child development stages critical thinking

Piaget’s Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Key Takeaways

Jean Piaget is famous for his theories regarding changes in cognitive development that occur as we move from infancy to adulthood.
Cognitive development results from the interplay between innate capabilities (nature) and environmental influences (nurture).
Children progress through four distinct stages , each representing varying cognitive abilities and world comprehension: the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), the concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years), and the formal operational stage (11 years and beyond).
A child’s cognitive development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world, which is referred to as a schema .
Piaget emphasized the role of active exploration and interaction with the environment in shaping cognitive development, highlighting the importance of assimilation and accommodation in constructing mental schemas.

Stages of Development

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children’s thought

Each child goes through the stages in the same order (but not all at the same rate), and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages, that is, each stage involves a different type of intelligence.

Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age – although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: Birth to 2 Years

The first stage is the sensorimotor stage , during which the infant focuses on physical sensations and learning to coordinate its body.

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

The infant learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring their environment).
During the sensorimotor stage, a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; self-recognition (the child realizes that other people are separate from them); deferred imitation; and representational play.
They relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally
At about 8 months, the infant will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they can’t see them and the infant will search for them when they disappear.

During the beginning of this stage, the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory therefore it does not have a sense of object permanence.

If it cannot see something, then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy from an infant, while it watches, but it will not search for the object once it has gone out of sight.

The main achievement during this stage is object permanence – knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

Towards the end of this stage the general symbolic function begins to appear where children show in their play that they can use one object to stand for another. Language starts to appear because they realise that words can be used to represent objects and feelings.

The child begins to be able to store information that it knows about the world, recall it, and label it.

Individual Differences

Cultural Practices : In some cultures, babies are carried on their mothers’ backs throughout the day. This constant physical contact and varied stimuli can influence how a child perceives their environment and their sense of object permanence.
Gender Norms : Toys assigned to babies can differ based on gender expectations. A boy might be given more cars or action figures, while a girl might receive dolls or kitchen sets. This can influence early interactions and sensory explorations.

Learn More: The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

The Preoperational Stage

Ages: 2 – 7 Years

Piaget’s second stage of intellectual development is the preoperational stage . It takes place between 2 and 7 years. At the beginning of this stage, the child does not use operations, so the thinking is influenced by the way things appear rather than logical reasoning.

A child cannot conserve which means that the child does not understand that quantity remains the same even if the appearance changes.

Furthermore, the child is egocentric; he assumes that other people see the world as he does. This has been shown in the three mountains study.

As the preoperational stage develops, egocentrism declines, and children begin to enjoy the participation of another child in their games, and let’s pretend play becomes more important.

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policemen), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real-life objects. Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery.
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.
A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not yet capable of logical (problem-solving) type of thought.
Moreover, the child has difficulties with class inclusion; he can classify objects but cannot include objects in sub-sets, which involves classifying objects as belonging to two or more categories simultaneously.
Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person’s.

By 2 years, children have made some progress toward detaching their thoughts from the physical world. However, have not yet developed logical (or “operational”) thought characteristics of later stages.

Thinking is still intuitive (based on subjective judgments about situations) and egocentric (centered on the child’s own view of the world).

Cultural Storytelling : Different cultures have unique stories, myths, and folklore. Children from diverse backgrounds might understand and interpret symbolic elements differently based on their cultural narratives.
Race & Representation : A child’s racial identity can influence how they engage in pretend play. For instance, a lack of diverse representation in media and toys might lead children of color to recreate scenarios that don’t reflect their experiences or background.

Learn More: The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The Concrete Operational Stage

Ages: 7 – 11 Years

By the beginning of the concrete operational stage , the child can use operations (a set of logical rules) so they can conserve quantities, realize that people see the world in a different way (decentring), and demonstrate improvement in inclusion tasks. Children still have difficulties with abstract thinking.

During this stage, children begin to think logically about concrete events.
Children begin to understand the concept of conservation; understanding that, although things may change in appearance, certain properties remain the same.
During this stage, children can mentally reverse things (e.g., picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape).
During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel.

The stage is called concrete because children can think logically much more successfully if they can manipulate real (concrete) materials or pictures of them.

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child’s cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).

Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.

But operational thought is only effective here if the child is asked to reason about materials that are physically present. Children at this stage will tend to make mistakes or be overwhelmed when asked to reason about abstract or hypothetical problems.

Cultural Context in Conservation Tasks : In a society where resources are scarce, children might demonstrate conservation skills earlier due to the cultural emphasis on preserving and reusing materials.
Gender & Learning : Stereotypes about gender abilities, like “boys are better at math,” can influence how children approach logical problems or classify objects based on perceived gender norms.

Learn More: The Concrete Operational Stage of Development

The Formal Operational Stage

Ages: 12 and Over

The formal operational period begins at about age 11. As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think in an abstract manner, the ability to combine and classify items in a more sophisticated way, and the capacity for higher-order reasoning.

Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be as well as what is (not everyone achieves this stage). This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning.

Adolescents can deal with abstract ideas: e.g. they can understand division and fractions without having to actually divide things up, and solve hypothetical (imaginary) problems.

Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. Formal operational thought is entirely freed from physical and perceptual constraints.
During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.g. no longer needing to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions).
They can follow the form of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples.
Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions. E.g. if asked ‘What would happen if money were abolished in one hour’s time? they could speculate about many possible consequences.

From about 12 years children can follow the form of a logical argument without reference to its content. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

This stage sees the emergence of scientific thinking, formulating abstract theories and hypotheses when faced with a problem.

Culture & Abstract Thinking : Cultures emphasize different kinds of logical or abstract thinking. For example, in societies with a strong oral tradition, the ability to hold complex narratives might develop prominently.
Gender & Ethics : Discussions about morality and ethics can be influenced by gender norms. For instance, in some cultures, girls might be encouraged to prioritize community harmony, while boys might be encouraged to prioritize individual rights.

Learn More: The Formal Operational Stage of Development

Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s theory places a strong emphasis on the active role that children play in their own cognitive development.
According to Piaget, children are not passive recipients of information; instead, they actively explore and interact with their surroundings.
This active engagement with the environment is crucial because it allows them to gradually build their understanding of the world.

1. How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking.

He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s intelligence:

Children’s intelligence differs from an adult’s in quality rather than in quantity. This means that children reason (think) differently from adults and see the world in different ways.
Children actively build up their knowledge about the world . They are not passive creatures waiting for someone to fill their heads with knowledge.
The best way to understand children’s reasoning is to see things from their point of view.

Piaget did not want to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number , time, quantity, causality , justice , and so on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation of his own three babies and sometimes controlled observation too. From these, he wrote diary descriptions charting their development.

He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

2. Piaget’s Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

Piaget’s (1936, 1950) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process that occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Children’s ability to understand, think about, and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start, discontinuous manner (rather than gradual changes over time).

It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.
It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.
It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience.

Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

Piaget claimed that knowledge cannot simply emerge from sensory experience; some initial structure is necessary to make sense of the world.

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.

Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world.

Piaget (1952, p. 7) defined a schema as: “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning.”

In more simple terms, Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of organizing knowledge. Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.

Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata (the plural of schema) be thought of as “index cards” filed in the brain, each one telling an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information.

When Piaget talked about the development of a person’s mental processes, he was referring to increases in the number and complexity of the schemata that a person had learned.

When a child’s existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e., a state of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.

Operations are more sophisticated mental structures which allow us to combine schemas in a logical (reasonable) way.

As children grow they can carry out more complex operations and begin to imagine hypothetical (imaginary) situations.

Apart from the schemas we are born with schemas and operations are learned through interaction with other people and the environment.

Piaget emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or acquired.

A schema can be defined as a set of linked mental representations of the world, which we use both to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed.

Examples of Schemas

A person might have a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is a stored form of the pattern of behavior which includes looking at a menu, ordering food, eating it and paying the bill.

This is an example of a schema called a “script.” Whenever they are in a restaurant, they retrieve this schema from memory and apply it to the situation.

The schemas Piaget described tend to be simpler than this – especially those used by infants. He described how – as a child gets older – his or her schemas become more numerous and elaborate.

Piaget believed that newborn babies have a small number of innate schemas – even before they have had many opportunities to experience the world. These neonatal schemas are the cognitive structures underlying innate reflexes. These reflexes are genetically programmed into us.

For example, babies have a sucking reflex, which is triggered by something touching the baby’s lips. A baby will suck a nipple, a comforter (dummy), or a person’s finger. Piaget, therefore, assumed that the baby has a “sucking schema.”

Similarly, the grasping reflex which is elicited when something touches the palm of a baby’s hand, or the rooting reflex, in which a baby will turn its head towards something which touches its cheek, are innate schemas. Shaking a rattle would be the combination of two schemas, grasping and shaking.

4. The Process of Adaptation

Piaget also believed that a child developed as a result of two different influences: maturation, and interaction with the environment. The child develops mental structures (schemata) which enables him to solve problems in the environment.

Adaptation is the process by which the child changes its mental models of the world to match more closely how the world actually is.

Adaptation is brought about by the processes of assimilation (solving new experiences using existing schemata) and accommodation (changing existing schemata in order to solve new experiences).

The importance of this viewpoint is that the child is seen as an active participant in its own development rather than a passive recipient of either biological influences (maturation) or environmental stimulation.

When our existing schemas can explain what we perceive around us, we are in a state of equilibration . However, when we meet a new situation that we cannot explain it creates disequilibrium, this is an unpleasant sensation which we try to escape, and this gives us the motivation to learn.

According to Piaget, reorganization to higher levels of thinking is not accomplished easily. The child must “rethink” his or her view of the world. An important step in the process is the experience of cognitive conflict.

In other words, the child becomes aware that he or she holds two contradictory views about a situation and they both cannot be true. This step is referred to as disequilibrium .

Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

To get back to a state of equilibration, we need to modify our existing schemas to learn and adapt to the new situation.

This is done through the processes of accommodation and assimilation . This is how our schemas evolve and become more sophisticated. The processes of assimilation and accommodation are continuous and interactive.

5. Assimilation

Piaget defined assimilation as the cognitive process of fitting new information into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding. Overall beliefs and understanding of the world do not change as a result of the new information.

Assimilation occurs when the new experience is not very different from previous experiences of a particular object or situation we assimilate the new situation by adding information to a previous schema.

This means that when you are faced with new information, you make sense of this information by referring to information you already have (information processed and learned previously) and trying to fit the new information into the information you already have.

Imagine a young child who has only ever seen small, domesticated dogs. When the child sees a cat for the first time, they might refer to it as a “dog” because it has four legs, fur, and a tail – features that fit their existing schema of a dog.
A person who has always believed that all birds can fly might label penguins as birds that can fly. This is because their existing schema or understanding of birds includes the ability to fly.
A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003).
If a baby learns to pick up a rattle he or she will then use the same schema (grasping) to pick up other objects.

6. Accommodation

Accommodation: when the new experience is very different from what we have encountered before we need to change our schemas in a very radical way or create a whole new schema.

Psychologist Jean Piaget defined accommodation as the cognitive process of revising existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding so that new information can be incorporated.

This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.

In order to make sense of some new information, you actually adjust information you already have (schemas you already have, etc.) to make room for this new information.

A baby tries to use the same schema for grasping to pick up a very small object. It doesn’t work. The baby then changes the schema by now using the forefinger and thumb to pick up the object.
A child may have a schema for birds (feathers, flying, etc.) and then they see a plane, which also flies, but would not fit into their bird schema.
In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh. With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.
A person who grew up thinking all snakes are dangerous might move to an area where garden snakes are common and harmless. Over time, after observing and learning, they might accommodate their previous belief to understand that not all snakes are harmful.

7. Equilibration

Piaget believed that all human thought seeks order and is uncomfortable with contradictions and inconsistencies in knowledge structures. In other words, we seek “equilibrium” in our cognitive structures.

Equilibrium occurs when a child’s schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation).

Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

Equilibration is a regulatory process that maintains a balance between assimilation and accommodation to facilitate cognitive growth. Think of it this way: We can’t merely assimilate all the time; if we did, we would never learn any new concepts or principles.

Everything new we encountered would just get put in the same few “slots” we already had. Neither can we accommodate all the time; if we did, everything we encountered would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We’d be exhausted by the mental effort!

Applications to Education

Think of old black and white films that you’ve seen in which children sat in rows at desks, with ink wells, would learn by rote, all chanting in unison in response to questions set by an authoritarian old biddy like Matilda!

Children who were unable to keep up were seen as slacking and would be punished by variations on the theme of corporal punishment. Yes, it really did happen and in some parts of the world still does today.

Piaget is partly responsible for the change that occurred in the 1960s and for your relatively pleasurable and pain-free school days!

“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly”. Piaget (1972, p. 27)

Plowden Report

Piaget (1952) did not explicitly relate his theory to education, although later researchers have explained how features of Piaget’s theory can be applied to teaching and learning.

Piaget has been extremely influential in developing educational policy and teaching practice. For example, a review of primary education by the UK government in 1966 was based strongly on Piaget’s theory. The result of this review led to the publication of the Plowden Report (1967).

In the 1960s the Plowden Committee investigated the deficiencies in education and decided to incorporate many of Piaget’s ideas into its final report published in 1967, even though Piaget’s work was not really designed for education.

The report makes three Piaget-associated recommendations:

Children should be given individual attention and it should be realized that they need to be treated differently.
Children should only be taught things that they are capable of learning
Children mature at different rates and the teacher needs to be aware of the stage of development of each child so teaching can be tailored to their individual needs.

“The report’s recurring themes are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the centrality of play in children’s learning, the use of the environment, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children’s progress – teachers should “not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.”

Discovery learning – the idea that children learn best through doing and actively exploring – was seen as central to the transformation of the primary school curriculum.

How to teach

Within the classroom learning should be student-centered and accomplished through active discovery learning. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning, rather than direct tuition.

Because Piaget’s theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of “readiness” is important. Readiness concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught.

According to Piaget’s theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.

According to Piaget (1958), assimilation and accommodation require an active learner, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot be taught, they must be discovered.

Therefore, teachers should encourage the following within the classroom:

Educational programs should be designed to correspond to Piaget’s stages of development. Children in the concrete operational stage should be given concrete means to learn new concepts e.g. tokens for counting.
Devising situations that present useful problems, and create disequilibrium in the child.
Focus on the process of learning, rather than the end product of it. Instead of checking if children have the right answer, the teacher should focus on the student’s understanding and the processes they used to get to the answer.
Child-centered approach. Learning must be active (discovery learning). Children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge.
Accepting that children develop at different rates so arrange activities for individual children or small groups rather than assume that all the children can cope with a particular activity.
Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing “truths.”
Using collaborative, as well as individual activities (so children can learn from each other).
Evaluate the level of the child’s development so suitable tasks can be set.
Adapt lessons to suit the needs of the individual child (i.e. differentiated teaching).
Be aware of the child’s stage of development (testing).
Teach only when the child is ready. i.e. has the child reached the appropriate stage.
Providing support for the “spontaneous research” of the child.
Using collaborative, as well as individual activities.
Educators may use Piaget’s stages to design age-appropriate assessment tools and strategies.

Classroom Activities

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years):.

Although most kids in this age range are not in a traditional classroom setting, they can still benefit from games that stimulate their senses and motor skills.

Object Permanence Games : Play peek-a-boo or hide toys under a blanket to help babies understand that objects still exist even when they can’t see them.
Sensory Play : Activities like water play, sand play, or playdough encourage exploration through touch.
Imitation : Children at this age love to imitate adults. Use imitation as a way to teach new skills.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years):

Role Playing : Set up pretend play areas where children can act out different scenarios, such as a kitchen, hospital, or market.
Use of Symbols : Encourage drawing, building, and using props to represent other things.
Hands-on Activities : Children should interact physically with their environment, so provide plenty of opportunities for hands-on learning.
Egocentrism Activities : Use exercises that highlight different perspectives. For instance, having two children sit across from each other with an object in between and asking them what the other sees.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years):

Classification Tasks : Provide objects or pictures to group, based on various characteristics.
Hands-on Experiments : Introduce basic science experiments where they can observe cause and effect, like a simple volcano with baking soda and vinegar.
Logical Games : Board games, puzzles, and logic problems help develop their thinking skills.
Conservation Tasks : Use experiments to showcase that quantity doesn’t change with alterations in shape, such as the classic liquid conservation task using different shaped glasses.

