Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied how children's cognitive abilities develop from birth through adulthood. He identified four stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. According to Piaget, learning occurs through active discovery and interaction with the environment as a child constructs their understanding of the world. Piaget's theory emphasizes that teachers should focus on student-centered, active learning through experimentation and social interaction, rather than direct instruction, to best facilitate cognitive development.

1. Psychological Basis for Work in
Education- Piaget
Dr. Peeyush Kamal

2. Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
● A Swiss psychologist and genetic epistemologist
● Work on how children develop intellectually from birth to adulthood.
● His research on children’s cognitive development.
● Identified four theories relating to the stages that children pass through in the
development of intelligence and formal thought process.
○ The Sensorimotor stage – birth to two years old – children know the world
through their senses and motor movements
○ The preoperational stage – two to seven years old – children develop
through language and symbolic play
○ The concrete operational stage – seven to eleven years old – logical thought
emerges but children still struggle with abstract and theoretical thinking
○ The formal operational stage – age 12 to adulthood – the ability to critically
analyse situations and think in more abstract terms.

3. ● Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that
intelligence changes as children grow. A child's cognitive
development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to
develop or construct a mental model of the world.
● Cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate
capacities and environmental events, and children pass through a
series of stages.
● Within the classroom learning should be student-centered and
accomplished through active discovery learning. The role of the
teacher is to facilitate learning, rather than direct tuition.

4. ● Therefore, teachers should encourage the following within the classroom:
● Focus on the process of learning, rather than the end product of it.
● Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing
"truths."
● Using collaborative, as well as individual activities (so children can
learn from each other).
● Devising situations that present useful problems, and create
disequilibrium in the child.
● Evaluate the level of the child's development so suitable tasks can be
set.
● Learning depends upon students’ ‘hands on’ interactions with objects
rather than the transmission of information.
● Constructivist theories of learning as well as child-centred
pedagogies.

5. Individual learning
● Piaget’s focus on learning as individual development is reflected in the
organisation of most education systems, where learning is individualised
and students are measured on their individual rather than collaborative
performances. Development is seen as individual rather than social or
cultural, for example.

6. Student-centred teaching and formative assessment
Student-centred teaching, in which teachers begin with the student’s existing
understandings and help them build on and develop these (although note this
doesn’t preclude teachers identifying and planning carefully the content to be
taught). Assessment practices that aim to find out what students already know
and can do in order to inform subsequent teaching are important for teaching
to be timely and relevant to each student’s current capacity for structuring and
restructuring knowledge. Teachers use assessment to understand students’
prior experience and understanding and how they personally construct a topic
or subject in their minds.

7. Active learning
Piaget thought that independent exploration and discovery were important at
all stages of cognitive development in enabling students to lead their own
learning in line with their current developmental understandings. Students at
the stage of concrete operations require opportunities for hands-on learning,
experimenting and testing of objects in order to build concepts, as well as later
to work with verbal propositions. Students at the formal operations stage
benefit from open-ended projects in which they can explore hypothetical
possibilities and reasoning.

8. Discovery learning
Piaget’s theory is also associated with the concept of ‘discovery learning’ in
which students are invited to explore carefully planned activities and
experiences that are designed to help them realise key observations and ideas.
It is important to note that, although Piaget thought that students could
discover some things for themselves, most of the time their development
requires reflection and making connections to construct knowledge. In other
words, teachers’ structuring of students’ discoveries is important.

9. Principles of Piaget’s Theory
(1) The first principle drawn from Piaget’s theory is the view that learning has
to be an active process, because knowledge is a construction from within.
(2) A second principle suggests the importance of social interactions .among
children in school. Piaget believed strongly that for intellectual
development the cooperation among children is as important as the child’s
cooperation with the adults.
(3) A third principle points to the priority of intellectual activity based on
actual experiences rather than on language. Language is important but not
at the expense of original thinking.

10. Educational implications
Piaget’s work heavily influenced Constructivist pedagogues which emphasizes that teachers need to
foster an interactive learning environment that encourages discovery.
School leveling, K-12, heavily influenced by stage theory Direct teacher instruction may inhibit
learning since knowledge comes from interaction with the environment.
Piaget’s four stages of development are a thorough explanation of brain development during
particular times in life.
This research is important to educators because if we push a child to learn or understand a concept
before they are ready then we are doing them a disservice.
Awareness of these stages of learning can better assist teachers in understanding a student’s capacity
for learning.