A Brief Introduction to Piaget’s Theory

1. A Brief Introduction to Piaget’s Theory Prof. Jack Bauer University of Dayton

2. First Things to Know • One of 20th century’s most influential theorists in the sciences & beyond • Piaget’s interests: • Knowledge (epistemology) • Knowledge is a system of mental representations • Dev’t of knowledge (“genetic epistem.”) • Not to be confused with David Letterman

4. What Knowledge Does • Organization: Brings order to experience • Adaptation: Helps to interact with and adjust to the world • Assimilation: Compare & contrast one’s past knowledge to new info • Accommodtion: Reconstruct one’s past knowledge to incorporate new info

5. How Knowledge Develops • Knowledge emerges from action • Child actively constructs knowledge • Not “absorbs” it • Cog. abilities develop progressively • What is cognitive development? • Increasing capacity to differentiate & integrate information • Increasing capacity to generate knowledge

6. Overview of Four Stages • Sensorimotor Stage • Born with reflexes, not thoughts • Actions & perception get more complex • Traces of memory become more permanent • Preoperational Stage • Simple knowledge (what things are) • Fuzzy or sporadic logic • Concrete Operations Stage • Logical reasoning for observable world • Formal Operations Stage • Logical reasoning for abstract world • Complex possibilities, underlying motives

7. Sensorimotor Stage • Start w/ reflex motions (not thoughts!) • With experience, those motions come under control & are combined with different stimuli • Then planned actions in present moment • Gradual acquisition of object knowledge • i.e., knowledge/memory that things exist • More familiar things 1st, then less familiar • Object permanence in 2nd year of life • Mental representations formed routinely for all things • Overall: Traces of procedural “knowledge” build into enduring mental representations

8. Preoperational Stage • Roughly ages 2-7 (more at: pre-school years) • Child knows what things are but has limited logic for how they operate • e.g., “fantasy play” w/ toys & story characters • Egocentrism: Limited perspective-taking • Stage ends with conservation • General understanding that things can change form but still be the same thing

9. Concrete Operations Stage • Roughly ages 7-12 (grade-school years) • Child can reason logically about the concrete (i.e., observable) world • Interested in how things, people etc. work • Classifies everything into categories, rules, roles • Stage ends when child generally thinks logically about the abstract world also

10. Formal Operations Stage • Roughly ages 12 on up • Can think about complex possibilities & alternatives • Hypothetical/deductive reasoning • Can ask “if...then...” about abstract things, like: • variables • complexities of relationships • underlying values and ideologies • self in the distant future

11. Discontinuous Stages? • This is how Piaget’s theory is often characterized by people who aren’t specialists in Piaget Form-op Con-op Pre-op Sen-mot

12. Not-So-Discontinuous Stages • This is closer to how Piaget described his own stages—with substages Form-op Con-op Pre-op Sen-mot

13. Continuous Stages • The line represents purely gradual/continous dev’t • The ovals represent points along the line where functioning starts to look different than before Form-op Con-op Pre-op Sen-mot

14. Stages: Continuity & Discontinuity • This is how I tend to think of Piaget: Gradually increasing capacities to differentiate and integrate yield qualitatively advanced capacities to think Form-op Con-op Pre-op Sen-mot

15. Final Notes on Piaget • Focus on sequence of stages, not age • Especially for personality development in adulthood • Dev’t to next stage is indicated by routine functioning of the next stage’s abilities, not by the first signs of it • Dev’t is not about how much info one has • Rather, it’s about how complexly and integratively one knows