As you will discover below, Piaget’s theories about children’s cognitive development form part of the theoretical position known as constructivism.

Brief history/biography

1896     Born in Switzerland

1905     Wrote his first scientific paper on an albino sparrow

1918     Received his PHD in Zoology from the University of Neuchatel

1919     Studied at the Sorbonne after a year spent in Zurich studying under Carl Jung

1921     Became the director of the Institute Rousseau in Geneva

1923     Married Valentine Chatenay

1925     Professor of Psychology, Sociology and Philosophical Sciences at the University of Neuchatel

1929     Professor of Child Psychology in Geneva, going to be Professor Emeritus in 1971

1980     Dies in Geneva

Historical significance

Piaget’s interest in Psychology was undoubtedly inspired by his time with Jung. Psychology was a very new science, but it was his studies at the Sorbonne which gave him an opportunity to link his growing interest in Psychology with educational theories.

At the Sorbonne, he worked with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who invented the first IQ tests.  Whilst Piaget came to find the work that he was doing with Binet rather uninspiring, it was here that he first saw that children think and learn in a different way to adults. Combined with a growing awareness of how his own children learnt through play and social interaction, this marked the beginning of a life study about the acquisition of knowledge.

Piaget’s academic studies in epistemology and their application to pedagogy have been of considerable significance to education over the past decades, particularly the development of the Early Years Framework (EYF) staged curriculum which will be discussed later in this unit.

Piaget’s theories

Piaget’s work centred on how children learn and think and how their intellectual development was constructed. His main premiss was that we create our own knowledge through the interaction between experiences and our ideas. As Jarvis and Chandler (2001) explain (Angles on Child Psychology. Cheltenham: Nelson Thorne), his work was focused on the following:

• How children learn
• The stages of cognitive development
• The difference between how adults and children learn

Piaget’s observations of children and their interaction with the environment in which they were playing provided the basis of his theory that this play was what enabled children to learn. Through engaging with the world around them and constructing an understanding of the reality of life through active learning and problem solving, children develop in what Piaget saw as discrete and distinct stages. Early learning through action, he argued, led to changes in mental and cognitive operations. This process was enabled through both schemas and cognitive operations. A schema according to Jean Cherry (The verywell mind, 2019) is ‘a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information’. In other words, a schema allows us as individuals to gather and store information which we can then use for future action.

Piaget argued that babies have innate schemas which then develop as they become aware of their environment so that they can learn from each experience. Through this assimilation of knowledge through experience, the child can begin to make sense of its environment and self.

Concurrent with this development, Piaget also argued that children learn how the world around them works effectively. He called the rules by which this works ‘operations’. This understanding, he claimed, occurs through maturity, and not experience, so appears later in the development of the child’s learning.

Piaget’s stages of development

Although Piaget ascribed ages to each stage, he was clear that these are not fixed ages, but guidelines. However, his theories are premised on the concept that each learning action adds to an increased understanding in what he saw as a natural sequence. In order for a child to learn the process, Piaget argued, they had to be at the relevant stage of development. It is important to note that Piaget argued that if a person became stuck at a particular stage, they could not progress any further and would stay at that stage through adulthood.

It is this theory which has influenced many educational structures and practices. However, the fixed notion of development stages has troubled many other researchers and has led to significant subsequent criticism of Piaget’s theories.

The Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)

At this stage, Piaget described that most learning is achieved through physical action (movement of parts of the body e.g. their feet and then crawling/walking) and the senses.  What they learn from the taste, smell, touch, sight and sound of objects around themselves provides the first schemas.

As they learn to talk and therefore can explore the world around them, they also develop what Piaget termed ‘object permanence’, the understanding that objects exist even if we cannot see them.

The Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)

At this age, Piaget argued that children are self-centred and still view the world through their own perception. His assertion that at this stage children need constant stimulation to build schemas and experiences has also had a significant impact on the education structures in Europe and America.

At this stage, language development allows children to develop ideas around sensations and feelings, rather than simple sensations. However, the limited understanding can also affect a child’s ability to understand logical sequences or operations.

The Concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years)

Piaget describes this stage as the point at which a child develops the ability to decentre; in other words, to see the world through others’ perspectives, rather than just their own. This egocentrism was seen as an important stage by Piaget as it allows for the development of self. The concept of logical classification is also much more easily achieved, although often only to concrete objects, rather than imaginary or hypothetical objects.

The Formal operational stage (12 to adulthood)

At this stage, Piaget claimed that children can understand and manage abstract thought, hypothetical problems and mental calculations. They can problem solve and understand the implications and consequences of actions and language.

What underpins the movement through each stage is the need for a wide range of experiences and stimuli. Without this, effective development is not necessarily possible.

Equilibrium, accommodation, assimilation & conservation

These are terms used by Piaget in his studies.

Learning new information creates new schemas. Piaget’s theory describes how the information is assimilated and accommodated (gathered and stored). This then means that when the child encounters a similar experience or situation, they can call up the stored information.

This state of understanding was called equilibrium by Piaget. Conversely, the lack of understanding is referred to as disequilibrium.

An example of this would be in the situation when a young child is given a soft toy animal that makes a sound when pressed. An understanding that the action of pressing the animal to create a sound leads to a schema being created and the information being assimilated and accommodated, and a sense of equilibrium is reached. However, when presented with other soft toys that don’t make a noise, a sense of disequilibrium is created. This feeling is only re-balanced when the child understands that not all soft toys make noises. The equilibrium is then re-established.

