Piaget's theory of cognitive development identified four factors that influence changes in thinking: biological maturation, activity, social experiences, and equilibration. Piaget proposed that people progress through four distinct stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. At each stage, children develop new thinking abilities as a result of biological changes and interactions with their environment. Piaget's theory provided insights into how children's thinking develops from infancy through adulthood.

1. Piaget’s Theory
Main points

3. Piaget identified four factors – biological
maturation, activity, social experiences,
and equilibration – that interact to
influence changes in thinking.

4.  Biological maturation – biological changes
that are genetically programmed
 Activity – act on the environment
 Social experiences – social transmission,
learning from others
 Equilibration – search for balance between
cognition and environment

5. Piaget also concluded that people
inherit two basic tendencies, or
“invariant functions”. One is toward
organization, the other is toward
adaptation.

6. Organization
Ongoing process of arranging information and
experience into mental systems and
categories

7.  These mental systems or categories of
perception and experience are called
schemes

8. Adaptation
Adjustment to the environment

9.  Two basic processes are involved in this
adjustment:
Assimilation – fitting new information into existing schemes
Accommodation – altering existing schemes or creating new
ones in response to new information

10. Assimilation, accommodation and
organization can be viewed as a kind of
complex balancing act. In his theory, the
actual changes in thinking take place through
the process of equilibration – the act of
searching for a balance.

11. Equilibration is the search for mental balance
between cognitive schemes and information from
the environment.
Disequilibrium, in Piaget’s theory, is the “out-of-
balance” state that occurs when a person realizes
that his or her current ways of thinking are not
working to solve a problem or understand a
situation.

12. Piaget believed that all people pass
through the same four stages
(sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational, and formal operational) in
exactly the same order as they grow

14. Infancy: The Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)
Involves the senses and motor activity.
Development of object permanence and
beginning of logical, goal-directed actions.

15.  Object permanence – the understanding
that objects have a separate, permanent
existence
 Goal-directed actions – deliberate actions
toward a goal

16. Early Childhood to the Early Elementary
Years: The Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
The stage before a child masters logical
mental operations.
Child is moving toward mastering mental
operations, accomplishes semiotic function,
tends be egocentric – which brings to
collective monologue – and has difficulty with
reversible thinking, conservation and
decentering.

17.  Operations – actions a person carries out by
thinking them through instead of literally
performing the actions
 Semiotic function – the ability to use
symbols – language, pictures, signs or
gestures – to represent actions or objects
mentally
 Reversible thinking – thinking backwards,
from the end to the beginning

18.  Conservation – principle that some
characteristics of an object remain the
same despite changes in appearance
 Decentering – focusing on more than one
aspect at a time
 Egocentric – assuming that others
experience the world the way you do
 Collective monologue – form of speech in
which children in a group talk but do not
really interact of communicate

19. Later Elementary to the Middle School
Years: The Concrete-Operational Stage (7-
11 years)
Mental tasks tied to concrete objects and
situations.
Mastery of identity, compensation,
classification, reversibility and seriation.

20.  Identity – principle that a person or object
remains the same over time
 Compensation – the principle that changes
in one dimension can be offset by changes
in another
 Classification – grouping objects into
categories

21.  Reversibility – a characteristic of Piagetian
logical operations – the ability to think
through a series of steps, then mentally
reverse the steps and return to the starting
point; also called reversible thinking
 Seriation – arranging objects in sequential
order according to one aspect, such as size,
weight, or volume

22. High School and College: Formal Operations
(11-adult)
Mental tasks involving abstract thinking and
coordination of a number of variables.
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning starts and
adolescent egocentrism may occur.

23.  Hypothetico-deductive reasoning – a
formal-operations problem-solving strategy
in which an individual begins by identifying
all the factors that might affect a problem
and then deduces and systematically
evaluates specific solutions
 Adolescent egocentrism – assumption that
everyone else shares one’s thoughts,
feelings and concerns

24.  The Fourth Stage
Do we all reach it?
Piaget himself suggested that most adults
may be able to use formal-operational
thought in only a few areas where they have
greatest experience or interest.

25. The importance of Piaget’s theory
Jean Piaget devised a model describing
how humans go about making sense of
their world by gathering and organizing
information. His ideas provide an
explanation of the development of
thinking from infancy to adulthood

26. Applications to the classroom
Piaget’s findings regarding people’s
difficulties during cognitive
development made it possible to create
certain goal-oriented exercises
Such as…

28. Criticisms to the theory
Although most psychologists agree with
Piaget’s insightful descriptions of how
children think, many disagree with his
explanations of why thinking develops as
it does. The criticisms are mostly based
on the trouble with stages,
underestimating children’s abilities and
cognitive development and culture.

29. Sources
PDF: Cognitive development - Wookfolk