PIAGET'S DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES

Jean Piaget advanced a quite new theory of development of cognitive abilities. He proposes that cognitive development proceeds through an orderly sequence of stages. The important concept of his theory of cognitive development is not the age at which the child moves from preferred mode of response to another but the fixed progression from one stage to another. The child cannot adopt the strategies of a later stage at an early stage of development without having first acquired and exercised the strategies of earlier stage.

The stages of cognitive development are related in that they represent forms of adaption but these forms are qualitatively different; that is the adaptive functions' are transformed as the child moves from one stage to the next. 

The Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget divides the stages of cognitive development in the following categories-

(1) The period of sensorimotor adaptation (since birth to 2 years).

The period from birth to two years is marked by an extraordinary development of mind. The infant starts from reflex domination and reaches the stage of sensorimotor schemes in a means to end relationship. The development of this period is very important for future life.

The intellectual development at this age is marked by four fundamental characteristics: (a) Object concept formation, (b) Coordinated space, (c) Objectified causality, and (d) Objectification of time.

The objects exist in the psychological world of an adult irrespective of their physical presence before the adult but in the world of the child they only exist when they are physically present and child looks at them, grasps them and acts with them.

2) The development of symbolic and preconceptual thought (2 to 4 years) 

At the end of sensorimotor period, the child starts dealing with the world by means of ideational representations. By imitation and other forms of behaviour, he demonstrates that he is capable of extending his world beyond here and now. These actions of the child indicate the use of symbols. By the age of 4 years the child develops way of representing the environment in the absence of perceptual cues and will build a set of symbolic schemes.

(3) The period of intuitive thought (4 to 8 years)

At this stage, the child is able to use concepts as stable generalization of his past and present experiences. His reasoning is not logical and is based on intuition rather than on systematic logic. The intuitive thought of the child is mainly concerned with stages or static configurations and neglects transformation. The child talks about this or that momentary static conditions but he cannot adequately link a whole set of successive conditions into an integrated totality by taking into account the transformations which unify them and render them logically coherent.

(4) The period of concrete operations (8 to 12 years) 

Concrete operation means that stage of cognitive development when the child is able to direct his attention away from the static conditions and can focus on the whole set of successive changes that occur in the process of transformation. At this stage the child can reason well. Transformation could return to its starting point. Piaget has given a long list of operations which make possible the handling of numbers in various relations to each other, the arrangement of objects into classes and sub classes and the ordering of objects according to one or more attributes. He has coined a term 'grouping' to describe a set of operations.

(5) The period of formal operations (from 12 years to adolescence) 

At this stage the child's thought process becomes quite systematic and reasonably well-integrated. These qualities of the child's thought process are evident when events are present. Reality guides his contemplation of possibility. He starts a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. The use of formal operations is what is called the con- trolling aspects of comprehending.

The child at this stage in his formal thinking can free himself of the here and now in a lawful and systematic way. His wisdom. lies in the masterful administration of the unforeseen. When an adolescent is faced with a problem, he uses formal operations to identify the variables that seem relevant to the solutions and then considers all the possible combinations of these variables.

The hallmark of formal operations period is the development of the ability to think in symbolic terms and comprehend content meaning- fully without requiring physical objects or even visual or other imagery based on past experience with such objects. Formal operations are the logical and mathematical concepts which are used in advanced conceptualization and reasoning etc. that is difficult to represent concretely