Piaget also explored the movement in egocentric perspectives by constructing what has become known as the 3-mountain experiment To view a YouTube video of this experiment in action click here

Practical application to tutoring

If Piaget was a tutor, on a very simple level he would be doing two things. He would make every session a doing session, in that he would be trying make sure a child was learning through an activity. Secondly, he would be constantly assessing what stage the child was at and trying to create lots of discovery learning activities to help the child cognitively progress to further stages.

All the tutoring sessions would be designed as experience -rich educational experiences and discovery learning. Students would be allowed to have control over their learning. Piaget would use lots of  open-ended activities, followed by discussions about what has been learnt. Open-ended tasks are those that provide an understanding of a concept which then leads to the understanding of a more complex concept, so that the student sees the ‘point’ in learning the skill.

On a very simple level, Piaget’s notions of a child learning through doing or activity rather than passively taking in information contradicted the behaviourist approach to learning which you have already learned about. Therefore, the notion of experience-rich educational experiences and discovery learning from a facilitator came into fashion.  We will look at the criticisms of such an educational position later in this unit, but its significance to modern pedagogy cannot be denied.

Piagetian teaching requires us as tutors or teachers to stand back and allow our students to learn independently, even if (or especially when) they make mistakes. This can be quite hard, but the discussion which follows any independent action is so worthwhile. ‘Can you think of a way that we could identify the substance as a salt?’ ‘How would you describe Mr Birling in the opening scene? That’s interesting. Can you show me why you think that he has modern ideas about war?’ etc.

Incorporating academic play and exploration is also a Piagetian concept. This ‘play’ can be cerebral as well as physical – word games, building shapes, encouraging students to disappear down ‘rabbit holes’ using the internet. Action can also help learning: physical movements to embody a chemical experiment or walking through a Shakespeare soliloquy to understand the effect of punctuation.

Use mnemonics, posters, post-it notes, pictures to remind students about the process (more important than the content) of their learning area.

Most importantly, Piaget advocated for educators to be aware of their students’ individual learning levels. Be careful not to assume that they are all working at the same level. Present information which matches the needs of the individual students, but which is also consistent with the student’s management of logical thought. (Don’t teach them to solve quadratic equations until they have grasped the concept of simple equations!)

Criticisms

Piaget’s discovery learning is often impractical if you are trying to get a student through a school based syllabus that has an exam deadline. Many parents who deregister their children from school and home educate them are often doing so as they want their child to discovery learn rather than a planned journey through a syllabus.

However, before we dismiss Piaget’s theories as impractical in any curriculum trajectory, let’s take some time to recognise the core essential: that the role of the child as learner is central to the practices. Whilst we may in modern times take this for granted, Piaget and others like him that you will read about later in this course, introduced a revolutionary concept into pedagogy which had a remarkable effect on teachers, facilitators, tutors and educational policies. Its development because of what he saw as teaching machines and the multiple-choice approach to learning offered a response to what can be seen as the rather simplistic behaviourist approach to learning. Piaget’s theories are still the most popular for the EYF and it’s an important basis for play therapy across a lot of children’s settings.

However, there are many critics who felt that his theories did not address the socio-economic implications for learning. Children who come from socially or educationally disadvantaged environments perform less well at school than others. Piaget’s theories struggle to explain this.

In addition, several scientists including Kohler (2008) and Flanagan (1998) have attempted to recreate some of Piaget’s experiments. Their conclusions point to the flawed nature of the data: initial theories were based on the behaviour of his own three children (a very small and unscientific method with considerable potential for researcher bias) Also, his first studies concerned children of other intellectual or academic families and therefore did not provide a representative sample.

Piaget’s stages indicate a structure which may simply not be right. It does seem not to include the possibility of individual difference. Some take this criticism further to suggest that the tasks that he set the children were inappropriate to their age and that he significantly underestimated the age at which the children showed the specific abilities ( Lefrancois (2000:229) ).

As with most pedagogical theories, Piaget’s approach has been applied in fairly extreme ways. Whilst one of his premises was that children learn best in isolation, it is perhaps difficult to see how this could be achieved (or even if it should) in a classroom or tutorial setting. It is all very well suggesting that the organisation of learning as well as its timing should emanate from the children, there can be few teachers, tutors or schools who subscribe to this approach wholeheartedly. As you will be realising in this course, there is no ‘one size fits all approach’ with tutoring.

However, after the publication of the Plowden report in 1967, primary schools in England began to adopt Piagetian approaches, some of which remain today. The Plowden report (Children and their Primary schools) was a major, and controversial, paper commissioned by the government. Its findings show a clear link to Piaget, advocating a child-centred approach to teaching that provided different learning expectations for different stages of development. So, instead of serried ranks of primary age children reciting their learning by rote or teaching which assumed that all students were at the same level, primary schools were encouraged to be aware of the developmental stage of each individual child and teach and treat them accordingly.

It also raised the issue of the importance of play and learning through play, creativity, and imagination. While Piaget was not the only, nor the first academic to write about the importance of a child-centred approach, his legacy can certainly be seen in many changes of pedagogical delivery and the current EYF programme with its focus on the uniqueness of every child has its links back to this fascinating Swiss academic. What is less known, perhaps, is Piaget’s celebration of peer interactions and collaboration, a staple of most modern lessons

Glossary

Adaptation: the learning through adjustment to new environments and knowledge

Cognitive development: the development of conscious and problem solving

Concrete operational: Years 7 – 11 stage of development

Schema: a stage of intellectual development

Sensorimotor: birth to 2 years

Egocentric: a stage at which children are only aware of their own perspective and viewpoint

Preoperational: 2- 7 years