Cognitive Development: How Children Are Inclined To Learn

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget is one of the most popular theorists on child development, particularly cognitive development. Cognitive development is the change in a child's mental ability and capacity related to their change in age (physical maturity). The study of cognitive development, and cognitive development theories, therefore, are interested in how the brain’s development at a certain stage is related to certain external behaviours and abilities.

These abilities can include, thinking, planning, memory, and problem-solving. Because such abilities and capacities are controlled mostly by the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobe, they are among the last to fully develop at maturity of age 25.

Cognitive development theories and studies essentially ask: watching the child's behaviour, what can we figure out about their brain at that point? However, it's not just about their brain at a single point, this theory is concerned with how children’s thinking and consequent behaviour is progressively changed based on how they relate to the world and learn from it.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, therefore, takes us through child cognitive development step by step. This is quite a rich and useful theory, however, like all our others, I'm just going to provide the overview for now and we'll be able to unpack and discuss in depth later on.

Little Scientists

At its core, Piaget's theory discusses how children are experimental in nature, calling them “little scientists”. To him young children are naturally explorative and actively willing to engage with their world around them. He claimed that children were naturally curious about the world around them and prone to explore, discover, and experiment within that world. It is this curiosity, exploration, and experimentation that leads them to learn and develop.

According to this theory, children are increasingly discovering their place in the world, acting on the world around them, and responding to the world’s responses to them. It shows development as an exciting journey of intentional discovery. As the child explores their world, they build mental ideas and theories (called schemas) about how the world works. They constantly test these out and adapt them accordingly. As they receive more input from the world, and develop their schemas, their thinking becomes more complex, and this is how they develop.

This theory emphasises the idea of children forming theories about how the world works and testing them out (through ‘experiments’) to see whether they will work the same way again. He also speaks of how as children develop biologically, they change their theories of the world. When they are at a certain stage, they can only understand the world in one way, so they formulate their theories through that specific lens, as they develop and come to understand more about the world, they refine and integrate their knowledge. At the same time, they change their ways of experimenting and testing.

Assimilation and Accommodation

Development happens through the consistent assimilation and accommodation of bits of knowledge which develop how the child understands and relates to the world. Children are learning through either accommodation or assimilation.

Assimilation is where children incorporate new information about something into their existing understanding of the world and that thing's place/function in it. For example, a child might know that water is clear and cold, then they have an experience which teaches them that water can be very hot too. They have added another bit of knowledge to their existing idea, while keeping the existing knowledge intact.

Accommodation is where experience teaches the child something that requires a change in their understanding. For example, a child might see water in a clear glass and think it is a stable thing which only ever exists in that form. Only to push the glass over to get a better look, and be surprised by the water spilling all over the place. They have to now change their understanding of water's solidity by correcting the wrong one through accommodating the new one.

However, assimilation and accommodation don't often happen after just one experience, like any good scientific test, the outcome may have to be repeated a number of times for the child to firmly grasp the understanding. Therefore, a child who keeps throwing their toy down after you pick it up isn't often being naughty, they are testing whether the same thing will happen each time until they are satisfied.

As children are exploring their world, assimilating and accommodating knowledge, and building on their schemas, they are also going through cognitive stages. Each stage needs to be resolved for the child to move to the next. These stages are resolved through successfully assimilating or accommodating knowledge.

Stages of Development

To Piaget, children go through distinct stages in their cognitive development. Each stage builds on the last, so each stage is crucial to the one before it. A child has to “pass” one stage (formally grasp a concept) before they can move to the next one.

He outlined four specific stages which he believed children go through in their younger years. There is the Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), Preoperational stage (2-7 years), Concrete Operational stage (7-11 years) and Formal Operational stage (12 and up).

During the Sensorimotor stage, the child is learning about the permanent world and their place in it. They are figuring out the world through movement and their senses and may just do things because they find them pleasurable. They are realising that their actions can impact on the environment and exploring this ability. They are also learning about the existence of physical things, knowing that they exist even when they aren't there, and being able to think about things that aren't directly in front of them (object permanence).

The Preoperational Stage sees an increase in the child's symbolic thought. Here they are able to represent the things they're thinking about through drawings, scribbles, pretend play, and more. During this time, however, their thought is still rather self-centred, and they struggle to see things from others' perspectives or understand how others think.

The Concrete Operational stage is where the child is able to think more logically. Rather than being able to think of only one thing at a time or only be able to see from their point of view, they are now starting to better grasp these concepts and skills. They can only think of concrete things though. Therefore, the Formal Operational Stage is the use of all this knowledge in a more complex and sophisticated manner. Their knowledge goes from the concrete, to the abstract here. Now, they can hypothesise about things they may not have seen or experienced yet just based on a sophisticated knowledge of how the world works.

Three kinds of knowledge

In addition to Piaget's theory on development, he also discussed how there are different ways of knowing.

Physical knowledge - the knowledge of cause and effect, observable things in the world. Discovered through exploring and observing.

Social knowledge - knowledge related to the social world, mostly based on instruction or modelling on how to behave or things constructed by people, like holidays and correct behaviour.

Logico-mathematical knowledge - one writer described it as "the creation of relationships" within the brain. This is where the brain learns to create relationships between different bits of knowledge. This is very much like the worldbuilding we discussed at the beginning of this Issue. This knowledge is created by each person's own brain and so is unique to them.

Based on Piaget's theory, I would understand that throughout their lives, the child goes through these forms of knowledge as stages of learning and that at each point, they would be more reliant on one form of knowledge than another. While I am sure that we use each of these forms of knowledge pretty consistently throughout our lives, there are stages of development where one might rely more heavily on one form of knowing than another.

For example, in the sensorimotor stage, the child is more reliant on their physical knowledge. As they move into the more social space of preschool and interact with more individuals than just their immediate family, they are required to lean more on their social knowledge and build that up. Logico-mathematical is likely always at work, but it gets more sophisticated as they grow, and is likely related to that synapse pruning that we discussed in Issue 2.

The Takeaway

Piaget's theory is quite useful in our understanding of how children are actively involved in building their worlds. It shows us, however, that even in their self-driven activity, they are still reliant on the world around them to provide the opportunities for learning, and the social world causes a different type of knowledge.

Even though this theory almost ignores the influence of the world around the child, showing the child as an independent actor in their own world, we must not forget that they are not independent. Because learning is so socially mediated, we need to understand that the correct environment, behaviour, and attitude are needed to stimulate and encourage that behaviour.

He also shows us how exciting learning and development can be. This is a concept which will be further unpacked moving forward.

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