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and older):

Hypothesis Testing : Encourage students to make predictions and test them out.
Abstract Thinking : Introduce topics that require abstract reasoning, such as algebra or ethical dilemmas.
Problem Solving : Provide complex problems and have students work on solutions, integrating various subjects and concepts.
Debate and Discussion : Encourage group discussions and debates on abstract topics, highlighting the importance of logic and evidence.
Feedback and Questioning : Use open-ended questions to challenge students and promote higher-order thinking. For instance, rather than asking, “Is this the right answer?”, ask, “How did you arrive at this conclusion?”

While Piaget’s stages offer a foundational framework, they are not universally experienced in the same way by all children.

Social identities play a critical role in shaping cognitive development, necessitating a more nuanced and culturally responsive approach to understanding child development.

Piaget’s stages may manifest differently based on social identities like race, gender, and culture:

Race & Teacher Interactions : A child’s race can influence teacher expectations and interactions. For example, racial biases can lead to children of color being perceived as less capable or more disruptive, influencing their cognitive challenges and supports.
Racial and Cultural Stereotypes : These can affect a child’s self-perception and self-efficacy . For instance, stereotypes about which racial or cultural groups are “better” at certain subjects can influence a child’s self-confidence and, subsequently, their engagement in that subject.
Gender & Peer Interactions : Children learn gender roles from their peers. Boys might be mocked for playing “girl games,” and girls might be excluded from certain activities, influencing their cognitive engagements.
Language : Multilingual children might navigate the stages differently, especially if their home language differs from their school language. The way concepts are framed in different languages can influence cognitive processing. Cultural idioms and metaphors can shape a child’s understanding of concepts and their ability to use symbolic representation, especially in the pre-operational stage.

Curriculum Development

According to Piaget, children’s cognitive development is determined by a process of maturation which cannot be altered by tuition so education should be stage-specific.

For example, a child in the concrete operational stage should not be taught abstract concepts and should be given concrete aid such as tokens to count with.

According to Piaget children learn through the process of accommodation and assimilation so the role of the teacher should be to provide opportunities for these processes to occur such as new material and experiences that challenge the children’s existing schemas.

Furthermore, according to this theory, children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge.

Curricula need to be developed that take into account the age and stage of thinking of the child. For example there is no point in teaching abstract concepts such as algebra or atomic structure to children in primary school.

Curricula also need to be sufficiently flexible to allow for variations in the ability of different students of the same age. In Britain, the National Curriculum and Key Stages broadly reflect the stages that Piaget laid down.

For example, egocentrism dominates a child’s thinking in the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. Piaget would therefore predict that using group activities would not be appropriate since children are not capable of understanding the views of others.

However, Smith et al. (1998), point out that some children develop earlier than Piaget predicted and that by using group work children can learn to appreciate the views of others in preparation for the concrete operational stage.

The national curriculum emphasizes the need to use concrete examples in the primary classroom.

Shayer (1997), reported that abstract thought was necessary for success in secondary school (and co-developed the CASE system of teaching science). Recently the National curriculum has been updated to encourage the teaching of some abstract concepts towards the end of primary education, in preparation for secondary courses. (DfEE, 1999).

Child-centered teaching is regarded by some as a child of the ‘liberal sixties.’ In the 1980s the Thatcher government introduced the National Curriculum in an attempt to move away from this and bring more central government control into the teaching of children.

So, although the British National Curriculum in some ways supports the work of Piaget, (in that it dictates the order of teaching), it can also be seen as prescriptive to the point where it counters Piaget’s child-oriented approach.

However, it does still allow for flexibility in teaching methods, allowing teachers to tailor lessons to the needs of their students.

Social Media (Digital Learning)

Jean Piaget could not have anticipated the expansive digital age we now live in.

Today, knowledge dissemination and creation are democratized by the Internet, with platforms like blogs, wikis, and social media allowing for vast collaboration and shared knowledge. This development has prompted a reimagining of the future of education.

Classrooms, traditionally seen as primary sites of learning, are being overshadowed by the rise of mobile technologies and platforms like MOOCs (Passey, 2013).

The millennial generation, defined as the first to grow up with cable TV, the internet, and cell phones, relies heavily on technology.

They view it as an integral part of their identity, with most using it extensively in their daily lives, from keeping in touch with loved ones to consuming news and entertainment (Nielsen, 2014).

Social media platforms offer a dynamic environment conducive to Piaget’s principles. These platforms allow for interactions that nurture knowledge evolution through cognitive processes like assimilation and accommodation.

They emphasize communal interaction and shared activity, fostering both cognitive and socio-cultural constructivism. This shared activity promotes understanding and exploration beyond individual perspectives, enhancing social-emotional learning (Gehlbach, 2010).

A standout advantage of social media in an educational context is its capacity to extend beyond traditional classroom confines. As the material indicates, these platforms can foster more inclusive learning, bridging diverse learner groups.

This inclusivity can equalize learning opportunities, potentially diminishing biases based on factors like race or socio-economic status, resonating with Kegan’s (1982) concept of “recruitability.”

However, there are challenges. While the potential of social media in learning is vast, its practical application necessitates intention and guidance. Cuban, Kirkpatrick, and Peck (2001) note that certain educators and students are hesitant about integrating social media into educational contexts.

This hesitancy can stem from technological complexities or potential distractions. Yet, when harnessed effectively, social media can provide a rich environment for collaborative learning and interpersonal development, fostering a deeper understanding of content.

In essence, the rise of social media aligns seamlessly with constructivist philosophies. Social media platforms act as tools for everyday cognition, merging daily social interactions with the academic world, and providing avenues for diverse, interactive, and engaging learning experiences.

Applications to Parenting

Parents can use Piaget’s stages to have realistic developmental expectations of their children’s behavior and cognitive capabilities.

For instance, understanding that a toddler is in the pre-operational stage can help parents be patient when the child is egocentric.

Play Activities

Recognizing the importance of play in cognitive development, many parents provide toys and games suited for their child’s developmental stage.

Parents can offer activities that are slightly beyond their child’s current abilities, leveraging Vygotsky’s concept of the “Zone of Proximal Development,” which complements Piaget’s ideas.

Peek-a-boo : Helps with object permanence.
Texture Touch : Provide different textured materials (soft, rough, bumpy, smooth) for babies to touch and feel.
Sound Bottles : Fill small bottles with different items like rice, beans, bells, and have children shake and listen to the different sounds.
Memory Games : Using cards with pictures, place them face down, and ask students to find matching pairs.
Role Playing and Pretend Play : Let children act out roles or stories that enhance symbolic thinking. Encourage symbolic play with dress-up clothes, playsets, or toy cash registers. Provide prompts or scenarios to extend their imagination.
Story Sequencing : Give children cards with parts of a story and have them arranged in the correct order.
Number Line Jumps : Create a number line on the floor with tape. Ask students to jump to the correct answer for math problems.
Classification Games : Provide a mix of objects and ask students to classify them based on different criteria (e.g., color, size, shape).
Logical Puzzle Games : Games that involve problem-solving using logic, such as simple Sudoku puzzles or logic grid puzzles.
Debate and Discussion : Provide a topic and let students debate on pros and cons. This promotes abstract thinking and logical reasoning.
Hypothesis Testing Games : Present a scenario and have students come up with hypotheses and ways to test them.
Strategy Board Games : Games like chess, checkers, or Settlers of Catan can help in developing strategic and forward-thinking skills.

Critical Evaluation

The influence of Piaget’s ideas on developmental psychology has been enormous. He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children.

He was an inspiration to many who came after and took up his ideas. Piaget’s ideas have generated a huge amount of research which has increased our understanding of cognitive development.

Piaget (1936) was one of the first psychologists to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions include a stage theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities.
His ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating with children, particularly in the field of education (re: Discovery Learning). Piaget’s theory has been applied across education.
According to Piaget’s theory, educational programs should be designed to correspond to the stages of development.
Are the stages real? Vygotsky and Bruner would rather not talk about stages at all, preferring to see development as a continuous process. Others have queried the age ranges of the stages. Some studies have shown that progress to the formal operational stage is not guaranteed.

For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students fail at formal operation tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only one-third of adults ever reach the formal operational stage.

The fact that the formal operational stage is not reached in all cultures and not all individuals within cultures suggests that it might not be biologically based.

According to Piaget, the rate of cognitive development cannot be accelerated as it is based on biological processes however, direct tuition can speed up the development which suggests that it is not entirely based on biological factors.
Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he failed to consider the effect that the social setting and culture may have on cognitive development.

Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological process of maturation.

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals which suggests that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

Dasen (1994) cites studies he conducted in remote parts of the central Australian desert with 8-14-year-old Indigenous Australians. He gave them conservation of liquid tasks and spatial awareness tasks. He found that the ability to conserve came later in the Aboriginal children, between ages of 10 and 13 (as opposed to between 5 and 7, with Piaget’s Swiss sample).

However, he found that spatial awareness abilities developed earlier amongst the Aboriginal children than the Swiss children. Such a study demonstrates cognitive development is not purely dependent on maturation but on cultural factors too – spatial awareness is crucial for nomadic groups of people.

Vygotsky , a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is crucial for cognitive development. According to Vygotsky the child’s learning always occurs in a social context in cooperation with someone more skillful (MKO). This social interaction provides language opportunities and Vygotsky considered language the foundation of thought.

Piaget’s methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. Piaget made careful, detailed naturalistic observations of children, and from these, he wrote diary descriptions charting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

Because Piaget conducted the observations alone the data collected are based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would have been more reliable if Piaget conducted the observations with another researcher and compared the results afterward to check if they are similar (i.e., have inter-rater reliability).

Although clinical interviews allow the researcher to explore data in more depth, the interpretation of the interviewer may be biased.

For example, children may not understand the question/s, they have short attention spans, they cannot express themselves very well, and may be trying to please the experimenter. Such methods meant that Piaget may have formed inaccurate conclusions.

As several studies have shown Piaget underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to understand (e.g., Hughes , 1975).

Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child is capable of doing) and performance (what a child can show when given a particular task). When tasks were altered, performance (and therefore competence) was affected. Therefore, Piaget might have underestimated children’s cognitive abilities.

For example, a child might have object permanence (competence) but still not be able to search for objects (performance). When Piaget hid objects from babies he found that it wasn’t till after nine months that they looked for it.

However, Piaget relied on manual search methods – whether the child was looking for the object or not.

Later, researchers such as Baillargeon and Devos (1991) reported that infants as young as four months looked longer at a moving carrot that didn’t do what it expected, suggesting they had some sense of permanence, otherwise they wouldn’t have had any expectation of what it should or shouldn’t do.

The concept of schema is incompatible with the theories of Bruner (1966) and Vygotsky (1978). Behaviorism would also refute Piaget’s schema theory because is cannot be directly observed as it is an internal process. Therefore, they would claim it cannot be objectively measured.
Piaget studied his own children and the children of his colleagues in Geneva to deduce general principles about the intellectual development of all children. His sample was very small and composed solely of European children from families of high socio-economic status. Researchers have, therefore, questioned the generalisability of his data.
For Piaget, language is considered secondary to action, i.e., thought precedes language. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the development of language and thought go together and that the origin of reasoning has more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world.

Piaget’s Theory vs Vygotsky

Piaget maintains that cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct knowledge of their own.

Whereas Vygotsky argues that children learn through social interactions, building knowledge by learning from more knowledgeable others such as peers and adults. In other words, Vygotsky believed that culture affects cognitive development.

These factors lead to differences in the education style they recommend: Piaget would argue for the teacher to provide opportunities that challenge the children’s existing schemas and for children to be encouraged to discover for themselves.

Alternatively, Vygotsky would recommend that teachers assist the child to progress through the zone of proximal development by using scaffolding.

However, both theories view children as actively constructing their own knowledge of the world; they are not seen as just passively absorbing knowledge.

They also agree that cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, not only a matter of learning more things.

What is cognitive development?

Cognitive development is how a person’s ability to think, learn, remember, problem-solve, and make decisions changes over time.

This includes the growth and maturation of the brain, as well as the acquisition and refinement of various mental skills and abilities.

Cognitive development is a major aspect of human development, and both genetic and environmental factors heavily influence it. Key domains of cognitive development include attention, memory, language skills, logical reasoning, and problem-solving.

Various theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, provide different perspectives on how this complex process unfolds from infancy through adulthood.

What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?

Piaget divided children’s cognitive development into four stages; each of the stages represents a new way of thinking and understanding the world.

He called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence , (2) preoperational thinking , (3) concrete operational thinking , and (4) formal operational thinking . Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

According to Piaget, intellectual development takes place through stages that occur in a fixed order and which are universal (all children pass through these stages regardless of social or cultural background).

Development can only occur when the brain has matured to a point of “readiness”.

What are some of the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals, suggesting that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

What are Piaget’s concepts of schemas?

Schemas are mental structures that contain all of the information relating to one aspect of the world around us.

According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas, such as sucking, which give us the means to interact with the world.

These are physical, but as the child develops, they become mental schemas. These schemas become more complex with experience.

Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence . Child development , 1227-1246.

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belkapp Press.

Cuban, L., Kirkpatrick, H., & Peck, C. (2001). High access and low use of technologies in high school classrooms: Explaining an apparent paradox. American Educational Research Journal , 38 (4), 813-834.

Dasen, P. (1994). Culture and cognitive development from a Piagetian perspective. In W .J. Lonner & R.S. Malpass (Eds.), Psychology and culture (pp. 145–149). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Gehlbach, H. (2010). The social side of school: Why teachers need social psychology. Educational Psychology Review , 22 , 349-362.

Hughes, M. (1975). Egocentrism in preschool children . Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Edinburgh University.

Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence . New York: Basic Books.

Keating, D. (1979). Adolescent thinking. In J. Adelson (Ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 211-246). New York: Wiley.

Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development . Harvard University Press.

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Piaget, J. (1936). Origins of intelligence in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1945). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood . London: Heinemann.

Piaget, J. (1957). Construction of reality in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J., & Cook, M. T. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children . New York, NY: International University Press.

Piaget, J. (1981). Intelligence and affectivity: Their relationship during child development.(Trans & Ed TA Brown & CE Kaegi) . Annual Reviews.

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Siegler, R. S., DeLoache, J. S., & Eisenberg, N. (2003). How children develop . New York: Worth.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wadsworth, B. J. (2004). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development: Foundations of constructivism . New York: Longman.

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Child cognitive development is a fascinating and complex process that entails the growth of a child’s mental abilities, including their ability to think, learn, and solve problems. This development occurs through a series of stages that can vary among individuals. As children progress through these stages, their cognitive abilities and skills are continuously shaped by a myriad of factors such as genetics, environment, and experiences. Understanding the nuances of child cognitive development is essential for parents, educators, and professionals alike, as it provides valuable insight into supporting the growth of the child’s intellect and overall well-being.

Throughout the developmental process, language and communication play a vital role in fostering a child’s cognitive abilities . As children acquire language skills, they also develop their capacity for abstract thought, reasoning, and problem-solving. It is crucial for parents and caregivers to be mindful of potential developmental delays, as early intervention can greatly benefit the child’s cognitive development. By providing stimulating environments, nurturing relationships, and embracing diverse learning opportunities, adults can actively foster healthy cognitive development in children.

Key Takeaways

Child cognitive development involves the growth of mental abilities and occurs through various stages.
Language and communication are significant factors in cognitive development , shaping a child’s ability for abstract thought and problem-solving.
Early intervention and supportive environments can play a crucial role in fostering healthy cognitive development in children.

Child Cognitive Development Stages

Child cognitive development is a crucial aspect of a child’s growth and involves the progression of their thinking, learning, and problem-solving abilities. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed a widely recognized theory that identifies four major stages of cognitive development in children.

Sensorimotor Stage

The Sensorimotor Stage occurs from birth to about 2 years old. During this stage, infants and newborns learn to coordinate their senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.) with their motor abilities. Their understanding of the world begins to develop through their physical interactions and experiences. Some key milestones in this stage include object permanence, which is the understanding that an object still exists even when it’s not visible, and the development of intentional actions.

