Lesson 8 Cognitive Development Theory

  



      As mentioned by Vega and Prieto (2012), Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive development was one of the learning theories with the most impact in the field of teaching. Piaget is a Swiss psychologist who presented his theory through cognitive stages. According to him, that in fixed order, children go through the four cognitive stages namely sensori-motor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.

How Learning Occurs

            As cited in Bulusan, et al. (2019), in order to explain how cognitive development happens Piaget introduced the concepts of schema, assimilation and accommodation.

  1.      Schema – describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemata are cognitive that help one interpret and understand the world.
  2.      Assimilation – process of taking new information into existing schema. It occurs when we modify or change new information to fit into our schemas (what we already know). It keeps the new information or experience and adds to what already exists in our minds (Almy & Genishi, 1979).
  3.      Accommodation – involves changing or altering existing schemata owing to the new information provided or learned. It is when we restructure of modify what we already know so that new information can fit in better. This results from problems posed by the environment and when our perceptions do not fit in with what we know or think (Almy & Genishi, 1979).

Stages of Cognitive Development

            Piaget theorized that there are four phases of cognitive development among children. And, that children move through these four stages of mental development at a particular age. Each of these stages describes the children’s acquisition of knowledge and nature of intelligence.

            Below are the four stages of cognitive development Piaget identified as described by Vega (2004):

  1. Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old). The cognitive development of infant and toddlers come mainly through the use of their bodies and their senses as they explore their environment. There are several characteristics of sensorimotor period that help explain how the infant thinks. They are:
  1. Egocentrism – refers to the children’s tendency to see things as they want them to be
  2. Object permanence (inability) – this means that when an object or a person not within the sight ceases to exist for the infant. If the toy an infant is playing with is put behind a chair and thus is out of sight, the child simply stops searching for it. This explains the pleasure infants manifest when someone plays peek-a-boo with them.

  3. Concept of space and time – gradually, as children begin to crawl and walk, they realize that there is a distance between the objects that they are using to steady themselves. By moving from object to object, they learn about space and the time it takes to move from object to object. 

Piaget’s analysis of infant cognitive development is important for those who care for the infants, but it has also implications for the classroom. What happens during the first two years of life provides the foundation for more formal work. This enables them to go with the use of symbols (such as those used in language and mathematics)

 

2. Pre-operational stage (2-7 years old). The term pre-operational refers to a child who has begun to use symbols but is not yet mentally capable of manipulating them. Children who can not yet take something apart and put it together again, who cannot comprehend to reverse the action, who cannot believe that water poured from a short fat glass into a taller thinner one retains the same volume – these children are at a level of thinking that precedes operational thought.

To help children, particularly at the kindergarten and first grade levels, teachers should encourage them to manipulate materials (especially in mathematics and science) and gives as many hands-on experiences as possible.

Centering, egocentrism, and irreversibility are features of the pre-operational period.

  1. Centering – means concentrating on only one part of an object or activity. Children ignore the relationship between among the various parts. An example of this is Piaget’s experiment with tokens. When the tokens were spread out, preoperational children could not relate the spaces between tokens to the number of tokens.

  2. Egocentrism – like the sensorimotor stage, preoperational children still has the characteristic of seeing things as they want them to be
  3. Irreversibility – means the inability to reverse one’s thinking. Pre-schoolers learn that 2+2=4 but they can not grasp yet that 4-2=2.

             For teachers working with children at this age, several activities are suggested. A teacher could use pictures from magazines, brochures or newspapers and have the children tell stories about them. This would not only help in the assessment of their language ability but would also reveal much about their cognitive development.

 

3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years old). During this stage, children gain a better understanding of mental operations. They can accomplish true mental operations and are now able to reverse their thinking (reversible thinking) and group objects into classes. Reversible thinking involves conservation and decentration.

Meanwhile, there are still limitations at this stage. They begin thinking logically about concrete objects and events but have difficulty understanding abstract and hypothetical concepts. They also achieved conservation of numbers, mass and weight, and can classify objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size.

Below are some of the key features of this stage explained by Bulusan, et al. (2019):

  1. Conservation – is the belief that, whatever the arrangement or appearance of the object, as long as there is nothing added or removed, the number or amount of object would remain the same.

  2. Decentration – refers to the children’s ability to focus on more than one dimension of an object at a time. Children at this age would understand that wider glass contains the same amount of fruit juice with the content of the tall but narrower glass. They will not only focus on height but also of the width.
  3. Classification – involves the ability to group similar objects in terms of color, shape, use, etc. For example, children would group balls, wheels, marbles as round objects; that 4, 12, 36 are numbers divisible by 4.
  4. Seriation – the ability to arrange objects according to size, like small to smallest, far to farthest, etc. That bull is big, carabao is bigger, and the elephant is the biggest best illustrates this ability.

 

4. Formal operation stage (11 years old onwards). During this period, children develop a new kind of thinking that is abstract, formal and logical. While during the earlier stages, children use trial-and-error to solve problems, during this stage they are able to systematically solve a problem in a logical and systematic way.


Bulusan, et al. (2019) explained two abilities of children during this stage:

  1. Hypothetico-deductive reasoning – the ability of adolescents to think like a scientist, as they can give hypotheses and conjectures about the problem, set-up experiments to test them, and control extraneous variables to arrive at a valid and reliable explanation. They are capable of giving deductions as they systematically evaluate their observations as well as their answers.
  2. Adolescent egocentrism – this is the assumption that although others have different perceptions and beliefs, every individual share other’s thought, feelings, and concerns. David Elkind used to describe this phenomenon of adolescents' inability to distinguish between their perception of what others think about them and what people actually think in reality. This is opposite to the egocentric characteristic in the earlier stage, wherein children think that what they and others think are similar to them.

 

Teaching Implications of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development


Berk (2013) provided a summary of teaching implications derived from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. These considerations include the following:

  1. Focus on the process of children’s thinking, not just its products. Instead of simply checking for a correct answer, teachers should emphasize the students’ understanding and the process they used to get the answer.
  2. Recognize the crucial role of children’s self-initiative, active involvement in learning activities. Encourage the children to discover themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment, rather than the presentation of ready-made knowledge.
  3. De-emphasize on practices aimed at making children adult-like in their thinking. Accelerating children’s progress through the stages could be worse than no teaching at all.
  4. Accept individual differences in developmental progress. Children go through all the same developmental stages. However, they do so at different rates. Teacher must exert special effort to arrange classroom activities for individuals and groups of children rather than for the whole class.

References

  • Aquino, A. M. (2009). Facilitating human learning (First Edition). Rex Book Store, Inc.
  • Bulusan, F., Raquepo, M. R., Balmeo, M. L., & Gutierrez, J. C. (2019). Facilitating learner-centered teaching (First Edition). Rex Book Store, Inc.
  • CMO No. 75 s. 2017, Policies, Standards and Guidelines for Bachelor of Secondary Education (BSEd), p. 39
  • CMO No. 80 s. 2017, Policies, Standards and Guidelines for Bachelor of Physical Education (BPEd), p. 24
  • Lucas, M. R. D., & Corpuz, B. B. (2013). Facilitating learning: a metacognitive process (3rd Edition). LORIMAR Publishing, Inc.
  • Ornos, P. S., Gonzaga, E. P., Esgra, C. B., Gomez, N. G., Tarinay, A. R., & Verde, S. P. (2008). Facilitators of the learning process. Grandwater Publications.
  • Vega, V. A., & Prieto, N. G. (2012). Facilitating learning (Revised Edition). Books Atbp. Publishing Corp.

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