Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development is a theory about the nature and development of Human Intelligence. It tells about how humans acquire, create and use knowledge. The idea of this theory came from when Piaget was teaching in a school and was interested by the observation that “children of different ages made different mistakes”. After this he came up with four stages of cognitive development.

But first What is Cognition?

 Cognition discusses the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and understanding through thoughts, experiences and senses. It comes from the Latin word Cognition which means examination or learning or knowledge.

Cognitive Development is the stage by stage growth of mental processes of children. Piaget created and studied an account of how children gradually become able to think logically and scientifically. After much observation he proposed that children go through several stages starting from birth. As kids interact with the world, they gain more and more knowledge and it adds to their existing knowledge creating connections in their brain. He summarized it into four stages:

·       Sensorimotor stage: Birth to 2 years.

According to Piaget, this is the first stage where infants think through their senses and actions. Infants will touch, look, listen and even taste objects to learn. These actions allow them to construct concepts or simply learn about various objects in the world. They learn that things are solid and will not simply disappear which is a basic concept. During this time they also learn that if they cannot see something does not mean that it disappeared. This is called object permanence. It also develops gradually.

·        Preoperational stage: 2 to 7 years.

In this stage, children use their ability to represent objects in many activities which might not make sense or seem logical. The easiest example of this is the make believe world of children. Often we see children having tea parties with toys or talking to themselves. This is because they don’t think realistically. This doesn’t mean that they are mentally ill, they do know that they are just toys but they pretend that they can actually drink tea and respond. So here they are thinking realistically and imaginatively. Imaginative thinking is usually encouraged at this point too.

·        Concrete operational stage: 7 to 11 years.  

By this time children enter elementary schools and start thinking logically. However their thinking skills are still very basic compared to adults and most of it is unconscious. They learn things like “if nothing is added or taken away then the amount will be the same”. This is learned unconsciously and helps them perform mathematical tasks and other tasks. They also learn doing tasks with multiple steps which is hard for younger children. Another thing that they learn is multitasking or the ability to focus on more than one problem at once.

·        Formal operational stage: 12 to adulthood.

In the last stage, children are able to think about hypothetical or abstract objects not just concrete ones. Students at this level can understand questions like “What if the world never discovered oil?” and “what if you could be any animal?” also “what if Shakespeare never wrote anything?” These are hypothetical questions which obviously are not possible. These are simply questions which children can think about and form hypothetical situations. Piaget’s fourth stage is about problem solving and people often don’t use this skill which is why it may vary for person to person.

Application of this theory:

Parents and teachers can both use this theory to support children’s growth. Teachers especially can plan lessons according to their student’s cognitive abilities. Recent studies have also highlighted the importance of this. Teachers can develop a better understanding of their students with the help of this theory. The point of this theory is to approach new learning and teaching techniques keeping the children’s cognitive abilities in mind. Piaget’s theory has already influenced many teaching techniques like student centered learning. It also helps students to formulate and think about their own ideas and form connections and create schemas.........