Preoperational Stage

The Preoperational Stage takes place between the ages of 2 and 7 years old. In this stage, children start to think symbolically, and their language capabilities rapidly expand. They also develop the ability to use mental images, words, and gestures to represent the world around them. However, their thinking is largely egocentric, which means they struggle to see things from other people’s perspectives. During this stage, children start to engage in pretend play and begin to grasp the concept of conservation, recognizing that certain properties of objects (such as quantity or volume) remain the same even if their appearance changes.

Concrete Operational Stage

The Concrete Operational Stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 12 years old. At this stage, children’s cognitive development progresses to more logical and organized ways of thinking. They can now consider multiple aspects of a problem and better understand the relationship between cause and effect . Furthermore, children become more adept at understanding other people’s viewpoints, and they can perform basic mathematical operations and understand the principles of classification and seriation.

Formal Operational Stage

Lastly, the Formal Operational Stage typically begins around 12 years old and extends into adulthood. In this stage, children develop the capacity for abstract thinking and can consider hypothetical situations and complex reasoning. They can also perform advanced problem-solving and engage in systematic scientific inquiry. This stage allows individuals to think about abstract concepts, their own thought processes, and understand the world in deeper, more nuanced ways.

By understanding these stages of cognitive development, you can better appreciate the complex growth process that children undergo as their cognitive abilities transform and expand throughout their childhood.

Key Factors in Cognitive Development

Genetics and brain development.

Genetics play a crucial role in determining a child’s cognitive development. A child’s brain development is heavily influenced by genetic factors, which also determine their cognitive potential , abilities, and skills. It is important to understand that a child’s genes do not solely dictate their cognitive development – various environmental and experiential factors contribute to shaping their cognitive abilities as they grow and learn.

Environmental Influences

The environment in which a child grows up has a significant impact on their cognitive development. Exposure to various experiences is essential for a child to develop essential cognitive skills such as problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking. Factors that can have a negative impact on cognitive development include exposure to toxins, extreme stress, trauma, abuse, and addiction issues, such as alcoholism in the family.

Nutrition and Health

Maintaining good nutrition and health is vital for a child’s cognitive development. Adequate nutrition is essential for the proper growth and functioning of the brain . Key micronutrients that contribute to cognitive development include iron, zinc, and vitamins A, C, D, and B-complex vitamins. Additionally, a child’s overall health, including physical fitness and immunity, ensures they have the energy and resources to engage in learning activities and achieve cognitive milestones effectively .

Emotional and Social Factors

Emotional well-being and social relationships can also greatly impact a child’s cognitive development. A supportive, nurturing, and emotionally healthy environment allows children to focus on learning and building cognitive skills. Children’s emotions and stress levels can impact their ability to learn and process new information. Additionally, positive social interactions help children develop important cognitive skills such as empathy, communication, and collaboration.

In summary, cognitive development in children is influenced by various factors, including genetics, environmental influences, nutrition, health, and emotional and social factors. Considering these factors can help parents, educators, and policymakers create suitable environments and interventions for promoting optimal child development.

Language and Communication Development

Language skills and milestones.

Children’s language development is a crucial aspect of their cognitive growth. They begin to acquire language skills by listening and imitating sounds they hear from their environment. As they grow, they start to understand words and form simple sentences.

Infants (0-12 months): Babbling, cooing, and imitating sounds are common during this stage. They can also identify their name by the end of their first year. Facial expressions play a vital role during this period, as babies learn to respond to emotions.
Toddlers (1-3 years): They rapidly learn new words and form simple sentences. They engage more in spoken communication, constantly exploring their language environment.
Preschoolers (3-5 years): Children expand their vocabulary, improve grammar, and begin participating in more complex conversations.

It’s essential to monitor children’s language development and inform their pediatrician if any delays or concerns arise.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication contributes significantly to children’s cognitive development. They learn to interpret body language, facial expressions, and gestures long before they can speak. Examples of nonverbal communication in children include:

Eye contact: Maintaining eye contact while interacting helps children understand emotions and enhances communication.
Gestures: Pointing, waving goodbye, or using hand signs provide alternative ways for children to communicate their needs and feelings.
Body language: Posture, body orientation, and movement give clues about a child’s emotions and intentions.

Teaching children to understand and use nonverbal communication supports their cognitive and social development.

Parent and Caregiver Interaction

Supportive interaction from parents and caregivers plays a crucial role in children’s language and communication development. These interactions can improve children’s language skills and overall cognitive abilities . Some ways parents and caregivers can foster language development are:

Reading together: From an early age, reading books to children enhance their vocabulary and listening skills.
Encouraging communication: Ask open-ended questions and engage them in conversations to build their speaking skills.
Using rich vocabulary: Expose children to a variety of words and phrases, promoting language growth and understanding.

By actively engaging in children’s language and communication development, parents and caregivers can nurture cognitive, emotional, and social growth.

Cognitive Abilities and Skills

Cognitive abilities are the mental skills that children develop as they grow. These skills are essential for learning, adapting, and thriving in modern society. In this section, we will discuss various aspects of cognitive development, including reasoning and problem-solving, attention and memory, decision-making and executive function, as well as academic and cognitive milestones.

Reasoning and Problem Solving

Reasoning is the ability to think logically and make sense of the world around us. It’s essential for a child’s cognitive development, as it enables them to understand the concept of object permanence , recognize patterns, and classify objects. Problem-solving skills involve using these reasoning abilities to find solutions to challenges they encounter in daily life .

Children develop essential skills like:

Logical reasoning : The ability to deduce conclusions from available information.
Perception: Understanding how objects relate to one another in their environment.
Schemes: Organizing thoughts and experiences into mental categories.

Attention and Memory

Attention refers to a child’s ability to focus on specific tasks, objects, or information, while memory involves retaining and recalling information. These cognitive abilities play a critical role in children’s learning and academic performance . Working memory is a vital component of learning, as it allows children to hold and manipulate information in their minds while solving problems and engaging with new tasks.

Attention: Focuses on relevant tasks and information while ignoring distractions.
Memory: Retains and retrieves information when needed.

Decision-Making and Executive Function

Decision-making is the process of making choices among various alternatives, while executive function refers to the higher-order cognitive processes that enable children to plan, organize, and adapt in complex situations. Executive function encompasses components such as:

Inhibition: Self-control and the ability to resist impulses.
Cognitive flexibility: Adapting to new information or changing circumstances.
Planning: Setting goals and devising strategies to achieve them.

Academic and Cognitive Milestones

Children’s cognitive development is closely linked to their academic achievement. As they grow, they achieve milestones in various cognitive domains that form the foundation for their future learning. Some of these milestones include:

Language skills: Developing vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure.
Reading and mathematics: Acquiring the ability to read and comprehend text, as well as understanding basic mathematical concepts and operations.
Scientific thinking: Developing an understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and forming hypotheses.

Healthy cognitive development is essential for a child’s success in school and life. By understanding and supporting the development of their cognitive abilities, we can help children unlock their full potential and prepare them for a lifetime of learning and growth.

Developmental Delays and Early Intervention

Identifying developmental delays.

Developmental delays in children can be identified by monitoring their progress in reaching cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social milestones. Parents and caregivers should be aware of developmental milestones that are generally expected to be achieved by children at different ages, such as 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 9 months, 18 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and 5 years. Utilizing resources such as the “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” program can help parents and caregivers recognize signs of delay early in a child’s life.

Resources and Support for Parents

There are numerous resources available for parents and caregivers to find information on developmental milestones and to learn about potential developmental delays, including:

Learn the Signs. Act Early : A CDC initiative that provides pdf checklists of milestones and resources for identifying delays.
Parental support groups : Local and online communities dedicated to providing resources and fostering connections between families experiencing similar challenges.

Professional Evaluations and Intervention Strategies

If parents or caregivers suspect a developmental delay, it is crucial to consult with healthcare professionals or specialists who can conduct validated assessments of the child’s cognitive and developmental abilities. Early intervention strategies, such as the ones used in broad-based early intervention programs , have shown significant positive impacts on children with developmental delays to improve cognitive development and outcomes.

Professional evaluations may include:

Pediatricians : Primary healthcare providers who can monitor a child’s development and recommend further assessments when needed.
Speech and language therapists : Professionals who assist children with language and communication deficits.
Occupational therapists : Experts in helping children develop or improve on physical and motor skills, as well as social and cognitive abilities.

Depending on the severity and nature of the delays, interventions may involve:

Individualized support : Tailored programs or therapy sessions specifically developed for the child’s needs.
Group sessions : Opportunities for children to learn from and interact with other children experiencing similar challenges.
Family involvement : Parents and caregivers learning support strategies to help the child in their daily life.

Fostering Healthy Cognitive Development

Play and learning opportunities.

Encouraging play is crucial for fostering healthy cognitive development in children . Provide a variety of age-appropriate games, puzzles, and creative activities that engage their senses and stimulate curiosity. For example, introduce building blocks and math games for problem-solving skills, and crossword puzzles to improve vocabulary and reasoning abilities.

Playing with others also helps children develop social skills and better understand facial expressions and emotions. Provide opportunities for cooperative play, where kids can work together to achieve a common goal, and open-ended play with no specific rules to boost creativity.

Supportive Home Environment

A nurturing and secure home environment encourages healthy cognitive growth. Be responsive to your child’s needs and interests, involving them in everyday activities and providing positive reinforcement. Pay attention to their emotional well-being and create a space where they feel safe to ask questions and explore their surroundings.

Promoting Independence and Decision-Making

Support independence by allowing children to make decisions about their playtime, activities, and daily routines. Encourage them to take age-appropriate responsibilities and make choices that contribute to self-confidence and autonomy. Model problem-solving strategies and give them opportunities to practice these skills during play, while also guiding them when necessary.

Healthy Lifestyle Habits

Promote a well-rounded lifestyle, including:

Sleep : Ensure children get adequate and quality sleep by establishing a consistent bedtime routine.
Hydration : Teach the importance of staying hydrated by offering water frequently, especially during play and physical activities.
Screen time : Limit exposure to electronic devices and promote alternative activities for toddlers and older kids.
Physical activity : Encourage children to engage in active play and exercise to support neural development and overall health .

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key stages of child cognitive development.

Child cognitive development can be divided into several key stages based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development . These stages include the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), preoperational stage (2-7 years), concrete operational stage (7-11 years), and formal operational stage (11 years and beyond). Every stage represents a unique period of cognitive growth, marked by the development of new skills, thought processes, and understanding of the world.

What factors influence cognitive development in children?

Several factors contribute to individual differences in child cognitive development, such as genetic and environmental factors. Socioeconomic status, access to quality education, early home environment, and parental involvement all play a significant role in determining cognitive growth. In addition, children’s exposure to diverse learning experiences, adequate nutrition, and mental health also influence overall cognitive performance .

How do cognitive skills vary during early childhood?

Cognitive skills in early childhood evolve as children progress through various stages . During the sensorimotor stage, infants develop fundamental skills such as object permanence. The preoperational stage is characterized by the development of symbolic thought, language, and imaginative play. Children then enter the concrete operational stage, acquiring the ability to think logically and solve problems. Finally, in the formal operational stage, children develop abstract reasoning abilities, complex problem-solving skills and metacognitive awareness.

What are common examples of cognitive development?

Examples of cognitive development include the acquisition of language and vocabulary, the development of problem-solving skills, and the ability to engage in logical reasoning. Additionally, memory, attention, and spatial awareness are essential aspects of cognitive development. Children may demonstrate these skills through activities like puzzle-solving, reading, and mathematics.

How do cognitive development theories explain children’s learning?

Piaget’s cognitive development theory suggests that children learn through active exploration, constructing knowledge based on their experiences and interactions with the world. In contrast, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes the role of social interaction and cultural context in learning. Both theories imply that cognitive development is a dynamic and evolving process, influenced by various environmental and psychological factors.

Why is it essential to support cognitive development in early childhood?

Supporting cognitive development in early childhood is critical because it lays a strong foundation for future academic achievement, social-emotional development, and lifelong learning. By providing children with diverse and enriching experiences, caregivers and educators can optimize cognitive growth and prepare children to face the challenges of today’s complex world. Fostering cognitive development early on helps children develop resilience, adaptability, and critical thinking skills essential for personal and professional success.

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Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained

Background and Key Concepts of Piaget's Theory

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

child development stages critical thinking

Important Cognitive Development Concepts

Next in Stages of Cognitive Development Guide The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of learning. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence. Piaget's stages are:

Sensorimotor stage : Birth to 2 years
Preoperational stage : Ages 2 to 7
Concrete operational stage : Ages 7 to 11
Formal operational stage : Ages 12 and up

Piaget believed that children take an active role in the learning process, acting much like little scientists as they perform experiments, make observations, and learn about the world. As kids interact with the world around them, they continually add new knowledge, build upon existing knowledge, and adapt previously held ideas to accommodate new information.

History of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s and was a precocious student, publishing his first scientific paper when he was just 11 years old. His early exposure to the intellectual development of children came when he worked as an assistant to Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon as they worked to standardize their famous IQ test .

Piaget vs. Vygotsky

Piaget's theory differs in important ways from those of Lev Vygotsky , another influential figure in the field of child development. Vygotsky acknowledged the roles that curiosity and active involvement play in learning, but placed greater emphasis on society and culture.

Piaget felt that development is largely fueled from within, while Vygotsky believed that external factors (such as culture) and people (such as parents, caregivers, and peers) play a more significant role.

Much of Piaget's interest in the cognitive development of children was inspired by his observations of his own nephew and daughter. These observations reinforced his budding hypothesis that children's minds were not merely smaller versions of adult minds.

Until this point in history, children were largely treated simply as smaller versions of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify that the way that children think is different from the way adults think.

Piaget proposed that intelligence grows and develops through a series of stages. Older children do not just think more quickly than younger children. Instead, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences between the thinking of young children versus older children.

Based on his observations, he concluded that children were not less intelligent than adults—they simply think differently. Albert Einstein called Piaget's discovery "so simple only a genius could have thought of it."

Piaget's stage theory describes the cognitive development of children . Cognitive development involves changes in cognitive process and abilities. In Piaget's view, early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later progresses to changes in mental operations.

The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects. A child's entire experience at the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, senses, and motor responses.

Birth to 2 Years

Major characteristics and developmental changes during this stage:

Know the world through movements and sensations
Learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking, and listening
Learn that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen ( object permanence )
Realize that they are separate beings from the people and objects around them
Realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them

During the sensorimotor stage, children go through a period of dramatic growth and learning. As kids interact with their environment, they continually make new discoveries about how the world works.

The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short time and involves a great deal of growth. Children not only learn how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal about language from the people with whom they interact. Piaget also broke this stage down into substages. Early representational thought emerges during the final part of the sensorimotor stage.

Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, was an important element at this point of development.

By learning that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they have an existence of their own outside of individual perception, children are then able to begin to attach names and words to objects.

The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The foundations of language development may have been laid during the previous stage, but the emergence of language is one of the major hallmarks of the preoperational stage of development.

2 to 7 Years

Begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects
Tend to be egocentric and struggle to see things from the perspective of others
Getting better with language and thinking, but still tend to think in very concrete terms

At this stage, kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of other people. They also often struggle with understanding the idea of constancy.

Children become much more skilled at pretend play during this stage of development, yet they continue to think very concretely about the world around them.

For example, a researcher might take a lump of clay, divide it into two equal pieces, and then give a child the choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a compact ball while the other is smashed into a flat pancake shape. Because the flat shape looks larger, the preoperational child will likely choose that piece, even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.

The Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

While children are still very concrete and literal in their thinking at this point in development, they become much more adept at using logic. The egocentrism of the previous stage begins to disappear as kids become better at thinking about how other people might view a situation.

7 to 11 Years

Begin to think logically about concrete events
Begin to understand the concept of conservation; that the amount of liquid in a short, wide cup is equal to that in a tall, skinny glass, for example
Thinking becomes more logical and organized, but still very concrete
Begin using inductive logic, or reasoning from specific information to a general principle

While thinking becomes much more logical during the concrete operational state, it can also be very rigid. Kids at this point in development tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts.

During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. Kids in the concrete operational stage also begin to understand that their thoughts are unique to them and that not everyone else necessarily shares their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

The Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

The final stage of Piaget's theory involves an increase in logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning, and an understanding of abstract ideas. At this point, adolescents and young adults become capable of seeing multiple potential solutions to problems and think more scientifically about the world around them.

