Piaget's theory of cognitive development
Teoría del desarrollo cognitivo de Piaget
- Date
- 1936 · confidence medium
- Place
- University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
- Credited to
- Jean Piaget
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Piaget proposed that children pass through four qualitatively distinct stages -sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational- in which they actively construct their understanding of the world, rather than simply reasoning as "incomplete adults".
The theory was developed over decades (from 1919, in Alfred Binet's Paris laboratory, to key works such as "The Origin of Intelligence in Children", 1936); dated here to 1936 as a representative milestone, with medium confidence. It has been criticised for undervaluing culture and language and for a rigidity of stages not always borne out by evidence.
What it led to
- Child-centred pedagogies and discovery-based learning
- Developmental psychology as a modern discipline
- Neo-Piagetian and post-formal theories refining his stages