Piaget’s Developmental Stages
JEAN PIAGET IS A SWISS PSYCHOLOGIST who began to study intellectual development (Dembo, 1994). His Cognitive Theory is influential in both education and psychology fields. He proposed that the thinking process will develop through each of the stages until a child can think logically. Understanding cognitive development helps us arrange appropriate lessons and learning environments. An instructor should assess a child’s current level of maturity before beginning the instructional design process. The following are four of Piaget's developmental stages:
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 Years)
Even though Piaget was opposed to applying age norms to the stages, most researchers consider approximately the first two years of life to be the Sensorimotor Stage (McCormick, 1997). Infants mainly make use of senses and motor capabilities to experience the environment. For instance, if infants cannot see or touch an object, they stop trying to find it. Once infants develop the capability to recognize that a hidden object still continues to exist, they start searching for it.
The characteristic limitation of this stage is ‘thinking only by doing’. The Sensorimotor infant gains physical knowledge.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 Years)
The second stage in Piaget’s theory of development coincides the preschool years. Children start to use symbols such as language to represent objects. For instance, the child understands the word “apple” although a real apple is not seen. However, the Preoperational child still learns from concrete evidence while adults can learn in abstract way. The Preoperational child is also unaware of another person’s perspective. They exhibit egocentric thought and language.
Image 1: The Preoperational child lacks the concept of number conservation.
Here are some limitations of Preoperational thought. To begin with, the Preoperational child lacks the concept of conservation. As shown in Image 1, a child is presented with two rows of apples that contain the same number of apples. While one row is lengthened without any change in the number of apples, the Preoperational child states that the rows are not equivalent. The appearance of the objects gives the wrong impression about them. Children’s decisions are dominated by their perceptions.
Conservation does not happen simultaneously in all subject areas. Children can understand conservation of numbers around age 5-6, and understand conservation of substance, or mass around age 7-8.
Additionally, the Preoperational child is likely to center on only one dimension of an event and ignore other important details. Also, children concentrate more on the static features of an event than on the transformations from one state to another.
Last, children in the Preoperational period at times will see some relationships between particular cases while in actuality there is none. For instance, a child might say, “If an apple is red, then a green fruit is not an apple.”
Image 2: The concrete operational is capable of reversible thought only if they operate physical objects.
Concrete Operational Stages (7-11 Years)
The next stage generally represents the elementary grade years. The concrete operational child begins to think logically. Operations are associated with personal experience. Operations are in concrete situation, but not in abstract manipulation.
Concrete operations allow children to classify several classes into a bigger group or to combine a number of classes in any order. Although objects are moved or reordered, no change takes place.
In addition, concrete operations allow children to order objects in terms of more than one dimension. Children at the concrete operational stage can solve conservation tasks. The operational thought is reversible. The concrete operational child can operate an action, and then go back to the original condition. For instance, 3 + 2 = 5 and 5 – 2 = 3 (see Image 2).
The limitation of the third stage of cognitive development is that operations are only carried out on concrete objects, and limited to two characteristics at the same time.
Formal Operational Stage (11 Years and Beyond)
After roughly 11 years old, students have the ability to consider many possibilities for a given condition. They are able to deal with propositions that explain concrete facts. They have the ability to use planning to think ahead.
Most importantly, students at Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development increase their ability to think abstractly. They can solve complex and hypothetical problems involving abstract operations.
Formal operational thinkers can recognize and identify a problem. They can state several alternative hypotheses, execute procedures to collect information about the problems to be studied, and test the hypotheses.
For more information on this topic, see the article on Genetic Epistemology.
Lin, S. (2002). Piaget's developmental stages. In B. Hoffman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Retrieved from