Age 12 and Up

Major characteristics and developmental changes during this time:

Begins to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems
Begins to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social, and political issues that require theoretical and abstract reasoning
Begins to use deductive logic, or reasoning from a general principle to specific information

The ability to thinking about abstract ideas and situations is the key hallmark of the formal operational stage of cognitive development. The ability to systematically plan for the future and reason about hypothetical situations are also critical abilities that emerge during this stage.

It is important to note that Piaget did not view children's intellectual development as a quantitative process. That is, kids do not just add more information and knowledge to their existing knowledge as they get older.

Instead, Piaget suggested that there is a qualitative change in how children think as they gradually process through these four stages. At age 7, children don't just have more information about the world than they did at age 2; there is a fundamental change in how they think about the world.

Piaget suggested several factors that influence how children learn and grow.

A schema describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world.

In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas.

For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters an enormous dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include these new observations.

Assimilation

The process of taking in new information into our already existing schemas is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat subjective because we tend to modify experiences and information slightly to fit in with our preexisting beliefs. In the example above, seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is a case of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Accommodation

Another part of adaptation is the ability to change existing schemas in light of new information; this process is known as accommodation. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Equilibration

As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to account for new knowledge (accommodation).

Piaget believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation using a mechanism he called equilibration. Equilibration helps explain how children can move from one stage of thought to the next.

One of the main points of Piaget's theory is that creating knowledge and intelligence is an inherently active process.

"I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality," Piaget wrote. "I believe that knowing an object means acting upon it, constructing systems of transformations that can be carried out on or with this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality."

Piaget's theory of cognitive development helped add to our understanding of children's intellectual growth. It also stressed that children were not merely passive recipients of knowledge. Instead, kids are constantly investigating and experimenting as they build their understanding of how the world works.

Hugar SM, Kukreja P, Assudani HG, Gokhale N. Evaluation of the relevance of Piaget's cognitive principles among parented and orphan children in Belagavi City, Karnataka, India: A comparative study . I nt J Clin Pediatr Dent. 2017;10(4):346-350. doi:10.5005/jp-journals-10005-1463

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Fischer KW, Bullock D. Cognitive development in school-age children: Conclusions and new directions . In: Development During Middle Childhood: The Years From Six to Twelve. National Academies Press.

Sobel AA, Resick PA, Rabalais AE. The effect of cognitive processing therapy on cognitions: impact statement coding . J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(3):205-11. doi:10.1002/jts.20408

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Fancher RE, Rutherford A. Pioneers of Psychology: A History . W.W. Norton.

Santrock JW. A Topical Approach to Lifespan Development (8th ed.) . McGraw-Hill.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Parents' Guide

Introduction, critical thinking development: ages 5 to 9.

Critical thinking must be built from a solid foundation. Although children aged five to nine are not yet ready to take on complicated reasoning or formulate detailed arguments, parents can still help their children lay a foundation for critical thinking.

In order to develop high-level critical thinking skills later in life, five- to nine-year-old children must first make progress along four different tracks. This includes developing basic reasoning skills and interests, building self-esteem, learning emotional management skills, and internalizing social norms that value critical thinking. The following sections will discuss the importance of these foundational aspects of critical thinking and offer parents guidance in how to support their young children’s development.

1. Logic and Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is different from logical thinking. logical thinking is like math: it involves formal reasoning skills that can only be learned later in life. in contrast, critical thinking builds on everyday reasoning. so parents should guide their children’s critical thinking development from a very young age..

Formal logic is an important part of critical thinking, but ultimately critical thinking involves habits and skills going far beyond the domain of logic. Children are able to develop their critical faculties not from logical analysis, but everyday reasoning.

There are three main factors to keep in mind in differentiating logic from the everyday reasoning that underpins critical thinking.

First, logic is not a natural human trait. If logic were natural, we wouldn’t have to learn how to reason, and math wouldn’t be considered so difficult in school. The natural reasoning displayed by children is often founded on sensory experiences and marred by the cognitive biases discussed in the introduction. Consider this example. Someone says: “If it rains, I’ll take my umbrella with me.” And then a moment later adds: “It’s not raining.” What may we conclude? The vast majority of people — including both adults and children old enough to understand the question — will conclude that the person will not take an umbrella. In context, that is a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Logic is not natural to humans and can only be acquired through learning.

But from a purely logical perspective, it does not follow. The fact that if it does rain, the speaker will take an umbrella implies nothing, strictly speaking, about what will happen in the case that it is not raining. Logic, the cognitive capacity for formal and reliable deduction, is not natural to humans. We can only acquire it through learning—and only at an age when the cognitive system and brain development allow for such learning (between ages 12 and 15).

Second, although logic is not natural, it can be taught with varying degrees of success, according to personality, cognitive profile, and so on. Multiple developmental psychology studies since Piaget have shown that our cognitive system can only become proficient in logical analysis later on, and with the correct training.

Third, if parents train children from ages five to nine to make more or less complex logical deductions, no deep knowledge is acquired. At a young age, the cognitive system does not yet have the capacity to discern logical invariables (i.e., the ability to reproduce a line of reasoning in a variable context).

This is why we only explain mathematical principles to children when they are 13 to 14 years old. But again parents can encourage the basics of critical thinking at an early age by promoting social factors like self-esteem.

Logic and Brain Development

Complex reasoning predominantly takes place in the prefrontal cortex and areas of the brain devoted to language. Language development is, of course, closely linked to explicit learning, as well as to implicit stimulation.

But reasoning requires more than just language skills. The prefrontal cortex carries out what are known as executive functions. It controls concentration, planning, decision-making, and many other functions. These allow us to break down complex tasks into a series of simpler tasks. Reasoning requires a strategy that breaks things down. The prefrontal lobe is a cerebral zone that only matures neurologically after the age of 20.

Logic is neither natural nor easy. Its development requires a comfortable handling of language and the capacity for problem-solving in the prefrontal cortex. Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How can we get there?

Metacognition

2. everyday reasoning, although their logical reasoning skills are undeveloped, young children can argue and express opinions. parents should encourage them. even though a child’s argument will tend to be based on emotion, the practice can help build a critical perspective and confidence..

Despite the fact that young children may not be able to grasp logical concepts, they still employ everyday forms of reasoning in both their use of language and in problem-solving and decision-making. It is from out of these capacities that critical thinking can begin to develop at this age.

As is readily apparent, communication via language is not logical. Natural language does not conform to a formal logical structure. It is contextual, whether we are talking about comprehension or expression. If someone says: “If I had a knife, I would cut my steak,” most people would understand that having a knife makes it possible to cut the steak. However, in formal logic, the sentence means that if I had a knife, I would be obliged to cut the steak. Logical language is systematic and obligatory. But a child learns to speak and to understand in a pragmatic and contextual, not logical, fashion.

Certain communication problems result from an overly rigid logical rigor, as in the case of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Paradoxically, human communication only works because it is not a purely logical linguistic system. This is one of the reasons why automated translation between languages has been a thorn in the side of artificial intelligence experts since the 1970s.

Logical Proof and Factual Proof

Most real-life problems that we have been grappling with since infancy cannot be formally resolved by logical deduction .

Decision-making is based on a complex mix of different elements:

the cognitive processing of a situation and/or argument

intervention, conscious or unconscious, from our memory of similar past experiences, our preferences, and our personality in the broad sense

our emotions

This is how a child can choose between two toys or how an adult chooses between buying and renting an apartment. People with ultra-logical cognitive tendencies won’t have enough factors for their reasoning to work with, and may be incapable of making a decision—and therefore, incapable of taking action. Neurological studies, since those undertaken by Antonio Damasio in the 1990s, have shown us that decision-making processes and emotional processes are intimately linked , from both neurophysiological and behavioral perspectives.

Pure logic, besides often producing unfortunate results in the real world, can be a hindrance in a highly complicated universe where decisions require managing multiple factors. This is the main reason why artificial intelligence is only now starting to see results, despite the fact that information technology has been in use since the 1940s.

Computer engineers have needed to overcome their grounding in logical, mathematical, and hypothetical deduction, and to incorporate developments in cognitive science and neurology. Algorithms now operate more like children. That is to say, they make random decisions, analyze and memorize the outcomes in order to progress, and then correct themselves by discerning both the invariables and the contextual variables. This is called deep learning.

Children cannot rely too heavily on logic, but they are still able to express opinions based on their experiences, intuitions, and emotions.

This is also how children between five and nine years old operate. They solve many problems and make many choices, without being able to demonstrate (in the purest sense of the word) why their conclusions and choices were correct.

Between the ages of five and nine, therefore, children cannot rely too heavily on logic. However, they are still able to to express opinions based on their experiences, intuitions, and emotions. To do this, they need to practice, have good self-esteem, and feel esteemed by others in order to believe they have the right, the desire, and the energy to put their critical thinking to use. In other words, they need to exist as a thinking and acting subject whose capacities are recognized by others.

At this age, children are able to argue based on things they have experienced and knowledge they have acquired at school or at home, from books, television, or the internet, or by talking with their friends. They are also able to argue with their “heart.” They assume that their emotions are arguments themselves.

For example, a child might consider that we shouldn’t eat meat because innocent animals shouldn’t have to die. The child’s empathy is the crux of their argument and the strength of their insistence will often be proportional to that of their emotions.

Case in Point

We show children from this age group a drawing of a rectangular flask tipped at an angle, and we ask them: “If I fill this flask roughly halfway, could you draw the water line on the flask?”

What would be the result? Most children will draw a line perpendicular to the flask’s longitudinal axis. Yet, since this axis does not run vertically but is at an angle, the line the child draws is not horizontal relative to the ground, as it should be.

Children err here because their minds are referentially anchored to the flask, just as astronomers for many millennia fixated on the idea of the earth, and later the sun, as a reference point—before realizing that the universe does not have an absolute reference point.

Even if we explain the error to children—and they say they understand—many will, shortly afterwards, make the same mistake again. Their cognitive system is not mature enough to incorporate the logic behind reference and relativity. The example shows how logical thinking is not natural. It requires a learned ability to step back and remove oneself from immediate engagement with a particular situation.

3. Preparing Kids to Think Critically

Parents or guardians can foster critical thinking skills in children from an early age. First, it’s important to understand the basics of how children learn to think and how a child’s mind differs from that of an adult. Critical thinking in their early years prepares children for life’s challenges and allows them to live a productive life.

How to teach critical thinking to your child

Here are four ways you can support your child’s early cognitive development and put them on the path to becoming critical thinkers. Teaching critical thinking may seem daunting, but having a primer on the particular needs of a child can help you better approach this important task.

1. Encourage children not to see everything as centered only on them by involving them in discussions on an array of topics, including current affairs.

Contrary to popular belief, from the age of five—and sometimes even earlier—children like to be involved in discussions, provided they are not drowned in technical vocabulary or formal logic . They also need to feel that adults are interested in what they are saying and that they are being listened to. Adults need to learn to step away from the role of educator and engage children at their level.

It is highly important for the development of critical faculties that children see their thoughts on the world are accepted. By taking those thoughts seriously, we are taking our children seriously and accepting them.

For example, ask five-year-old children whether Santa Claus exists and how they know. Listen to their arguments: they saw Santa at the mall; they know their Christmas presents must come from somewhere. Contradicting them or breaking down their worldview would be a grave mistake. It would fly in the face of our knowledge about cognitive development, and it would disregard their emotional need for this belief. Paradoxically, we need to let children formulate their own ideas and worldviews, namely through dreaming and imagination. In this way, they will grow happy and confident enough, in time and at their own pace, to move on to more mature ideas.

2. Value the content of what children say.

With encouragement, children will want to express their thoughts increasingly often, quite simply because they find it pleasurable. A certain structure in our brains, the amygdala, memorizes emotions linked to situations we experience. We are predisposed to pursue experiences and situations which induce pleasure, be it sensory or psychological. If a child puts energy into reflection in order to convince us that aliens exist, and we then dismantle their arguments and dreams, we will be inhibiting their desire to participate in this type of discussion again.

For children aged five to nine, the pleasure of thinking something through, of expressing and discussing their thoughts, of feeling language to be a source of joy, are all of far greater importance than argumentative rigor or logical reasoning .

Children debate and give their opinions. This stimulates their brain, which creates a whole host of connections, which, in turn, improve their abilities and their cognitive and emotional performance. The pleasure of discussion, of having someone listen to your ideas, releases a “flood” of neurotransmitters that promote cerebral development. An atmosphere of kindness and benevolence in which the child feels heard produces neural connections and develops various kinds of intelligence. As the child learns through debate, putting effort into reflective thought and into verbal and bodily expression, the brain evolves and invests in the future. This results from cognitive stimulation paired with joie de vivre that comes from being heard by others and receiving their undivided attention.

Parents should not hold back from bringing children into discussions and debates.

3. gradually, the ability to argue with pertinence, on both familiar topics of reflection or debate and new ones, will increase..

Numerous recent studies show that doing well in school results more so from pleasure and the development of self-esteem than heavy exposure to graded exercises, which can create anxiety and belittle children. Children are vulnerable and quickly internalize the labels others place on them.

In short, parents should not hold back from bringing children into discussions and debates, keeping to the principles outlined above. Also, be sure to respond to their desire to start discussions within their frame of reference and be sure to take them seriously.

4. Gradually, with time, pleasure, learning, and cognitive and emotional development, it will be possible to encourage children to argue without pressuring them through open-ended questions.

From the age of eight, children can start learning about metacognition and the adoption of alternative points of view. They should also be trained at this time to understand the difference between an opinion, an argument, and a piece of evidence.

An opinion is the expression of an idea that is not, in and of itself, true or false. Children are empowered to express their opinions early on by all the preliminary work on building up self-esteem. “I think they should close down all the schools, so we can be on holiday all the time” is an opinion. A child of five can easily express such an opinion.

An argument is an attempt to convince others by offering information and reasoning. A child of eight might argue: “If we close down all the schools, we can get up later. Then we’ll have more energy to learn things better at home.”

Evidence are the facts we use to try to prove a point in an argument. Evidence can be highly powerful but it rarely amounts to conclusive proof. When an unambiguous proof is presented, alternative opinions evaporate, provided that one can cognitively and emotionally assimilate the perspective of the person presenting the proof. Something can be proven in two ways. On the one hand, it can be proven through formal reasoning—attainable from the age of nine upwards in real-life situations and, later on, in l more abstract situations. On the other hand, it can be established through factual demonstration. If a child claims that “you can scare away a mean dog by running after it,” proof can be given through demonstration. This leaves no need for argument.

From ages eight to nine, children can come to differentiate and prioritize opinion, argument, and evidence in what they say and hear, provided that their own flawed arguments at age five to six were met with respect and tolerance. This is vital for developing children’s self-esteem and respect for others. It enables them to take pleasure in argument and increases their desire to express themselves more persuasively.

Critical thinking exercises for kids

Hunting—for or against? For a debate like this one, with considerable social implications, focus on these concepts:

1. Teach children to distinguish between:

An opinion : I am against hunting…

An argument : … because it entails animal suffering and human deaths.

Hunting significantly increases the production of stress hormones (such as hydrocortisone) in hunted animals.

There are around thousands of hunting accidents each year.

2. Teach children to adopt a counter-argument for practice:

An opinion : I am in favor of hunting…

An argument : … because it allows us to control the size of animal populations.

Evidence : Wild boar populations are high and cause a great deal of damage to farmland.

New Perspectives and Overcoming Biases

4. the importance of self-esteem, children need self-esteem to think themselves worthy of expressing their opinions. parents can strengthen their children’s self-esteem by encouraging them to try new things, stimulating their curiosity, and showing pride in their accomplishments., understanding the importance of self-esteem, the foundation of critical thinking.

Before children can learn to analyze and criticize complicated material or controversial opinions, they need to have a strong sense of themselves. Their capacity to question external sources of information depends on feelings of self-worth and security.

The terms “self-confidence” and “self-esteem” are often used interchangeably. There is, however, a difference between the two, even if they are related. Before we can have high self-esteem, we must first have self-confidence. The feeling of confidence is a result of a belief in our ability to succeed.

Self-esteem rests on our conscious self-worth, despite our foibles and failures. It’s knowing how to recognize our strengths and our limitations and, therefore, having a realistic outlook on ourselves.

Self-esteem requires an ability to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and to accept them as they are.

