Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

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1. Key Ideas
   1. Children are active and motivated learners
   2. Children organise what they learn from their experiences
   3. Children adapt to their environment through assimilation and accomodation
   4. Interaction with the physical environment is critical for cognitive development
   5. Equilibration promotes increasingly complex forms of thought
   6. Interaction with other people is equally critical
   7. Children think in qualitatively different ways at different age levels
   8. Childrens logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from adults
2. Stages of Cognitive Development
   1. Sensorimotor (Birth) - children only think about things that are immediately infront of them, what they are doing and seeing at that moment
   2. Preoperational (age 2)- children can now think and talk about things beyond their immediate experience, but cannot yet reason in adult-like ways
   3. Concrete Operations (age 6 or 7)- adult-like logic appears limited to reasoning about concrete, real-life situations
   4. Formal Operations (age 11 or 12)- Logical reasoning processes are applied to abstract ideas as well as concrete ideas and situations
3. Biography
   1. Born 1896, Died 1980
   2. Studied natural sciences at university
   3. Published more than 50 books and 500 papers
   4. Occupied chairs in: psychology, sociology, history of science and scientific thinking.