Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely. Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an act internalized as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a re-adaptation.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget’s Stages of Development proposes that children go across four stages of learning. His study focuses not only on analyzing how children gain knowledge but to also on understanding their nature of intelligence. 

The theory suggests that children’s intelligence changes as they grow. The cognitive advancement of a child isn’t about securing information, but the child too should create a mental structure of the world. 

The cognitive development takes place under the interaction of natural capacities and environmental events, and every child goes through a sequence of stages. Piaget did want to evaluate how children can spell, solve difficulties or problems or spell as a way of differentiating their I.Q, but he was more interested in the way in fundamental concepts.

Piaget observed children from beginning of childhood i.e. the infant stage to adolescent stage using natural observation of his own three children and occasionally controls the observations as well. From these observations he put down a diary explanation recording their development process.

Piaget also drew observations and clinical discussions of older children who were good at holding conversations and engaging with questions. He also believed that children should make mistakes and learn from them, rather than punishing them for making them. 

Piaget considered that children through their teens in an attempt to decide how they developed their logical thinking. He also attempts to document the stage of cognitive development by remarking the memory process of the children.

Basically, Piaget believed that humans create their own understanding of the world. In theoretical terms, he believed that learning is caused by the mixture of two processes that is accommodation and assimilation. 

Children first reflect on past experiences to recognize new concepts, and then control their expectations to adapt to new experiences. This says that children are constantly forming knowledge based upon the newly introduced ideas, which conducts to the long-term changes. Piaget was further concentrated on cognitive development introduced over the time.

Piaget’s Stages of Development

• Piaget believed that children take an energetic role in the process of learning. As the kids interconnect with the world and environment around them, they constantly add new knowledge piling on the existing contained knowledge, and accommodating the previously held ideas into newly formed information. 
• Piaget advanced that intelligence grows and develops through a sequence of stages. Older children do not only think more fast that the younger ones. Instead they both have qualitative and Quantitative differences between the thinking process of young children as compared to the older ones.
• According to his observations, he assumed that children were not lesser intelligent than adults but they simply think in a different way. Albert Einstein said about Piaget’s theory of discovery that “so simple only a genius could have thought of it.”
• Piaget’s stages development theory narrates the cognitive development of children. Cognitive development includes changes in the cognitive process and ability. In Piaget’s point of view, premature cognitive development involves the process that is based upon the activities and later progresses to the conversions in the mental functioning.

The first stage – The Sensorimotor Stage

• In the course of this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers gain knowledge by the way of experiences and handling objects. A child’s whole experience at the advance period of this stage occurs in the way of general reflexes, senses and motor responsive.
• We are able to observe that the thought process of the infants are through their actions, from about 6 months old onwards, the child begin to organize ideas into solid concepts that do not change. 
• Through the sensorimotor stage, the children go under a period of powerful growth and learning process. As the kids connect with their surroundings they constantly make new realizations about the working of the world.
• The cognitive development that takes place through this period takes place over a relatively short period of time and includes a great deal of growth. Children not only grasp how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking. They also adapt a great deal about the speaking skills from the surrounding people they interact with.
•  Piaget also divided this this stage into substages. Early portrayal thought up rises during the final part of the sensorimotor stage.
• By learning that articles are divided and distinct entities. They have a presence of their own outside of a single perception, children are then able to start to attach names and words to the objects.

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The second stage – The Preoperational Stage

• The base of languages development may have been set down during the previous stage, but the implementation of the language is one of the vital hallmarks of the preoperational stage of development.
• Children here pretend to play and understand, but still encounter logic and consider other people’s different points of view.  They also frequently struggle with the idea of continuity.
• Infants in this age also show great feeling, which means that they think that their toys and other non-living stuffs also contain feelings like a living being does. 
• By the age of 2 years, the toddlers can disconnect their process of thinking from the physical world. But they are still not able to evolve logical or operational thinking skills. 
• Their thoughts are still centered around their own worldview and their own judgment of events. 

The third stage – The Concrete Operational Stage

• By the time children are still very solid and literal in their thinking at this stage of development, they become much more expert at adapting the logic. The egocentrism of the earlier stage starts to disappear. The kids now can formulate better thinking about how exactly the other people might view a situation or a scenario.
• Throughout the time thinking become much more logical through the solid operational state, it can also be very stiff. Kids at this point of stage in development manage to fight with the abstract and hypothetical concepts.
• At this stage, children become less self-centered and start thinking about how other people think and feel. At this stage, children also begin to understand that their thoughts are their own and that everyone else does not necessarily share their thoughts, feelings and judgments. 

“The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things. Not simply of repeating what other generations have done men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. The second goal of education is to form a critical and scrutinizing mind that does not accept everything offered. “

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The fourth operational stage – The Formal Operational Stage

• The final stages of Piaget theory include improving logical reasoning, the ability to use logical thinking, and understanding conceptual ideas. This portion allows adolescents and adults to see different possible solutions and think more scientifically about the world around them. 
• The ability to think about unique ideas and situations is a key feature of this stage of cognitive development.  The capacity to in order to plan for the future and reason about the theoretical situations are also crucial abilities that emerges through this stage.

“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials. But the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something. He must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.” –Jean Piaget, Play and Development: A Symposium,

• The Piaget’s theory of cognitive advancement makes no such explanations approximately any specific age.
• Piaget proposed that there’s a subjective alter in how the children think as they gradually prepare in these four stages. 

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Key Takeaways:

• Each stage speaks to particular cognitive capacities, from sensorimotor investigation to unique considering, forming individuals’ understanding of the world.
• Advancement is an dynamic prepare driven by intuitive with the environment, interest, and digestion of modern data.
• Adjusting instructing strategies and situations to adjust with each arrange can optimize learning results and cultivate cognitive improvement.