For example, children can have high self-esteem even if they know that they struggle with math. Self-esteem can also vary depending on context. Children in school can have high social self-esteem, but a lower academic self-esteem.

Self-esteem requires an ability to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and to accept them as they are. Children must learn to understand that they have value, even if they can’t do everything perfectly.

Self-esteem starts developing in childhood. Very young children adopt a style of behavior that reflects their self-image. From the age of five, healthy self-esteem is particularly important when it comes to dealing with the numerous challenges they face. Children must, among other things, gradually become more independent, and learn how to read, write, and do mental arithmetic. This period is key, and children need self-confidence as well. More than anywhere else, it is in the family home that children develop the foundations for self-esteem.

Children with high self-esteem:

have an accurate conception of who they are and neither over- nor underestimate their abilities;

make choices;

express their needs, feelings, ideas, and preferences;

are optimistic about the future;

dare to take risks and accept mistakes;

keep up their motivation to learn and to progress;

maintain healthy relationships with others;

trust their own thoughts and trust others.

As parents, developing our own self-esteem enhances the development of our children’s self-esteem, as their identity is closely entwined with our own. Our children learn a great deal by imitating us. Modeling self-esteem can therefore be a great help to them. Here are some examples of what we can do:

Be openly proud of our accomplishments, even those which seem minor to us.

Engage in activities just for fun (and not for competitive reasons).

Don’t pay too much heed to other people’s opinions about us.

Don’t belittle ourselves: if we’ve made an error or if we aren’t so good at a certain task, explain to children that we are going to start again and learn to do it better.

At mealtimes, prompt everyone around the table to say something they did well that day.

On a big sheet of paper, write down the names of family members; then, write down next to everyone’s name some of their strengths.

5. Promoting Self-Esteem

To promote healthy self-esteem in children, parents must strike a balance between discipline and encouragement., the most important thing of all in the development of young children’s self-esteem is our unconditional love for them..

Children must feel and understand that our love will never be dependent on their actions, their successes, or their failures. It is this state of mind that allows them to embrace the unknown and to continue to progress despite the inevitable failures that come along with learning new skills.

Developing Self-Esteem

But be careful not to let unconditional love prevent the imposition of authority or limits. Instead of developing their self-esteem, the absence of limits promotes the feeling in children that they can do no wrong and renders them incapable of dealing with frustration. It is necessary to establish limits and to be firm (without being judgmental). The desired result is only reached if effort and respect are taken seriously.

Self-esteem means loving ourselves for who we are, for our strengths and our weaknesses, and it is based on having been loved this way since birth.

Advice: How to promote the development of a child’s self-esteem

As parents, we have a big influence on our children, particularly when they are young. Here are some ways to help build up children’s self-esteem:

Praise children’s efforts and successes. Note that effort is always more important than results.

Don’t hesitate to reiterate to children that error and failure are not the same thing. Show them that you’re proud of them, even when they make mistakes. Reflect with them on how to do better next time.

Let children complete household chores; give them a few responsibilities they can handle. They will feel useful and proud.

Show children that we love them for who they are, unconditionally, and not for what they do or how they look.

Let children express their emotions and inner thoughts.

Assist children in finding out who they are. Help them to recognize what they like and where their strengths lie.

Encourage them to make decisions. For example, let them choose their own outfits.

Invite them to address common challenges (according to their abilities and age).

Pitfalls to avoid

Avoid being overprotective. Not only does this prevent children from learning, it also sends them a negative message: that they are incapable and unworthy of trust.

Don’t criticize them incessantly. If we’re always making negative comments about our children, and if we show ourselves to be unsatisfied with their work or behavior even when they’re doing their best, they will get disheartened.

If children don’t act appropriately, stress that it is their behavior, rather than their personality, that must change. For example, it is better to explain that an action they may have done is mean, rather than that they are themselves mean.

Always be respectful towards children. Never belittle them. What we say to our children has a great impact on their self-image.

Show them we’re interested in what they’re doing. Don’t ignore them. We are still at the center of their universe.

Don’t compare them to their siblings or to other children their age. (“Your four-year-old sister can do it!”) Highlight how they are progressing without comparing them to anyone else.

Risk-Taking

6. the role of emotions, emotions are an important part of children’s cognitive development, but if emotions become overwhelming they can be counterproductive. parents should help their children learn how to express their feelings calmly and prevent emotions from becoming a distraction., understanding the role of emotions in the development of critical thinking.

Young children may develop skills in language and argument, and benefit from a level of self-esteem allowing them to stand their ground and explore the unknown. Nonetheless, the development of their critical faculties will still be limited if they haven’t learned how to manage their emotions.

Emotions appear in a part of the brain called the limbic system , which is very old in terms of human evolution. This system develops automatically at a very early stage. But very quickly, children experience the need to rein in the spontaneous and unrestricted expression of their emotions. These emotions are, of course, closely connected to basic relations to others (and initially most often to one’s parents) and to cultural norms.

The prefrontal lobe contains the greatest number of neural networks that simultaneously regulate the scope of conscious emotions and their expression in verbal and non-verbal language, as well as in behavior. From the age of five or six, children start their first year of primary school, where they are forced to sit for hours on end each day. They must also listen to a curriculum designed more around societal needs and expectations, rather than around the desires and emotions of children. Frontal lobe development enables the inhibition of urges and the management of emotions , two prerequisites for intellectual learning and for feelings of belonging in family and society.

The ability to manage emotions has a two-fold constructive impact on the development of children’s critical faculties. First, it enables children to override their emotions, so they may focus their attention and concentrate. This is essential for both cognitive development in general and their argumentative, logical, and critical skills.

Management of emotions also allows us to feel settled and to convince and influence others when we speak. Paradoxically, children learn that, by managing their emotions (which is initially experienced as repression), they can have an impact on their peers, make themselves understood, and even be emulated. The pleasure they derive from this reinforces the balance between spontaneity and control, and both pleasure in self-expression and respect for others will increase. Self-esteem will therefore progress, also allowing the child to assert his or her will.

Development of the critical faculties will benefit from a heightened level of self-esteem. But it’s important to remember that this is a balancing act.

If family or social pressures excessively inhibit emotional expression, feelings of uniqueness and self-worth are compromised. In this case, even with otherwise normal (and even excellent) cognitive development, children’s critical faculties can be impeded. A child won’t truly become an individual and the development of his or her critical faculties will therefore be stunted. Such a child is like a mere cell, rather than a whole organ. This lack of individuality is found in the social conventions and education systems established by totalitarian regimes. Highly intelligent, cultured, logical people can, under such regimes, remain devoid of critical thinking skills.

Emotion is the psychological motor of cognition. But in high and uncontrolled doses, emotion can override cognition.

Conversely, if children’s emotions and expressions of emotion are badly managed or not curtailed at all, they will come to see themselves as almost omnipotent. The consequent behavior will be mistaken for high self-esteem . In reality, cognitive and intellectual development will be dampened due to a lower attention span caused by poor emotional management. Logical and argumentative skills will be less developed and what may appear to be “critical” thinking will, in fact, be nothing more than a systematic, unthinking opposition to everything.

Critical thinking without cognitive and intellectual development does not truly exist. Real, constructive critical thinking requires listening, attention, concentration, and the organization of one’s thoughts. The development of these faculties itself requires good emotional management, which must intensify from around the age of five or six, in order to strengthen learning skills and social life. Above all, parents should not try to snuff out a child’s emotions. Emotions are what give children vital energy, the desire to learn, and the strength to exercise self-control. Emotion is the psychological motor of cognition. But in high and uncontrolled doses, emotion can override cognition.

7. Managing Emotions

Parents should not ignore or simply silence their children when they act out or are overcome with emotion. they should work with them on strategies for coping and discuss how they can more calmly and productively express their emotions., how to help our children to control their emotions.

Our emotions are a part of who we are: we have to learn to manage and accept them. In order to help children manage their emotions, we must set limits (for example, by forbidding them to waste food or lie). However, setting limits on their behavior does not mean setting limits on their feelings.

We cannot stop children from getting angry even if they are forbidden from acting on that anger rather we can coach children in controlling their reactions. Sending them to their rooms to calm down will not prevent them from being upset and frustrated. On the contrary, by conveying to them the idea that they must face their emotions alone, we encourage them to repress their feelings. When children repress their emotions, they can no longer manage them consciously, which means they are liable to resurface at any moment.

An angry child is not a bad person, but a hurt person. When children lose control over their emotions, it is because they are overwhelmed.

These outbursts, when our children seem to have totally lost control of themselves, can frighten us as parents. Indeed, if children habitually repress their emotions, they become unable to express them verbally and rage takes over.

Failing to acknowledge children’s emotions can prevent them from learning to exercise self-control.

Advice: How do children learn to manage their emotions?

Children learn from us. When we yell, they learn to yell. When we speak respectfully, they learn to speak respectfully. Likewise, every time we manage to control our emotions in front of our children, they learn how to regulate their own emotions.

To help children manage their emotions, we should explicitly explain how to do so and discuss it with them.

Even older children need to feel a connection with their parents to manage their emotions. When we notice our children having difficulties controlling their emotions, it is important to reconnect with them. When children feel cared for and important, they become more cooperative and their feelings of joy cancel out bad behavioral traits.

The best way to help children become autonomous is to trust them and to entrust them with tasks and little challenges.

An angry child is not a bad person, but a hurt person. When children lose control over their emotions, it is because they are overwhelmed. Controlling their emotions is beyond their capacities at that particular moment in time and emotional control is something that they’ll build gradually as they mature.

If we continue treating them with compassion, our children will feel safe enough to express their emotions. If we help them to cry and let out their emotions, these feelings of being overwhelmed will go away, along with their anger and aggression.

Is it important to teach children specific language for expressing emotions?

Of course it is! But don’t try to force children to voice their emotions. Instead, focus on accepting their emotions. This will teach them that:

There is nothing wrong with emotions—they enrich human life.

Even if we can’t control everything in life, we can still choose how we react and respond.

When we are comfortable with our emotions, we feel them deeply, and then they pass. This gives us the sensation of letting go and of releasing tension.

If we actively teach these lessons—and continue to work on resolving our own emotions—we will be happy to find that our children will learn to manage their feelings. It will eventually become second nature to them.

Emotional Management

8. critical thinking and social life, critical thinking is a positive social norm, but it requires the support of background knowledge and genuine reasoning skills. without them, critical thinking can become an illusion..

Parents should balance their encouragement of children’s argumentative skills and self-expression with an emphasis on intellectual rigor.

Taking account of social norms and peer groups

No child grows up in a vacuum. As they develop, children internalize many of the norms and ways of thinking that are dominant in their families, social lives, schools, and society more broadly. Parents should be aware of the positive and negative influences these different spheres can have on their children. They should know what they can do to expose their children to norms that will foster healthy and independent thinking.

It seems that the right, even the responsibility, to think for oneself and to exercise one’s critical faculties has become increasingly tied to notions of dignity and individuality. More and more we see factors that have historically determined who has the “right” to be critical—age, origin, gender, level of general knowledge, or other implicit hierarchies—fade in importance.

Thus, it is becoming more and more common for students (with disconcerting self-assurance) to correct their teachers on aspects of history or other issues that are matters of fact. This raises some important questions, notably regarding the role of the educator, the goals of education, and the relationships between generations.

Our society encourages critical thinking from a very early age. We have insisted on the fact that, for young children, although intellectual rigor is difficult to attain, it is crucial to develop self-esteem and self-affirmation. But we have also seen that from around the age of eight, it is necessary to move towards teaching them basic reasoning skills.

The risk of making the “right to critical thinking” a social norm from a young age is that we lower intellectual standards. If the encouragement of children to think critically is not paired with intellectual progress in other areas, critical thinking is rendered a mere simulation of free thought and expression. This is as true for children as it is for teenagers or adults.

The entire population may feel truly free and have high self-esteem. However, if the intellectual rigor that comes with arguing, debating, and reasoning, is missing from children’s intellectual and social education, the people will be easily manipulated. Giving our children the freedom to exercise their critical faculties must be paired with the demand for intellectual rigor and linguistic mastery, without which “critical thinking” would offer the mere illusion of liberty.

Striking a balance:

For parents today, it is a matter of striking a balance between fostering critical thought from an early age, in spite of gaps in knowledge and logic, and developing our children’s cognitive faculties and knowledge base. Without these faculties of listening, attention, comprehension, expression, argument, and deduction, critical thinking is an illusion, a pseudo-democratic farce. This can lead to a society plagued by ignorance and vulnerable to barbarism.

On the other hand, we cannot simply slip back into old social conventions whereby children were told to simply keep quiet and learn their lessons passively. The only thing this approach ensures is that the child won’t become a troublemaker.

What is needed is an approach that harmonize advances in philosophy and psychology, which consider children as fully fledged individuals, on the one hand, with an understanding of the intellectual immaturity of this child, on the other.

Disagreeing in a civilized manner, in the end, allows us to agree on what matters most.

With the help of an affectionate, attentive, but also sometimes restrictive and guiding parent—who is at once intellectually stimulating, indulgent, and patient with the child’s needs—early development of self-affirmation and critical thinking becomes compatible with growing intellectual aptitude.

This intellectual aptitude is crucial to a healthy social life as well. People lacking this intellectual maturity cannot even disagree with each other productively; they lack the ability to discuss subjects worthy of critical interest, as well as the social and cognitive skills of listening, argument, and logical deduction. Disagreeing in a civilized manner, in the end, allows us to agree on what matters most.

Consider this discussion between two eight year olds.

– “I saw a show on TV yesterday that proved that aliens really exist. Tons of people have seen them, and they’ve found marks left by flying saucers in the desert!”

– “But there’s no real evidence. Those clues and eyewitness accounts weren’t very specific. Different witnesses described the aliens in very different ways—some said they were little green men, while others said they were big with glowing eyes. And the marks from UFOs could have been formed by strong winds.”

– “Oh, so you think you’re smarter than the scientists on TV, is that it?”

One child declares that a TV show they saw proves the existence of aliens. He or she takes it for granted that what we see on TV is true. The second is educated into a norm that calls claims into question and demands evidence. The first child doesn’t understand the second, because, to him or her, seeing it on TV is proof enough. From this point onward, the discussion can only go in circles. In this case, different social or family norms are incompatible.

Independent Thinking

Case study 1, metacognition.

Already at a young age children can begin to gain perspective on how they reason. One good way to help them foster this metacognition is by pointing out the variety of different methods available for solving a particular problem. By, for example, seeing the multiple different methods available for solving a math problem, children can begin to think about their own thought processes and evaluate various cognitive strategies. This will gradually open up the world of reasoning to them. They will begin to pay more attention to how they solve problems or complete tasks involving reasoning, instead of focusing only on answering correctly or completing the task.

How do children calculate 6 x 3, for example?

There are several ways:

They could add 6 + 6 + 6;

They could recall that 6 x 2 = 12, then add six more to get 18;

They could simply memorize and recall the answer: 18;

They could draw a grid of 6 by 3 units and then count how many boxes are in the grid.

Or they could use one of various other techniques…

Our culture values accurate and precise results but tends to pay little attention to the route taken to arrive at those results. Yet, if children are aware of their train of thought, they will be in a better position to master the technique—to perfect it to the point where they may even decide to switch to another technique if they need to increase their speed, for example. That is why it is important to help children understand the method they are using to the point that they can explain it themselves.

In helping their children with schoolwork or other projects involving reasoning, parents should ask them to explain themselves, make explicit the steps they’re taking to solve a particular problem, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their method and alternative methods. The result will be a much deeper understanding not only of the particular task at hand, but also of the practice of reasoning itself.

Case Study 2

Logical proof and factual proof.

At this stage, we can begin to introduce rudimentary logical concepts and distinctions. In everyday conversation, children have already begun using what we might call “natural logic.” They may, for example, get in arguments, like the one below, in which they draw conclusions based on premises. When children present these types of arguments, parents can intervene to teach basic logical concepts and ask children how a given conclusion might be proven or disproven.

One distinction appropriate to teach at this age is that between logical proof (proof that draws logical conclusions from certain premises) and factual proof (proof that uses actual facts to prove or disprove a given statement). The following anecdote provides the opportunity for such a lesson.

William and Eve, two children walking their dog in the park, are having a conversation about Labradors:

— “There are two kinds of Labradors—black and golden,” declares William.

— “That’s not true; there are also chocolate Labradors,” replies Eve. “My friend Adam has one.”

