Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Schema. This refers to the cognitive structures by which individuals intellectually adapt and  organize their environment.
• Assimilation. The process of fitting a new experience into an existing or previously created cognitive structire or schema.
• Accommodation. The process of creating new schema.
• Equilibration. This is achieving proper balance between assimilation and accommodation.

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Stage 1. Sensori-motor Stage. This is the stage  when a child who is initially reflexive in grasping, sucking and reaching becomes more organized in his movement.
               Object Permanence. The ability of the child to know that objects still exists even when out of sight.

Stage2. Pre - Operational Stage. At this stage, the child can now make mental representations and is able to pretend, the child is now even closer to the use of symbols. And this stage is highlighted by the following:

• Symbolic Function. This is the ability to represent objects and events.
•  Egocentrism. This is the tendency of the child to only see his point of view and to assume that     everyone also has his same point of view.
• Centration. This is the tendency of the child to only focus on one aspect of a thing or event and exclude other aspects.
• Reversibility. Pre-operational children still has the inability to reverse their thinking. They can understand that 2+3 is 5 but cannot undesrtand that 5-3=2.
• Animism. This is the tendency of children to attribute human like traits or characteristics to inanimate objects.
• Transductive Reasoning. This refers to the pre-operational child's type of reasoning that is neither inductive nor deductive.

Stage 3. Concrete Operational Stage. This stage is characterized by the ability of the child to think logically but only in terms of concrete objects. This stage is marked by the following.

• Decentering. This refers to the ability of the child to perceive the different features of objects and situations.
• Reversibility. This is the stage that the child is able to follow that certain operations can be done in reverse.
• Conservation. This is the ability to know that certain properties of objects like number, mass, volume or area do not change even if there is a change in appearance.
• Seriation. This refers to the ability to order or arrange things in series based on one dimension such as weight, volume or size.

Stage 4. Formal Operational Stage. This is the stage where a child can now solve abstract problems and can now hypothesize. This covers ages between 12 and 15 years. This stage is characterized by the following:

• Hypothetical Reasoning. This is the ability to come up with different hypothesis about a problem and to gather and weigh data in order to make final decision or judgment.
• Analogical Reasoning. This is the ability to perceive the relationship in one instance and then use that relationship to narrow down possibile answers in another similar situation or problem.
• Deductive Reasoning. This is the ability to think logically by applying a general rule to a particular instance or situation.