“Cognitive development in childhood” -Based on Jean Piaget’s Theory

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDHOOD – BASED ON TO PIAGET’S THEORY

A Research Paper Submitted to

Dr. Allen R. Jackson

of the

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the M.Div. Course

BCCE5400 – Developmental Studies in Christian Education

in the Divisions of Christian Education

Ricardo Diègue

B.A., Leavell College, 2013

July 7, 2014

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................. 1

THE THEORIST (JEAN PIAGET)........................................................................................................ 3

PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT .................................................................. 3

The Sensorimotor Stage .............................................................................................................. 3

The Preoperational Stage ............................................................................................................ 4

The Concrete Operations Stage .................................................................................................. 6

The Formal Operations Stage ..................................................................................................... 7

Critics ...................................................................................................................................................... 8

Applications to Christian Education ....................................................................................................... 9

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 11

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“Cognitive development in childhood” -Based on Jean Piaget’s Theory

Introduction

The area of human development is essentially important for any educator, parent,

minister or anyone in the field of leadership. Commonly speaking, the physical components –

including aging as another important matter – are usually the main aspects while observing

growth. Yet, they are not the only factors of development; consequently, any leader should be

capable to identify all areas of growth that eventually will affect the subjects’ personality,

behavior, actions and reactions. Almost all scientists agree that someone’s behavior is either

condition by his environment or by his intrinsic value. That refers to the nature-nurture debate.

Some believe in the combination of both. Some authors label the nurture aspect as civilization or

environment1. Civilization – as a factor of impact on one’s behavior – embraces history, family

background, social system and components, and space of evolution. Nature covers biological

components such as genetic composition or heredity, and all internal factors of development.

Considering either nurture (influences of environment) or nature (individual characteristics),

scientific studies have established some general outlines that define individuals at a specific

stage of life while providing some common characteristics of their behavior.

Many psychologists had explored a series of stage in development: Sigmund Freud, Erik

Erikson, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and many more. Intrinsically, beside other factors,

development occurs in cognition. Cognitive processes are mental processes concerned with

1 G. Russell Carpenter and Walter R. Gove, “The Study of Human Behavior: Some

Epistemological Questions”, in The Fundamental Connection Between Nature and Nurture, ed. G.

Russell Carpenter and Walter R. Gove (Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1982), 17.

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knowing, such as perception, memory, imagery, reasoning, etc.2. These cognitive processes are

modified with aging. For instance, the way a child processes information – perception and

conception – is different to how an adult does it. Jean Piaget is one of the best known theorists

having used scientific methods to come up with general results that define how children develop

cognitively.

The aim of this paper is to consider and explain the different stage of cognitive

development in childhood, and provide some applications for ministries. Intellectual

development may tremendously impact a child’s whole life. For instance, it is a fact that the less

an adult see children thoughts as ridiculous, the more they create frustration for not being able to

communicate with them and meet their needs. As a result, children suffer emotionally and tend

not to get to their full potential as a human being.

My interest for this particular topic is based on the fact that as an educator, a parent, and

a leader dealing with children, it is a must to understand their way of processing thoughts, ideas

and concepts. That will lead to a better understanding of their expressions, facilitate

communication with them, and better serve and educate them. By apprehending this domain of

development, one should get more ability to both know how children learn as well as how to

teach them. Even though one might have been already exposed to many teaching methods, this

study should help with understanding the quintessence of them. This topic will answer the

philosophical teaching questions: why do we teach children in such different way or why should

they be taught with such methods. The implications for ministries will lead to some pragmatic

applications.

2 Ruth M. Beard, An Outline of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology for Students and

Teachers (New York, Basic Books, Inc, 1969), ix.