— “Well, his dog must not be a Labrador then,” William says.

How might we interpret this conversation?

In terms of logical proof, if Labradors are either black or golden, Adam’s chocolate “Labrador” cannot be a Labrador. That is a logically formulated proof. The reasoning is valid. It is the basic premise, William’s initial declaration that there are only two kinds of Labradors, that is false. It is, therefore, possible for William to draw a false conclusion even though his logic is technically correct.

In terms of factual proof, if we can prove that the chocolate-colored dog has two Labrador parents, we can factually prove that William’s premise is wrong: there are at least three types of Labrador.

There are many opportunities like this one to begin to make explicit the logical steps involved in everyday conversations with your children and to show them that they are already using logic, even if they may not know it. This serves to get them thinking about their own thinking, and it makes the topics of logic and reasoning less intimidating.

Case Study 3

What is bias.

A bias is a simply a preconceived and unreasoned opinion. Often biases are formed due to upbringing, larger societal biases, or particular subjective experiences. They exist in many forms and can persist into adulthood unless a child builds a firm foundation in critical thinking and reasoning.

How to overcome bias

The following anecdotes demonstrate how parents can use everyday events to help their children better understand and relate to perspectives outside their own. In order to think critically, children must be able to imaginatively and empathetically put themselves outside their own experiences and perspectives. Children thereby begin to come to terms with the limitations their own upbringings and backgrounds necessarily impose on them.

This is a vital part of metacognition since it allows children to see themselves, their attitudes, and their views as if from the outside. They become better at overcoming biases, prejudices, and errors in thinking. This process also enables them to entertain the perspectives of others and thereby engage in argument and debate in the future with more charity and nuance. Finally, it encourages them to seek out new experiences and perspectives and to develop intellectual curiosity.

In this first anecdote, a child learns to broaden her horizons through an interaction with another child whose experience is different from her own. In the second, a child learns that his attitude toward particular objects can depend strongly on the context in which they are experienced.

Overcoming Bias Example 1: Fear of Dogs

Jane is eight years old and lives in a small village. Her parents own several animals, including two Labradors.

Jane’s cousin Max is nine and a half and lives in central Paris.

Max is always happy to visit Jane, and they play together outside, dreaming up adventures and climbing trees. But he is terribly afraid of Jane’s big dogs; whenever they come near him, he screams at the top of his lungs and runs indoors to hide. Jane finds this funny, calling her cousin a “fraidy cat” and devising ploys to lure Max close to the dogs.

Jane does not realize that, unlike her, Max is not used to having animals in his daily environment. She interprets his attitude exclusively from the viewpoint of her own experience.

What would you do if you were Jane’s parents?

At the dinner table, Jane’s mom asks her to stop teasing Max and explains that he is not used to animals because he lives in different circumstances than she does.

She asks Max to tell them what it is like living in the city. Max talks about his daily life and, notably, how he takes the metro by himself to school in the mornings, two stations from home.

The blood drains from Jane’s face: “You take the metro all by yourself? I could never do that, I’d be much too scared of getting lost.”

Her mom says to her: “You see, Jane, you fell into a trap—thinking that your cousin was just like you. We are all different. You need to remind yourself of that in the future because it’s easy for you to forget!”

This focused discussion has given Jane the opportunity to overcome her own egocentrism by realizing that she and Max inhabit different worlds. She, therefore, realizes that even though Max is scared of dogs (whereas she is not), he is capable of things that intimidate her, like taking the metro alone. This allows her to re-examine her way of reasoning through a “meta” example of her own ideas about the world, eventually leading her to change her attitude toward her cousin.

As parents, we should look for and take advantage of opportunities to open up our children to new perspectives, especially with respect to unexamined biases they may have against peers or outsiders. They will gradually learn to identify and guard against the tendency we all have to generalize recklessly from our own limited experience. Moreover, they will develop the capacity to see things from other perspectives and interests outside their own narrow sphere.

Overcoming Bias Example 2: Fear of Nettles

Josh has recently been on a field trip with his class. Before a hike, the teacher warns the students to steer clear of the nettle plants in the area These “stinging nettles” can cause a nasty itching and burning rash.

A few days later, at dinner, Josh finds that his parents have prepared a nettle soup . Boiling water makes the nettles safe to touch and eat. But he refuses to eat it, since his experience tells them to keep nettles as far away from his body as possible— especially his mouth.

Josh vehemently refuses to try the soup at first and insists on having a frozen pizza instead. But his parents are firm with him and show him that the soup poses no danger by eating it themselves. Finally, Josh relents and tries the soup. He finds that it causes him no harm, and, much to his surprise, he actually enjoys it.

Children who do not know that nettles are safe to eat formulate their prejudice against the soup based solely on their experience, which is limited to the nettle’s irritant qualities. These kinds of learning experiences can be good moments for parents to point out to their children how they may falsely generalize their own limited experiences and how those experiences can produce unwarranted biases. These prejudices may stop them from trying out new things that may very well enrich their lives.

Case Study 4

Developing self esteem.

Climbing Esther and Ali, both five years old, are at a playground, looking at a climbing wall designed for five to 10 year olds.

Esther goes over to the wall, looks at it, and touches the climbing holds. She starts climbing, pulling herself up with her arms and putting her feet on the lower holds to relieve her arms.

When she is about six feet up the wall, Esther stops.

“Go on, Esther — you’re almost there! Come on, just one more push. You can do it!” calls out her father from the bench he is sitting on.

Esther looks at the top of the wall. She wants to make it all the way up, but her hands hurt from clutching the climbing holds. She lets go and lands on the soft covering of the playground.

“Oh—you almost made it,” her father calls out.

Ali’s father goes over to his son: “Do you want to try? Grab onto these with your hands, and then put your feet on the ones at the bottom. Then you move your hands up more, and then your feet—hands and feet… Go slowly; it’ll be tricky to start with. Check where the holds are before you start climbing.”

Ali goes to the foot of the wall and grabs the holds to see what they feel like. He starts climbing, following his father’s advice.

Ali climbs slowly. He is about halfway up the wall, far below where Esther reached. He asks to get down, and his father takes him in his arms and puts him on the ground.

“Great job, son! That was really good for a first try! I’m proud of you. That wall isn’t easy—it’s for children up to 10.”

In these two examples of the same situation, what is the impact of each parent’s behavior on the child’s self-esteem? What will each child remember from their first try at climbing?

Esther will probably be left with a sense of failure, thinking that she disappointed her father because she didn’t reach the top of the wall on her first try. She may not be willing to try again in the future, and she may hesitate to take on other new challenges. Even though he didn’t reach as high as Esther, Ali’s first climbing experience will likely be gratifying to him. His efforts have been recognized and encouraged by his father. He may be motivated now to make new efforts in the future, both in climbing and in other challenging new activities.

Case Study 5

Risk taking.

An important part of supporting the development of critical thinking skills at this age is encouraging children to take risks. Parents should beware of being hypercritical when their children make mistakes. They should also be proactive in exposing their children to new and potentially challenging situations. Finally, they should encourage their children to put themselves at risk in these situations, especially when it comes to putting forward arguments or answering questions. When they are (inevitably) wrong, children should be encouraged and supported rather than criticized. Being wrong should not become a source of shame for the child, but an opportunity to learn and grow. Consider the following anecdote.

Eight-year-old classmates Laura and Adam sit next to each other in a theater. Some 60 children, including Laura and Adam’s class, are on a field trip to see a historical reenactment.

Before the curtain rises, the activity leader presenting the show asks the children: ″Who can tell me the name of the Roman emperor who conquered Gaul?”

Adam, who happens to be an avid reader of a cartoon about history, knows the answer immediately (Julius Caesar) and wants desperately to say it—but is afraid of making a mistake in front of everyone and, as a result, remains silent.

Laura hesitates. Several names spring to mind as she thinks back to what she learned in history class: Nero, Caligula, etc. Finally, a few seconds later, no longer able to restrain herself, she blurts out, “Julius Caesar!”

The activity leader congratulates her and then gets the show started.

In this situation, we see two different attitudes toward the risk of being wrong:

Adam would rather keep quiet than risk giving a wrong answer. We can deduce from this that Adam associates mistakes with something negative that could earn him disapproval or lead to him being mocked—even punished. He has thus pressured himself into thinking that only perfection is acceptable and has therefore reduced his ability to try things out.

Laura, on the other hand, would rather risk being wrong than remain silent. We can deduce from this that she does not feel shame about making mistakes; in any case, her desire to try and the excitement of taking risks outweigh the drawbacks of being wrong.

We learn through trial and erro r , which is necessary for the development of the ability to reason. Risk-taking and trial and error are vital.

Children’s environments, and notably their parents’ attitudes regarding mistakes, are determining factors in how they approach risk-taking and in whether they allow themselves to make mistakes.

Case Study 6

In addition to acquiring perspective on their own experiences and their own reasoning, children should, at this age, begin to acquire perspective on their own emotions and to learn strategies for managing their emotions. Without these management skills, children will be continually overwhelmed by their emotions and allow them to compromise their reasoning. The anecdote below can be used as a model to help parents guide their children in learning to express and manage their emotions, and to think clearly in spite of strong emotional reactions.

Seven-year-old Eddie is on vacation by the sea with his parents, who suggest that they all go out and take a boat to a nearby island for a few hours. They can visit the lighthouse there.

Eddie, who is busy playing with his figurines, refuses to get ready for the trip as his parents have asked.

“I haven’t finished playing! I want to stay here,” he exclaims.

“You can play with your figurines at home whenever you want, Eddy, but this boat trip is special. It’s something we can only do on vacation,” argues his mother. “Come on now, hurry up and put your shoes on, and then go and get your bag. Take a jacket as well, please—it can be cold out at sea.”

Eddie’s parents are all ready, and he still has not budged. He carries on playing with his back to them.

“That’s enough now, Eddy. Get up and get ready so we can leave,” orders his father, raising his voice slightly.

Without looking at them, Eddy bursts into tears.

“I don’t want to go on a boat! I’m scared of falling in the ocean! And what if the boat sinks? There are sharks out there! Plus I get scared of swimming if I can’t touch the bottom—if the water is too deep for me,” he says with a quavering voice.

“Oh, Eddy, why didn’t you say so before? I didn’t realize you were worried about the boat. I didn’t even think of that. But you know what? It’s normal to be scared the first time. And the ocean is daunting, that’s for sure. Listen, I’ll tell you what: let’s look at the shipping forecast together. I checked it earlier and it’s going to be a really nice day, with a very calm sea. As for swimming offshore, that’s out of the question! We’ll go swimming at our usual beach when we get back later this afternoon. And we’ll all be wearing life jackets on the boat, so there’s no way you can drown! Are you less worried now?”

“Yes… But I don’t want you to think I’m a wimp…”

“Being scared is nothing to be ashamed of! It’s a normal feeling which helps to protect us from danger. You should always say if you’re scared. I can’t always guess how you’re feeling—you’ve got to tell me!”

In this scenario, after a bit of hesitation, Eddie was able to express his fears. His parents accepted this emotion and drew on it to reassure him with clear, objective facts, helping him to understand the unfamiliar circumstances. This way he could feel completely safe on the boat.

If Eddie had not expressed his fears—because he was afraid of his parents being judgmental, angry, or perhaps even making fun of him—the situation could have taken one of the following turns:

Eddie could have categorically refused to go on the trip, and his parents would either have had to force him to come, or drop the plan entirely.

Eddie could have obeyed them without saying anything, but the trip would have been ruined by his anxiety.

Although dealing with and expressing emotions may seem far afield from critical thinking, it is a vital precondition of critical and independent thinking that children have the confidence to recognize and acknowledge their emotions. Otherwise, children will be unable to set their emotions aside in order to consider complicated questions or scenarios in a clear and unbiased way.

Case Study 7

What is independent thinking.

What does independent thinking mean? Independent thinking is when an individual forms their own thoughts rather than just going along with what others are thinking. They apply their personal experiences, knowledge, and observations to form a personal viewpoint.

Independent thinking vs critical thinking

We can think independently without thinking critically, but we can’t think critically without thinking independently. That is, independent thinking is a precondition of critical thinking. In order to begin assessing information and making judgments objectively, we must first prevent ourselves from being unduly influenced by our peers’ views.

Example of independent thinking

In certain scenarios, children’s developing perspectives on their own beliefs, reasoning, and emotions can combine in the analysis of a challenging source of information. The wealth of media to which children are exposed today can be overwhelming, but these media can also provide opportunities for learning and practicing the skills of critical analysis. Parents can help guide their children in these situations by prompting them with questions and asking children to make their beliefs and reasoning explicit. At this young age, preparation for independent and critical thinking need not interfere with the fantasy life of the child, as the example below shows.

Six-year-old Tom has just written a letter to Santa Claus. Now he is watching television, flipping between channels until a show about Christmas catches his attention.

The TV presenter explains that nowadays children do not believe in Santa Claus the way they used to. Christmas has been totally commercialized. What’s more, red only became the color of Christmas due to the branding of the Coca-Cola company.

First part of the program: “What do those concerned say?” A journalist standing outside a school asks several children their opinion. The children interviewed say that their parents have told them about Santa Claus, but that he does not really exist, at least no more than witches and ghosts do. They say that they know exactly what they are going to get for Christmas and how much it will cost. Their little brothers or sisters may still believe in Santa, but they themselves are not babies anymore. Regardless of whether they’re “naughty or nice,” they know there will always be gifts for them under the tree.

Second part of the program: “Santa Claus: salesman.” Images in the background show check-out lines in toy stores, parents with shopping carts full to the brim, others taking photos of the shelves on their phones. We see Santa Clauses of all shapes and sizes in shopping malls, day care centers, in the street, and even sitting in donkey-drawn carriages. A narrator provides statistics on the average amount spent by families on gifts, as well as the percentage of gifts purchased in-store versus online.

Finally, the presenter comes back on the screen and concludes with, “Christmas has lost its magic!” before going to a commercial break.

Tom’s father came into the room while the show was on air and has seen part of it. He can tell that his son is both confused and unsettled.

“Why do you believe in Santa Claus, Tom? What are your reasons?”

“Because he’s come every year since I was little. And because he comes at nighttime. Who else could come in the middle of the night? Because he always drinks the hot chocolate we leave him under the tree, and he eats the cookies. Because I’ve seen him more than once, near the Christmas tree at school and in stores. Because no one else could make toys for every kid and deliver them all.”

“Yes, those are very good reasons to believe in him, Tom. And what about at school? Do you talk about Santa with the other kids?”

“The big kids say the same thing as the people on the TV: that he doesn’t exist and that their parents made him up. When I told them there was no way presents could just appear under the tree overnight, they said I was a baby. I don’t talk about Santa anymore because of that.”

“I think you’re right to assert yourself and say what you really think. There’s what they say on TV, what your friends say, and then there’s your own opinion. And it’s important for you to say what you think and defend your point of view. It’s important to listen to other people too, of course, because no one is right all the time. But having your own ideas and expressing them is really important all through your life.”

What would you have done if you were Tom’s father?

Would it have been better to admit the truth about Santa Claus to Tom and contradict his beliefs and imagination? If Tom’s dad had done that, what value would his son have placed on his own reasoning? Would he have dared to defend his opinion in the future?

During this conversation, the father chose to give weight to Tom’s arguments by giving credit to them and praising the way he expressed his personal thoughts. He did not state his own opinion on the matter, but instead focused the discussion on dealing with clashing points of view and on arguing. He hopes that Tom will now see the value in his own arguments, even if they go against what was said on the television show. Now, the next time he finds himself in a similar situation, Tom will probably be confident enough to express his own opinion on the information he receives.

The repetition of situations such as this should allow Tom’s critical thinking skills to develop. They will reinforce and strengthen his self-esteem and build his confidence in his ability to develop his own thoughts.

This situation may seem counter-intuitive. We usually associate the development of critical thinking with questioning certain beliefs, in this case the belief in the existence of Santa Claus.

This viewpoint, though, projects our own adult understanding onto Tom. Children of his age should instead be encouraged to express themselves, to be creative in their arguments, and to believe in the value of their own points of view—rather than in the truths that are thrust on them by adults, media, or their friends.

Table of content

Privacy overview.

