Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

According to Piaget’s theory, there are three stages that school aged children encounter. The first years of elementary school, kindergarten and first grade, children are experiencing the preoperational stage of development. This stage lasts from 2 to 6 years of age. In this stage, the usage of symbols is crucial to learning. Students associate words with mental images and gestures. It is difficult for students at this age to distinguish appearance from reality and to take other points of view into consideration. The most common terms to describe children in this stage are egocentrism and centration, which mean that they have trouble understanding anything outside of their viewpoint.
The next stage of development encompasses ages seven to eleven, or grades one through six. This stage is known as the concrete operational phase. At this period in development, children are learning how to take others opinions and viewpoints into account, known as decentration. Their levels of thinking also increase to include logic, categorization, and reversibility. At age 8, children begin to understand conservation, a term used to explain that properties of an object will remain the same even if altered, such as shape or container. For example, if you pour water from a cup into a vase, there is still the same amount of water; it has only changed to the shape of the new container. At higher grades, classifications and serial orders become a large part of their thinking requirements. Gained in the concrete operational stage, classifying can help students to retrieve information from previous knowledge and apply it to the task at hand. This form of thinking is especially important when it comes to solving difficult math problems, analyzing literature, or simply memorizing facts.
The final stage, according to Piaget, that children experience is known as the formal operational stage. This phase includes children at age 12 and caries them into adulthood. For grades seven and eight, junior high, the most common theme that children are struggling with is personal identity. In this point in life, children are learning to make logical connections and chained reasoning which is important in higher level thinking. They also learn the important skill of deductive reasoning and are able to answer and understand hypothetical problems. At these grades, logic and reference to previously learned information is crucial. The development at this age allows for greater understanding of difficult problems in all subjects.