Cognitive Developmental Theory

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a biologist who originally studied molluscs (publishing twenty scientific papers on them by the time he was 21) but moved into the study of the development of children's understanding, through observing them and talking and listening to them while they worked on exercises he set.

"Piaget's work on children's intellectual development owed much to his early studies of water snails"

(Satterly, 1987:622)

His view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously influential, particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigators, his importance comes from his overall vision.

He proposed that children's thinking does not develop entirely smoothly: instead, there are certain points at which it "takes off" and moves into completely new areas and capabilities. He saw these transitions as taking place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years. This has been taken to mean that before these ages children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain ways, and has been used as the basis for scheduling the school curriculum.

Piaget's Key Ideas

Adaptation What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation

Assimilation

The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.

Accommodation

The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation.

Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.

Classification The ability to group objects together on the basis of common features.

Class Inclusion The understanding, more advanced than simple classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)

Conservation The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.

Decentration The ability to move away from one system of classification to another one as appropriate.

Egocentrism The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development.

Operation The process of working something out in your head. Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their heads.

Schema (or scheme) The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together.

Stage A period in a child's development in which