Examining the Effectiveness of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory in Early
Childhood Education
Piaget’s theory examines the cognitive development of children as they develop from
infants to adults who could process abstract and sophisticated thoughts (Eggen & Kauchak,
2016, p. 65). Piaget conducted in-depth studies of cognition in children through observations.
The main concepts presented by Piaget are that children construct and organise their
experience into schemas that help them relate to the world around them. Wadsworth (2004)
suggests that “schemas could be thought of as ‘index cards’ filed in the brain, each one telling
an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information”. Children learn new
knowledge through adaptation process that enables transition from each stage to finally
achieve equilibrium (Almy, 1976). New experiences that are well-matched to past
experiences are assimilated into existing schemas, while dissimilar experiences would need
an accommodation of the schemas to reconstruct the equilibrium. It is also mentioned by
Almy (1976) that “equilibration, from the viewpoint of the child, is a ‘do-it–yourself’
process” (p. 95).
Piaget proposes four distinct stages of development that children progress through and
these stages are marked by qualitative differences (Eggen & Kauchak, 2016, p. 69). These
four are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Progress through these stages are made in the same order, and the stages could not be skipped
even though children move through the four stages at different rates, as mentioned by Siegler
(2012, as cited in Eggen & Kauchak, 2016).
The stage of development for children from 4 to 6 years old is the preoperational
stage. One particular characteristic of this stage is that perception heavily influences the
child’s thinking. Children have the tendency of centration, which is to only focus on the most
obvious perception. Their thinking is nevertheless egocentric and they assume everyone
perceives things the same way that they do. Children in this stage lack the concept of
conservation, which is the awareness that “the amount of some substance stays the same
regardless of its shape or the number of pieces into which it is divided” (Eggen & Kauchak,
2016, p. 70). Their thinking is concentrated on the state of the material, rather than on
transformations. Children are unable to form a mental “footpath” of what has happened to the
object and they purely make a guess on the reason, based on how the object currently
appears. They are also unable to reverse their thinking.
Another characteristic of the preoperational stage is symbolic thoughts. This is the