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The theorist. Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Switzerland. He was primarily interested in

epistemology, the study of knowledge. His researches started based on human development –

considering his own three children as samples from which he had collected data based on

observation, interviews, and diverse tests3. He intended to explore their cognitive development,

which Sonia Austrian called a succession of intellectual structures a child develops in order to

interact with the environment. Unlike Sigmund Freud who had focused his studies on emotional

development of adult to explain childhood, he directly considered the intellectual (cognitive)

development of children4. While his primary purpose was the intellectual structures or the

function of intelligence, it is to say that Piaget did not ignore that physical maturation and

hereditary factors in childhood. In fact, his work embraced all these aspects.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

The Sensorimotor Stage (From infancy). Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

consists of four periods or stages: the sensorimotor stage (infancy), the preoperational stage, the

concrete operations stage (childhood), and the formal operations stage (adolescence). The first

one happens in infancy, from birth up to twenty-four months. The fourth and last stage happens

in early adolescence, from eleven or twelve to fourteen or fifteen. Because the purpose of this

paper is to consider the development in childhood, the second stage will be the first studied

aspect. However, it is to mention that in the sensorimotor stage, says Papalia5, infants learn about

the world through their senses and their motor activities. She subdivides this first stage in six

3 Sonia G. Austrian, Developmental Theories through the Life Cycle, ed. Sonia G. Austrian

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50. 4 Ibidem, 51. 5 Ruth Duskin Feldman, Sally Wendkos Olds, and Diane E Papalia, Human Development,

ninth edition (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 157.

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substages. From birth to one month, reflexes start. From one to four months, they repeat

pleasurable behaviors such as thumb sucking. From four to eight to twelve months, they are

more interested in environment; they prolong interesting experiences intentionally but not goal-

directed. From twelve to eighteen months, as toddlers they show curiosity and experimentation

and purposely lead their actions to see results. And, from eighteen to twenty-four months, they

can mentally represent events; they are no longer restrained to trial and error to solve problems.

Symbolic thoughts allow them to begin to think about events and anticipate their consequences

without always resorting to action.6

The Preoperational Stage, in early childhood.

The second stage of Piaget’s theory starts from preschool, from two years and is done by

seven years. This is called the early childhood. Some authors considers early childhood from two

to six years, others until seven years.

In the early childhood, Lefrançois subcategorizes the preoperational stage it in two parts:

the preconceptual sub-stage (2 to 4 years) and the intuitive sub-stage (4 to 7 years).7 It is so

called preoperational because by that age the intelligence of preschoolers is more conceptual and

symbolic. Piaget calls it therefore the preoperational stage. According to Lefrançois, an operation

is a thought characterized by some specific logical properties – a logical thought.8

At the preconceptual sub-stage, children get abilities to represent one thing by another.

This enables them to use language, to interpret and draw pictures, to extend his range in play in

6 Ibidem. 7 Guy R. Lefrancois, The Lifespan, sixth edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing

Company, 1999), 192. 8 Ibidem.

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symbolic or constructional games, and, later, to read and to write. Yet, he still does get the ability

to form true concepts.9 According to Austrian, this greater ability to retain symbols is called

semiotic function by Piaget. And, Piaget refers to this ability of using the symbols as the

preoperational intelligence.10

She continues to explain that Piaget used the term signifiers and

signified to refer to the tendency of the child to put meaning on a word based on experience. The

signifiers are the words, objects, visual images, or events. And, the signified is what the symbol

or word stands for in the mental of the child. For example, continues Austrian, a bicycle may be

seen as something positive or negative based on the riding experience.11

Another aspect at this

stage is that children tend to fail to assign a word to one class of objects but to a number, rather

similar actions or experiences. For instance, says Beard, a same person may be seen as distinct

individual based on what he wears, the place he occupies, or whether he is seen in a mirror or a

photograph.12

Another explanation given by Lefrançois is that they fail to recognize that similar

objects can belong to the same class and still be different objects. For example, seeing ten Santa

Claus in a day would be the same Santa.13

Lefrançois mentions three types of reasoning or thinking at that stage14

. The transductive

reasoning includes the deductive reasoning (from general to specific) and the inductive

reasoning (from specific to general). For a child, that type of reasoning leads to totally incorrect

conclusions. For instance, if A flies and B flies; therefore, A is B. A pigeon can be a parrot

because it flies. The syncretic reasoning makes them group objects according to their limited and

frequently changing rules. In a set of objects, a red toy truck goes with a blue truck because they

9 Ruth M. Beard, An Outline of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology for Students and

Teachers (New York, Basic Books, Inc, 1969), 39. 10 Austrian, 56. 11 Ibidem, 57. 12 Beard, 39. 13 Lefrancois, 193. 14 Ibidem.

