Active learning ideas
Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a pillar of educational psychology. Students examine his four stages: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. They also explore the processes of assimilation and accommodation, which explain how children adapt their mental schemas when encountering new information. This topic is essential for understanding how the quality of a child's thinking changes as they grow.
Activity 01
Students work in groups to set up and perform Piaget’s famous conservation tasks (liquid, number, and mass). They use 'scripts' to act as the researcher and the child, observing where 'pre-operational' children typically fail.
What are Piaget's four stages of development?
Activity 02
Divide the class into two teams. One team defends Piaget’s stages, while the other uses modern research (like Hughes’ Policeman Doll study) to argue that children are more capable at younger ages than Piaget suggested.
How do children adapt their schemas?
Activity 03
Students are given scenarios (e.g., a child seeing a zebra for the first time and calling it a horse). They must identify if the child is using assimilation or accommodation and then create their own scenario to test a partner.
Is Piaget's theory still relevant today?
A few notes on teaching this unit
Watch Out for These Misconceptions
Children just learn more facts as they get older.
Piaget argued that children's thinking undergoes a qualitative change; they don't just know more, they think differently. Active recreation of the 'Three Mountains' task helps students see that a child's inability to take another's perspective is a structural limit of their thinking, not just a lack of knowledge.
Piaget’s stages are fixed and happen at the exact same age for everyone.
While the sequence is generally consistent, the ages are averages. Peer discussion about 'naughty teddy' studies can show how changing the context of a task can help a child demonstrate a skill earlier than Piaget predicted.
Methods used in this brief
Early Brain Development
An overview of how the human brain develops from early gestation through childhood. Students will learn about the autonomic nervous system and the functions of the cerebral cortex.
8 methodologies
The Effects of Learning on Development
An exploration of Dweck's Mindset theory and Willingham's learning theory. Students will consider how praise and self-efficacy influence a learner's development.
8 methodologies