Developmental stages: Piaget

Developmental stages: Piaget

Introduction
	Jean Piaget (1896--1980) was a Swiss psychologist. His research and prolific writing have profoundly influenced the field of education psychology and Western education practices.
	Piaget (1972) described four stages of intellectual development.

Stages

Here are the four stages of intellectual development according to Piaget:

Stage	Age	Examples of characteristics observed
Sensorimotor	0 to 4 years	Explores things that can be seen, felt, touched; develops motor skills
Preoperational	2 to 7 years	Thinks in terms of self; oriented to the present; intuitive rather than logical
Concrete operations	7 to 11 years	Begins to understand numbers, space, and classification, and to apply logical operations to concrete problems; thinking is bound to the concrete
Formal operations	11 to 15 years	Able to think abstractly, hypothesize, generalize, reason and form different standpoints, and develop ideals

See also
	Developmental theories of learning
	See the following portions of online books for more information:
	Cognition and Learning, Piagetian theory

Context for this page:

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 2 July 1998