Content Is Thinking, Thinking is Content
Critical Thinking in Every Domain of Knowledge and Belief
Using Intellectual Standards to Assess Student Reasoning
Open-minded inquiry
Valuable Intellectual Traits
Universal Intellectual Standards
Thinking With Concepts
The Analysis & Assessment of Thinking
Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms
Distinguishing Between Inert Information, Activated Ignorance, Activated Knowledge
Critical Thinking: Identifying the Targets
Distinguishing Between Inferences and Assumptions

Critical Thinking Development: A Stage Theory

Becoming a Critic Of Your Thinking
Bertrand Russell on Critical Thinking

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Cognitive Development Theory: What Are the Stages?

Sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, formal operational stage.

Cognitive development is the process by which we come to acquire, understand, organize, and learn to use information in various ways. Cognitive development helps a child obtain the skills needed to live a productive life and function as an independent adult.

The late Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was a major figure in the study of cognitive development theory in children. He believed that it occurs in four stages—sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

This article discusses Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, including important concepts and principles.

FatCamera / Getty Images

History of Cognitive Development

During the 1920s, the psychologist Jean Piaget was given the task of translating English intelligence tests into French. During this process, he observed that children think differently than adults do and have a different view of the world. He began to study children from birth through the teenage years—observing children who were too young to talk, and interviewing older children while he also observed their development.

Piaget published his theory of cognitive development in 1936. This theory is based on the idea that a child’s intelligence changes throughout childhood and cognitive skills—including memory, attention, thinking, problem-solving, logical reasoning, reading, listening, and more—are learned as a child grows and interacts with their environment.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory suggests that cognitive development occurs in four stages as a child ages. These stages are always completed in order, but last longer for some children than others. Each stage builds on the skills learned in the previous stage.

The four stages of cognitive development include:

Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational

The sensorimotor stage begins at birth and lasts until 18 to 24 months of age. During the sensorimotor stage, children are physically exploring their environment and absorbing information through their senses of smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound.

The most important skill gained in the sensorimotor stage is object permanence, which means that the child knows that an object still exists even when they can't see it anymore. For example, if a toy is covered up by a blanket, the child will know the toy is still there and will look for it. Without this skill, the child thinks that the toy has simply disappeared.

Language skills also begin to develop during the sensorimotor stage.

Activities to Try During the Sensorimotor Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the sensorimotor stage include:

Playing peek-a-boo
Reading books
Providing toys with a variety of textures
Singing songs
Playing with musical instruments
Rolling a ball back and forth

The preoperational stage of Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs between ages 2 and 7 years. Early on in this stage, children learn the skill of symbolic representation. This means that an object or word can stand for something else. For example, a child might play "house" with a cardboard box.

At this stage, children assume that other people see the world and experience emotions the same way they do, and their main focus is on themselves. This is called egocentrism .

Centrism is another characteristic of the preoperational stage. This means that a child is only able to focus on one aspect of a problem or situation. For example, a child might become upset that a friend has more pieces of candy than they do, even if their pieces are bigger.

During this stage, children will often play next to each other—called parallel play—but not with each other. They also believe that inanimate objects, such as toys, have human lives and feelings.

Activities to Try During the Preoperational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the preoperational stage include:

Playing "house" or "school"
Building a fort
Playing with Play-Doh
Building with blocks
Playing charades

The concrete operational stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years. During this stage, a child develops the ability to think logically and problem-solve but can only apply these skills to objects they can physically see—things that are "concrete."

Six main concrete operations develop in this stage. These include:

Conservation : This skill means that a child understands that the amount of something or the number of a particular object stays the same, even when it looks different. For example, a cup of milk in a tall glass looks different than the same amount of milk in a short glass—but the amount did not change.
Classification : This skill is the ability to sort items by specific classes, such as color, shape, or size.
Seriation : This skill involves arranging objects in a series, or a logical order. For example, the child could arrange blocks in order from smallest to largest.
Reversibility : This skill is the understanding that a process can be reversed. For example, a balloon can be blown up with air and then deflated back to the way it started.
Decentering : This skill allows a child to focus on more than one aspect of a problem or situation at the same time. For example, two candy bars might look the same on the outside, but the child knows that they have different flavors on the inside.
Transitivity : This skill provides an understanding of how things relate to each other. For example, if John is older than Susan, and Susan is older than Joey, then John is older than Joey.

Activities to Try During the Concrete Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the concrete operational stage include:

Using measuring cups (for example, demonstrate how one cup of water fills two half-cups)
Solving simple logic problems
Practicing basic math
Doing crossword puzzles
Playing board games

The last stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs during the teenage years into adulthood. During this stage, a person learns abstract thinking and hypothetical problem-solving skills.

Deductive reasoning—or the ability to make a conclusion based on information gained from a person's environment—is also learned in this stage. This means, for example, that a person can identify the differences between dogs of various breeds, instead of putting them all in a general category of "dogs."

Activities to Try During the Formal Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the formal operational stage include:

Learning to cook
Solving crossword and logic puzzles
Exploring hobbies
Playing a musical instrument

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is based on the belief that a child gains thinking skills in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. These stages roughly correspond to specific ages, from birth to adulthood. Children progress through these stages at different paces, but according to Piaget, they are always completed in order.

National Library of Medicine. Cognitive testing . MedlinePlus.

Oklahoma State University. Cognitive development: The theory of Jean Piaget .

SUNY Cortland. Sensorimotor stage .

Marwaha S, Goswami M, Vashist B. Prevalence of principles of Piaget’s theory among 4-7-year-old children and their correlation with IQ . J Clin Diagn Res. 2017;11(8):ZC111-ZC115. doi:10.7860%2FJCDR%2F2017%2F28435.10513

Börnert-Ringleb M, Wilbert J. The association of strategy use and concrete-operational thinking in primary school . Front Educ. 2018;0. doi:10.3389/feduc.2018.00038

By Aubrey Bailey, PT, DPT, CHT Dr, Bailey is a Virginia-based physical therapist and professor of anatomy and physiology with over a decade of experience.

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Cognitive development.

Fatima Malik ; Raman Marwaha .

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Last Update: April 23, 2023 .

Definition/Introduction

The concept of childhood is relatively new; in most medieval societies, childhood did not exist. At approximately seven years of age, children were considered little adults with similar expectations for a job, marriage, and legal consequences. Charles Darwin originated ideas of childhood development in his work on the origins of ethology (the scientific study of the evolutionary basis of behavior) and "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," first published in 1877.

It wasn't until the 20th century that developmental theories emerged. When conceptualizing cognitive development, we cannot ignore the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget suggested that when young infants experience an event, they process new information by balancing assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is taking in new information and fitting it into previously understood mental schemas. Accommodation is adapting and revising a previously understood mental schema according to the novel information. Piaget divided child development into four stages.

The first stage, Sensorimotor (ages 0 to 2 years of age), is the time when children master two phenomena: causality and object permanence. Infants and toddlers use their sense and motor abilities to manipulate their surroundings and learn about the environment. They understand a cause-and-effect relationship, like shaking a rattle may produce sound and may repeat it or how crying can make the parent(s) rush to give them attention. As the frontal lobe matures and memory develops, children in this age group can imagine what may happen without physically causing an effect; this is the emergence of thought and allows for the planning of actions. Object permanence emerges around six months of age. It is the concept that objects continue to exist even when they are not presently visible.

Second is the "Pre-operational" stage (ages 2 to 7 years), when a child can use mental representations such as symbolic thought and language. Children in this age group learn to imitate and pretend to play. This stage is characterized by egocentrism, i.e., being unable to perceive that others can think differently than themselves, and everything (good or bad) somehow links to the self.

Third is the "Concrete Operational stage" (ages 7 to 11 years), when the child uses logical operations when solving problems, including mastery of conservation and inductive reasoning. Finally, the Formal Operational stage (age 12 years and older) suggests an adolescent can use logical operations with the ability to use abstractions. Adolescents can understand theories, hypothesize, and comprehend abstract ideas like love and justice.

Childhood cognitive development and the Piaget stages are poorly generalizable. For example, conservation may overlap between the Pre-operational and Concrete Operational stages as the child masters conservation in one task and not in another. Similarly, the current understanding is that a child masters the "Theory of Mind" by 4 to 5 years, much earlier than when Piaget suggested that egocentrism resolves. [1]

Stages of Cognitive Development (Problem-Solving and Intelligence)

The word intelligence derives from the Latin "intelligere," meaning to understand or perceive. Problem-solving and cognitive development progress from establishing object permanence, causality, and symbolic thinking with concrete (hands-on) learning to abstract thinking and embedding of implicit (unconscious) to explicit memory development.

Birth to two months: The optical focal length is approximately 10 inches at birth. Infants actively seek stimuli, habituate to the familiar, and respond more vigorously to changing stimuli. The initial responses are more reflexive, like sucking and grasping. The infant can fix and follow a slow horizontal arc and eventually will follow past the midline. Contrasts, colors, and faces are preferred. The infant will distinguish familiar from moderately novel stimuli. As habituation to the faces of caregivers occurs, preferences are developed. The infant will stare momentarily where at the place from where an object has disappeared (lack of object permanence). At this stage, high-pitched voices are preferred.

Two to six months: Children in this age bracket engage in a purposeful sensory exploration of their bodies, staring at their hands and reaching and touching their body parts; this builds the concepts of cause and effect and self-understanding. Sensations and changes outside of themselves are appreciated with less regularity. As motor abilities are mastered, something that happens by chance will be repeated. For example, touching a button may light up the toy, or crying can cause the appearance of the caregiver. Routines are appreciated in this age group.

Six to twelve months: Object permanence emerges in this age group as the toddler looks for objects. A six-month-old will look for partially hidden objects, while a nine-month-old will look for wholly hidden objects and uncover them; this includes engaging in peek-a-boo-type games. Separation and stranger anxiety emerge as the toddler understands that out of sight is not out of mind. As motor abilities advance, sensory exploration of the environment occurs via reaching, inspecting, holding, mouthing, and dropping objects. They learn to manipulate their environment, learning cause and effect by trial and error, like banging two blocks together can produce a sound. Eventually, as Piaget suggested, mental schemas are built, and objects can be used functionally; for example, by intentionally pressing a button to open and reach inside a toy box.

Twelve to eighteen months: Around this time, motor abilities make it easier for the child to walk and reach, grasp, and release. Toys can be explored, made to work, and novel play skills emerge. Gestures and sounds can be imitated. Egocentric pretend play emerges. As object permanence and memory advance, objects can be found after witnessing a series of displacements, and moving objects can be tracked.

Eighteen months to two years: As memory and processing skills advance and frontal lobes mature, outcomes are imagined without so much physical manipulation, and new problem-solving strategies emerge without rehearsal. Thought arises, and there is the ability to plan actions. Object permanence is wholly established, and objects can be searched for by anticipating where they may be without witnessing their displacement. At 18 months, symbolic play expands from just the self; the child may attempt to feed a toy along with themselves, and housework may be imitated.

Two to five years: During this stage, the preschool years, magical and wishful thinking emerges; for example, the sun went home because it was tired. This ability may also give rise to apprehensions with fear of monsters, and having logical solutions may not be enough for reassurance. Perception will dominate over logic, and giving them an imaginary tool, like a monster spray, to help relieve that anxiety may be more helpful. Similarly, conservation and volume concept lacks, and what appears bigger or larger is more. For example, one cookie split into may equal two cookies.

Children in the preschool stage have a poor concept of cause and may think sickness is due to misbehavior. They are egocentric in their approach and may look at situations from only their point of view, offering comfort from a favorite stuffed toy to an upset loved one. At 36 months, a child can understand simple time concepts, identify shapes, compare two items, and count to three. Play becomes more comprehensive. At 48 months, children can count to four, identify four colors and understand opposites.

At five years of age, pre-literacy and numeracy skills further; five-year-old children can count to ten accurately, recites the alphabet by rote, and recognize a few letters. A child also develops hand preference at this age. Play stories become even more detailed between four and five years and may include imaginary scenarios, including imaginary friends. Playing with some game rules and obedience to those rules also establishes during the preschool years. Rules can be absolute.

Six to twelve years: During early school years, scientific reasoning and understanding of physical laws of conservation, including weight and volume, develop. A child can understand multiple points of view and can understand one perspective of a situation. They realize the rules of the game can change with mutual agreement. Basic literacy skills of reading and numbers are mastered initially. Eventually, around third to fourth grade, the emphasis shifts from learning to read to reading to learn and from spelling to composition writing. All these stages need mastery of sustained attention and processing skills, receptive and expressive language, and memory development and recall. The limitation of this stage is an inability to comprehend abstract ideas and reliance on logical answers.

Twelve years and older: During this age, adolescents can exercise logic systematically and scientifically. They can simultaneously apply abstract thinking to solve algebraic problems and multiple logics to reach a scientific solution. It is easier to use these concepts for schoolwork. Later in adolescence and early adulthood, these concepts can also apply to emotional and personal life problems. Magical thinking or following ideals guides decisions more than wisdom. Some may have more influence from religious or moral rules and absolute concepts of right and wrong. Questioning the prevalent code of conduct may cause anxiety or rebellion and eventually lead to the development of personal ethics. Side by side, social cognition, apart from self, also is developing, and concepts of justice, patriarchy, politics, etc. establish. During late teens and early adulthood, thinking about the future, including ideas such as love, commitment, and career goals, become important. [2]

Issues of Concern

Pediatric and primary care practitioners are in a prime position to monitor the growth and development of children, particularly cognitive development. A lag in cognitive development may alert the provider to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disability, global developmental delay, developmental language disorder, developmental coordination disorder, mild intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorders, moderate-severe intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), or vision and auditory disorders.

The most well-known causes of intellectual disability are FASD, Down syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, other genetic or chromosomal problems, lead or other toxicities, and environmental influences such as poverty, malnutrition, abuse, and neglect. Prenatal causes of intellectual disability include infection, toxins and teratogens, congenital hypothyroidism, inborn errors of metabolism, and genetic abnormalities. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the most common preventable cause of intellectual disability. Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause, and Fragile X syndrome is the most common inherited cause. First-tier tests recommended for intellectual disability are chromosomal microarray and Fragile X testing.

Clinical concerns can arise in areas of visual analysis, proprioception, motor control, memory storage and recall, attention span and sequencing, and deficits in receptive or expressive language. Early recognition of intellectual disability leads to earlier diagnosis and intervention, showing promising results in improved cognition. Besides what is best for children and families, early intervention saves overall economic expenditure on disabilities. Thus, surveillance alone is inadequate; active screening for developmental delay should be an integral part of medical practice. [3] Some commonly used measures for screening are the Ages and Stages Questionnaire and the Survey of Well-being of Young Children. If the results of surveillance and screening are concerning, watchful waiting is inadequate, and a referral is necessary for early intervention.

Intellectual disability is defined when there is a concern for intellectual and adaptive functioning. Usually, on standardized measures, this means a score less than two standard deviations below the mean, which is 100 for most measures. Standardized tests used to measure intellectual function include the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI), and the Stanford-Binet test. One standardized test for adaptive functioning is the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale.

A learning disability should be suspected when the intelligence score is within the average range, but a significant discrepancy in achievement scores exists, or a child does not respond to evidence-based interventions. Evidence-based interventions include increasing instruction time and specialized instruction by trained personnel in deficit areas.

Clinical Significance

Early intervention during the "critical period" in development has shown promising results. [4] Thus clinicians must take the lead to diagnose, treat, and establish resources for early intervention to provide optimal health opportunities to our children. Early intervention services should be provided in two areas; biological risk/disabilities and environmental risk.

Pediatric and primary care practitioners should understand The Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) and other federal policies. Early intervention laws give entitlement to services from birth through early intervention home-based service, the Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) from birth to 3 years of age, and individualized education plans for ages 3 to 21 years. The goal is to minimize or prevent disability by accommodating children with intellectual disabilities or changing the curriculum to meet the individualized needs of the child. This plan should be based on an interprofessional assessment to understand the child's needs.

Thus, clinicians should partner with social workers, psychologists, or psychiatrists for thorough evaluations, lawyers to explore legal support and advocacy for services, therapists, early intervention providers, and schools to plan individualized goals and monitor progress.

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Disclosure: Fatima Malik declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Disclosure: Raman Marwaha declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits others to distribute the work, provided that the article is not altered or used commercially. You are not required to obtain permission to distribute this article, provided that you credit the author and journal.