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are both trucks; at the same time (changing quickly the rules) the red truck goes with the red ball

because they are both red. Finally, in the animistic thinking makes children believe that

inanimate objects are alive. For instance, while we are moving, the sun moves too. Sun, moon,

wind and clouds are all alive for them based on movement. Yet, this is not always true not,

because cars are not alive for them.

The second sub-stage is the intuitive stage, from 4 to 7 years. Turner and Helms present it

as a continuation of the preoperational thought15

. The transductive reasoning continues. There is

also what is called centering. Centering, says Turner, means concentrating on a single

outstanding feature of an object while ignoring the other components. For example, a same

amount of water may be judged different if there are two different forms of containers. At that

stage they also have a problem of reversibility. They can reverse mental operations. For example,

it is incomprehensible that two plus three is the same as three plus two. The transformational

reasoning does not quite work. This reasoning means to understand how one state transforms to

another when observing an event having a sequence of changes16

.

The Concrete Operations Stage

The third period of a cognitive development – second of the childhood – is the concrete

operations. That happens in the middle childhood, from 7 to 11 or 12 years. Many of the errors

of logic, as they were in the first two periods, tend to disappear and are replaced by more logical

thinking. According to Turner and Helms, children can understand the principle of

15Donald B. Helms and Jeffrey S. Turner, Lifespan Development, fifth edition (Fort Worth,

TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995), 307. 16 Ibidem, 308.

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conservation.17

Austrian defines conservation as the physical reality that despite changes in its

shape, the quantity of matter does not change18

. Same amount of liquid in different form of

containers are seen as the same at this stage. They also improve in the domain of classification,

which is the ability to understand the concept of subclasses, classes, and class inclusion, says

Turner. Lefrançois categorizes it into classes, seriation and number19

. When it comes to class

inclusion, they now understand that in a basket of more roses that tulips, there are still more

flowers than roses because the roses are a subclass of the flowers. Previously, they would make a

mistake by thinking that there are more roses than flowers. In terms of seriation, a child at this

stage might understand ordering in sequence20

. For instance, they may understand that while

arranging from small to big, a small object may be smaller than another but bigger than a third

one. Also, they have a more comprehension of numbers, such as ordinal properties and cardinal

properties.

The Formal Operations Stage

The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive development is the formal operations and it occurs in

adolescence ages. In fact, that occurs in teenage years and continues toward adulthood. They are

getting more cognitive maturity. They tend to think abstractly, meaning thinking with subjective

ideas or concepts that are apart from one’s objective analysis of the tangible environment. They

get more problem-solving strategies such as deductive or hypothetico-deductive reasoning and

inductive reasoning.21

During formal operations, the egocentrism is based on what people are

17 Ibidem, 310. 18 Austrian, 96. 19 Lefrançois, 255. 20 Ibidem, 256. 21 Turner and Helms. 373-374.

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thinking about them. That creates self-consciousness and leads to either inflation or deflation of

their esteem and self-confidence.22

Critics

Even though Piaget’s stages of development had highly impacted education for the past

decades, many scientists have criticized his work as not totally perfect. David Cohen argued

against his work because that for the fact it was all experimented between 1920 and 1930, he

thinks that his work has been invalidated by subsequent work23

. Yet, authors think his work is

still relevant today. There were Jerome Bruner who also criticized Piaget as a failure by not

considering a child’s previous experiences and insightful teaching24

. Helmore argues that

Piaget’s system was too rigid because the children were on constant observation, some of their

reactions might have not been natural25

.

Personally, I agree that most of Piaget’s approaches are still relevant in nowadays’

children. However I would still have some question marks and make some remarks on the

generality of the system. First of all, there should a certain level of implications of a child’s

background when it comes to the way he processes information and learns. Secondly, I would

emphasize that the validity of Piaget’s work might be generalized after observing and making

experiments on other type of children based on familial culture such as whether they are poor,

rich, illiterate, intellectual, or if they have good health history or not.

22 Ibidem, 375. 23 Peter Sutherland, Cognitive Development Today: Piaget and His Critics (London, Paul

Chapman Publishing, 1992), 114. 24 Ibidem, 58. 25 G. A. Helmore, Piaget: A Practical Consideration (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969), 45.

