in symbolic, imitative behavior
Explore picture books and can name and label objects
within pictures
Beginning of sense of time

14. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
Features the flourishing use of mental representations and
the beginnings of logic (intuitive thought).
 Flourishing Mental Representations
Use of symbols in:
Language
Artwork
Play

15. • Symbols in Artwork
• Symbols in Play

16.  Emergence of Intuitive Thought
Children reason according to what
things “seem like”, according to their
personal experience with the objects and events
involved.
Thought and logic
based on the child’s
personal experience
rather than on a formal
system of rules
On the way to school one foggy morning, our son, who was about
3½ years old, said, “Better turn your lights on – it’s really froggy
out.” When asked what he meant, he explained that he had noticed
a lot of this cloudy stuff in the air whenever we drove by ponds.
“Mom, I know that frogs live in water, so when all the frogs
breathe out, they make the air froggy.”

17. Evidence of Intuitive thought that can be seen in several characteristics
of thinking that are common during preoperational period:
• EGOCENTRISM
It is a child’s inability to take another person’s
perspective. To young children it does not seem that they are
the center of the universe, and it seems that everyone must
think about things the way they do.
Three
Mountains
Task

18. • ANIMISM
The idea that inanimate objects have conscious life and
feelings.
It is a notion that natural events or objects
(e.g. the sun, moon, hurricanes, droughts)
are under the control of people or
superhuman agents.
• ARTIFICIALISM

19.  Conservation Problems
Piaget used the term conservation to refer to the concept that
certain basic properties of an object (e.g. volume, mass, and
weight) remain the same even if its physical appearance
changes.

20. Concrete Operational Stage
• Children are decentered
• They focus on the dynamic transformation of the problem
• They show reversibility of true mental operations
• In this stage, children think about the world using
objective rules of logic, freeing them from misconceptions
of intuitive thought.
• Children master the conservation problems

21. Formal Operations Stage
According to Piaget, it is during adolescence that cognitive
development reaches its fullest potential – formal operational thought.
Adolescents gradually develop the ability to use hypothetico-deductive
reasoning, and they extend their logical thinking to concepts that are
abstract.

22.  Hypothetico – Deductive Reasoning
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning is the use of deductive
reasoning (reasoning from general principles to particular
conclusions) to systematically manipulate several variables,
test their effects in a systematic way, and reach concrete
conclusions.

23. It is the thought about things that are not real or tangible, or
things that are only possibilities
This leads adolescents to spend extraordinary amounts of
time speculating on all possible outcomes of seemingly
simple actions.
The adolescent also learns to think logically about such
abstract concepts as truth, justice, fairness, and morality
 Abstract Thought

24. Behaviorist Approach
Behaviorists study basic mechanics of learning.
Classical Conditioning
A teacher uses a bell to signal quiet time. When the bell
rings, the children folds their arms on their desk and rest
their heads.

25. Operant Conditioning
Learning occurs when behavior is either rewarded or
punished. Through operant conditioning, an association is
made between a behavior and its consequences.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

26. Psychometric Approach
• The psychometric approach attempts to measure various
aspects of individuals to understand how development
takes place, and also to compare with those comparable
group of people
• This is a measurement of individual differences

27. Bayley Scales of Infant Development
• The most frequently used test of infant development
• Published by Nancy Bayley
• Measures the mental and motor development and test the
behavior of infants from one to 42 months of age.