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Applications to Christian Education

Based on William Yount’s nine specific implications of Piaget’s theory in ministries26

, I

would suggest the following applications. First, teaching children between six in eleven years

with drama and role play is an effective method because at this stage they have less

comprehension of concepts. Instead of giving them a definition of love, it is better to get them in

a play where they can experience the act of love. They will remember more from experiencing

love than the definition. In fact, in the context of Christian or biblical teaching, learning is more

living than knowing. Other methods that can help to make their learning effective are visual aids,

arts and music, and nature experiences.

Secondly, since middle children tend to think egocentrically, use of social interaction can

be very effective to teach them to learn through other’s ideas. For instance, a group of eleven

year old sitting together to discuss an indirect question about who should they obey will give

different opinions about the topic. Through the process, all of them will realize that their own

opinions are not the only opinion. Remember that opinion at this stage is based on personal

experience. Since they surely will not have the same life experiences, they will provide divergent

ideas. The one who had maybe seen his father getting a ticket for passing a stop-sign may

mention police officer as an authority to obey. Another who only experienced a punishment of

not being allowed to play with his toy as a result of his disobedience may think that parents are

the only one to obey. Another one who has seen a movie about Noah and the deluge and that

understand that it was God’s punishment to the world may mention God as to be obeyed. From

there, one will learn that there are many authorities to obey, but not only what he thought. Social

interaction helps them to think more objectively and reduce their egocentrism.

26 William R. Yount, Created to Learn: A Christian’s Teacher’s Introduction to Educational

Psychology (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 95.

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Thirdly, Yount arguments that Piaget understands teaching as a setting of situations

created to make learners discover new thing27

. Consequently, problem-solving can be another

effective method. In a class, if the professor creates a situation where the children need to think

and come up with solutions, it will provoke them to recall what they already know. Bruce

Wilkinson calls that “retention”28

. The professor will be able to weight what they have retained

from specific thoughts. Once the recall some elements of thoughts in a specific range of ideas,

they continue to learn by “rehearsal”, which is a mastering by repetition of what they know.

They are utilizing some process of cause/effect, inductive thought, deductive thought,

hypothesis, thesis, synthesis and more. They will do it without being aware of the process. The

professor can lead discussions to the right path.

Finally, other methods such as getting the learner response by making him elaborate more

on meaning can clarify his current conception of his word and the meaning he puts in them.

Remember that at certain age, father or mother for example, family, riding bicycle, play and

different games can have meaning based on experiences. More explanations they give, more they

are expressing the conceptions.

Piaget’s four-stage theory may vary based on external situations, which some theorists

call the environment, others call it civilization and others refer to nurture. Whereas other factors

may impact their ways and time of functioning, generally speaking, all the four stages (the

sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operations stage and the formal

operations stage) are still relevant in life from infancy to adolescence. They all manifested in any

normal child. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a significant tool for education.

27 Ibidem, 97. 28 Bruce Wilkinson, The Seven Laws of the Learne, (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers,

1992), 205.

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Bibliographies

Austrian, Sonia G. Developmental Theories through the Life Cycle, ed. Sonia G. Austrian. New

York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Beard, Ruth M. An Outline of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology for Students and Teachers.

New York, Basic Books, Inc, 1969.

Carpenter, G. Russell and Walter Gove R. The Study of Human Behavior: Some

Epistemological Questions. In The Fundamental Connection Between Nature and

Nurture, ed. G. Russell Carpenter and Walter R. Gove. Massachusetts: Lexington Books,

1982.

Feldman, Ruth Duskin, Sally Wendkos Olds and Diane E. Papalia. Human Development, ninth

edition. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Helmore, G. A. Piaget: A Practical Consideration. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969.

Helms, Donald B. and Jeffrey S. Turner. Lifespan Development, fifth edition. Fort Worth, TX:

Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.

Lefrancois, Guy R. The Lifespan, sixth edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company,

1999.

Sutherland, Peter. Cognitive Development Today: Piaget and His Critics. London, Paul

Chapman Publishing, 1992.

Wilkinson, Bruce. The Seven Laws of the Learner. Sister, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 1992.

Yount, William R. Created to Learn: A Christian’s Teacher’s Introduction to Educational

Psychology. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996.