Cite this Page Malik F, Marwaha R. Cognitive Development. [Updated 2023 Apr 23]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-.

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The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

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26 Development of Thinking in Children

Susan A. Gelman, University of Michigan, USA

Brandy N. Frazier, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Manoa, HI

Published: 21 November 2012
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Children's thinking is of broad relevance to the study of thinking and reasoning, because it provides insight into fundamental issues concerning the building blocks of cognition, the role of experience, and how conceptual change comes about. The present chapter reviews four main aspects of children's thinking: (1) developmental changes, and how best to characterize such changes; (2) early cognitive capacities in infancy and early childhood, and the methodological tools that reveal these capacities; (3) causal reasoning and naive theories in childhood; and (4) the ways in which children are prepared to learn from the actions and testimony of others. The chapter ends with open questions and directions for future research.

Introduction

Why study thinking in children.

Many people study thinking in children because they are interested in children: They may work with children in some capacity (as a teacher, or a speech therapist, for example), or they are parents and have had opportunity to observe their own child's growth (as with Charles Darwin, who wrote detailed observations of the development of his oldest son, William), or they may simply find children to be charming and inherently interesting (recall the popularity of the television show Kids Say the Darndest Things in the 1990s). There are also several theoretical reasons that the study of children's thought is relevant, indeed central, to anyone interested in thinking and reasoning.

The study of children tells us how knowledge comes about and how it evolves . The kinds of learning that take place in childhood are profound. Consider that in the first 4 years of life, children construct mental structures to deal with number, space, time, human relationships, physical principles, and organization of the objects and events surrounding them. These achievements entail inherently developmental issues—conceptual change, critical periods, nature-nurture—that can best be studied by a focus on children.

A focus on children reveals what is intelligent in even the humblest of behaviors . The simple act of grasping a rattle, or sucking on a hand, or retrieving a dropped toy, can reveal layers of capacity and skill (Oztop, Bradley, & Arbib, 2004 ; von Hofsten, 2007 ). This, in turn, helps sharpen the questions, What is thinking? and What are its separable components?

A focus on children tells us about human preparedness . What is special about our species that permits us to learn certain skills rapidly and with minimal training? Language is a key example. Children are actually better language learners than adults (Johnson & Newport, 1989 ). This suggests a biological preparedness to learn language. At the same time, this prepared learning takes place within certain constrained conditions (e.g., learning from live interlocutors, not televised images; Kuhl, Tsoa, & Liu, 2003 ).

Childhood lays bare human reasoning biases . Human thought is limited, biased, and prone to heuristics and shortcuts (Gigerenzer, 2000 ; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982 ). If one focuses on adults, these limitations can sometimes be difficult to see. In children, however, they are overt. One example is that of egocentrism. Originally proposed by Piaget and Inhelder ( 1956 ) to be characteristic of an early developmental stage, it turns out to be a tendency throughout the lifetime (Keysar, 2007 ).

Development is a methodological tool . The study of development answers questions that cannot otherwise be addressed when reasoning structures are well in place. Stephen Jay Gould ( 1983 ) exemplifies this point in his discussion of whether a zebra is a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes. An examination of a mature zebra provides no insight, since white and black stripes are intertwined. To answer this question, biologists have had to examine the developing zebra embryo (thereby reaching the conclusion that a zebra is a black animal with white stripes!). When focusing on human thought, developmental methods likewise permit special insights: Longitudinal methods reveal the stability of traits or beliefs over time, and microgenetic methods reveal the process of change as it unfolds (Siegler & Crowley, 1991 ).

Plan of This Chapter

This chapter takes a selective approach to the vast subject of the development of thinking, focusing on four main topics. First, we review the broad developmental changes in thought that take place in childhood, and we briefly discuss theoretical debates concerning how best to characterize these changes. Second, we review a sampling of the rich and varied evidence for early cognitive capacities, in infancy and early childhood. A consistent theme throughout the past 40 years has been the surprising complexity and sophistication of early thought. In this section, we also briefly touch on the importance of appropriate methodological tools for uncovering these abilities. Third, we consider the realm of causal reasoning and naive theories, as an example of the cognitive structures that children are building as well as processes that contribute to those structures. Finally, we note the importance of social input to children's developing thought, and the ways in which children are prepared to learn from the actions and testimony of others.

Developmental Change

When interacting with children, one is immediately struck by the differences in behavior as a function of age. Just by knowing a child's age, it is possible to predict quite accurately which skills the child will and will not yet have acquired. A newborn infant can't grasp a toy or recognize herself in a mirror, let alone talk or add a series of numbers. A 5-year-old child is highly skilled at language and mirror recognition and can recall past events but typically can't yet read or multiply numbers. A 10-year-old child can read, write, multiply, and divide but doesn't seem to have much grasp of the political issues of the day, has no methodological approach to scientific problems, and reasons about moral issues in a manner that seems rather rule-bound and rigid. A 17-year-old seems on a different plane of thought, able to reason skillfully about all of the issues that elude the younger children.

The theory that is best known and most influential to describe and explain these developments is that of Jean Piaget, the prominent Swiss scholar who is widely considered the “father” of cognitive developmental psychology. Piaget is rightly credited for a number of remarkable achievements. He came up with an ambitious, overarching theory that explains all of cognitive development (as opposed to working on just one aspect or sliver of cognition), and he is still recognized as capturing fundamental differences between children of different ages. Aspects of his theory are surprisingly forward looking and validated by more recent research. Piaget envisioned children as active, constructive thinkers, not simply passively taking in information supplied by others. He emphasized the importance of intrinsic motivation (vs. reward). And, over the course of a remarkably productive career, he made an amazing variety of interesting observations about children's thinking across many topics ranging from children's understanding of physical causality to their understanding of dreams, to their understanding of morality.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a full description or evaluation of Piaget's theory (see Flavell, 1963 ; Ginsburg & Opper, 1969 ; Piaget, 2000 ). However, we will briefly review his theory of stages and turn to four broader questions that underlie this framework: whether there can be said to be qualitative change over childhood in the nature of thought; whether children's thinking is domain general or domain specific; the nature of individual and cultural variation; and the effects of training and environmental experiences on cognitive development.

Piagetian Stages: A Brief Overview

Piaget proposed that children progress through four stages of thought, corresponding to distinct age periods: sensorimotor (0–2 years), preoperational (2–7 years), concrete operational (7–11 years), and formal operational (11 years +). Each of these stages is said to be characterized by certain limitations as well as certain achievements. For example, at the beginning of the sensorimotor period, infants don't realize that objects still exist when they disappear from view (i.e., they lack object permanence); at the beginning of the preoperational period, children don't realize that quantities are unchanging if their shape is transformed (i.e., they lack conservation of number, conservation of volume, etc.).

According to Piaget, stages have the following characteristics: Each stage is a qualitative advance from the previous stage; at a given stage, thinking is uniform, making use of the same structures to address a broad range of problems across a broad range of topics; the sequence of stages is unchanging and universal; and children can't be trained to move to a new stage before they're ready. Each of these assumptions has been called into question on the basis of more recent research evidence, which we review here.

Qualitative Versus Incremental Change

One tenet of stage theories is that children undergo qualitative changes in thought over time. For example, Piaget and Inhelder ( 1956 ) proposed that preoperational children are egocentric, literally having difficulty taking into account a perspective other than their own. On this view, it is not until the concrete operational stage that nonegocentric thought becomes possible. For example, when given a three-dimensional display depicting three mountains and asked to report the perspective of a person sitting across the table from themselves, preschool children typically report that the person sitting across from them will see the same spatial perspective as their own. In contrast, by 7 years of age, children will consistently report the other person's perspective correctly.

One of the central challenges to a stage theory is that Piaget underestimated children's abilities—sometimes strikingly so. Although there is controversy regarding just how capable infants and young children are (see Woodward & Needham, 2009 , for discussion), there is broad agreement than children are much more capable than Piaget's initial observations would suggest (see the later section entitled “Early Competence”). This critique has been directed toward both methodological and theoretical issues. At a methodological level, the concerns are multiple. Piaget's methods were highly demanding and complex from an information-processing perspective. Children were often asked to explain their answers (thus requiring verbal and metacognitive abilities, in addition to whatever conceptual capacity was being measured). In addition, Piaget's tasks were often embedded in an unfamiliar experimental context that did not permit children to make use of more familiar strategies or contexts. (We also note, however, that novel contexts may be required to reveal reasoning as opposed to retrieval of learned routines.)

Considering once again the example of egocentrism, researchers have found that a variety of modifications can lead to significantly earlier success on a perspective-taking task, including the following: simplifying the display (e.g., presenting a single object with distinctive vantage points, such as a mouse holding a candle in one hand, rather than a scene with multiple objects; Fishbein, Lewis, & Keiffer, 1972 ), simplifying the task (e.g., asking the child to rotate the mouse so that the candle is facing the researcher, rather than reporting a given perspective; Fishbein et al., 1972 ), or embedding the task in a more natural set of actions (e.g., communicating the presence of a hidden toy to a parent who has either witnessed the hiding event or not; O'Neill, 1996 ).

Furthermore, careful task analysis reveals that constructs that Piaget analyzed as unitary may have different levels, so that early capacities are present much younger than Piaget would have granted (again, undermining the notion of a qualitative leap in capacity). For example, perspective-taking turns out to have at least two distinct levels that emerge at different points developmentally (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981 ). Level-1 perspective taking entails knowing that someone has a different perspective from one's own; Level-2 perspective taking entails knowing what that perspective is. Children may fail to figure out what perspective another person has, while still having a basically nonegocentric grasp of perspectives. Furthermore, children 18 months of age understand that different people can have competing desires (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997 ), even though an understanding of competing beliefs takes longer to develop (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995 ; Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2007 ).

From a theoretical standpoint, researchers have criticized Piaget's assumption of developmental “dichotomies” (e.g., from concrete to abstract; Keil, Smith, Simons, & Levin, 1998 ). They note that the reverse developmental pattern can take place as well: An abstract conceptual “framework” may then later be filled in with specifics. For example, long before children have learned the particulars of what differentiates the insides of animals versus machines, they expect animals and machines to differ in their internal parts (Simons & Keil, 1995 ).

A final point of criticism is that adult thinking isn't as logical and mature as Piaget had suggested. Egocentrism provides a compelling example. Rather than being restricted to a particular developmental stage, egocentrism is found even among adults, using more subtle methods. For example, when placed in a referential communication task and given an ambiguous instruction that could be interpreted from either the speaker's perspective or from an egocentric perspective, adults first gaze toward the referent that is the egocentric interpretation (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000 ). Similarly, when asked to judge whether a hypothetical hiker would be in greater need of food or drink, participants implicitly take an egocentric perspective, being more likely to select “drink” when they themselves are thirsty than when they are not (Van Boven & Loewenstein, 2003 ).

What do these critiques of Piaget imply about the broader issue of qualitative versus incremental change? Some have concluded that there is no qualitative change in cognitive development, and that instead what is most striking is the continuity from childhood through adulthood (Keil, 1981 ; Spelke, 2004 ). Others argue for qualitative change, without the additional commitment to stages, though the nature of that change is quite varied. For example, some have proposed that children's thought changes from associative to theory based (Rakison & Lupyan, 2008 ; Sloutsky, 2003 ), whereas others argue that children's thought is more akin to theory change in science (Carey, 2009 ; Gopnik & Schulz, 2004 ). Maturational changes (e.g., in working memory; in prefrontal cortext and inhibitory control) have also been proposed to yield stage-like shifts (Case, 1992 , 1995 ; Halford, Cowan, & Andrews, 2007 ; Morrison & Knowlton, Chapter 6 ). These issues are among the most central puzzles of cognitive development.

Domain Generality Versus Domain Specificity

Piaget proposed that thinking at a given stage was “all of a piece”—a child who is preoperational when reasoning about quantity is also preoperational when reasoning about morality, gender, classification, or perspective taking. In other words, he assumed that domain-general principles characterize thought. Although domain-general principles are important, more recent evidence shows that domain-specific principles are also important. For example, children do better than adults at learning a second language, whereas adults do better than children at learning higher mathematics, thus suggesting that different processes are at work in these different domains (Gelman & Noles, 2011 ).

At least three sources have been offered to account for domain differences in cognitive development: modularity, experience and expertise, and causal theories. Modularity is the position that certain cognitive processes are biologically constrained as the result of our evolutionary heritage. Development in these areas is thought to be highly predictable, making use of innate structures and domain-specific processes. Often (though not necessarily) these domains are associated with particular brain regions. A classic example is that of face perception, which emerges early and predictably in infancy and is associated with the fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2009 ). Other cognitive processes that have been hypothesized to reflect modularity are language acquisition (Pinker, 1994 ) or numerical reasoning (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004 ).

Expertise can also exert powerful domain-specific effects in children's cognitive performance. A striking example is that a child chess expert outperforms an adult chess novice, when it comes to memory for chess pieces on a chessboard (Chi, 1978 ). These differences disappear when examining memory outside the domain of expertise (e.g., digit span). One area where expertise effects have significant long-term implications is that of becoming a skilled reader, and there is great interest in understanding the changes that take place with increasing literacy experiences (Treiman & Kessler, 2007 ).

A final perspective on domain specificity is that children construct causal knowledge structures, often referred to as naïve theories, that reflect the particular ontology and causal processes of a particular domain (e.g., a theory of mind concerns thoughts and beliefs; a theory of physics concerns objects and forces). On this view, children are seen as analogous to scientists who devise theories to explain phenomena around them and revise those theories in light of contradictory evidence. However, young children differ from scientists in several important respects: They do not systematically test the hypotheses they entertain, and they do not engage in precise measurement or disconfirmation of alternative hypotheses (Kuhn et al., 1988 ). Nonetheless, children are like scientists in positing basic ontological distinctions and making causal predictions (Wellman & Gelman, 1998 ). Furthermore, children take in new evidence and revise their hypotheses on the basis of such evidence, as can be seen in the layers of increasing detail and specificity in infants' understanding of physical support (Baillargeon, Li, Ng, & Yuan, 2009 ).

Individual and Cultural Variation

One area that has not received much research attention concerns the nature of individual differences in cognitive development, as well as cultural variation in the processes of developmental change. Of particular interest is whether these simply involve changes in rate of development (e.g., some individuals achieving a certain milestone earlier than others), or whether there are qualitative changes in the process or outcome of development.

Recent evidence suggests that there are remarkably stable individual differences in various areas, including theory-of-mind reasoning (Wellman, Lopez-Duran, LaBounty, & Hamilton, 2008 ), mathematics reasoning (Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson, 2008 ; see Opfer & Siegler, Chapter 30 ), and processing speed (Rose, Feldman, & Wallace, 1988 ). For example, individual differences at age 14 in children's ability to discriminate large, uncountable sets of dots in a visual attention task correlate highly with scores on standardized mathematics achievement tests going back to kindergarten (Halberda et al., 2008 ). These data suggest that differences found in infancy or early childhood relate to more complex tasks presented later in life, and they argue for continuity across strikingly different tasks.

The importance of cultural context is also a critical issue that has not been sufficiently acknowledged in the past but is beginning to receive more attention. Research with adults demonstrates that cognitive principles once thought to be universal may reflect particular cultural values (Markus & Kitayama, 1991 ; Nisbett, 2003 ). For excellent developmental work on this topic, see Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, and Maynard ( 2003 ), Rogoff ( 2003 ), Astuti, Solomon, and Carey ( 2004 ), and Waxman, Medin, and Ross ( 2007 ).

Effects of Training and Experience

Piaget ( 1964 ) famously proposed that training cannot affect the progression of stages; the child must be developmentally ready before he or she is capable of benefitting from experience. To some extent this is certainly true: A lesson in calculus will have no effect on a 4-year-old child. Yet it is also clear that children are much more susceptible to training effects than Piaget had originally conceived. Recent intriguing studies demonstrate that certain motor experiences have broad cognitive consequences. For example, the onset of self-propelled locomotion (either crawling or use of a walker) is associated with a host of changes, including reluctance to cross a visual cliff (Campos et al., 2000 ). Furthermore, providing 3-month-olds with the means to pick up objects, by giving them “sticky mittens” (i.e., Velcro-backed mittens and Velcro-backed toys), leads them not only to explore the objects more intensely (Needham, Barrett, & Peterman, 2002 ) but also to interpret perceived events in a more sophisticated way (i.e., seeing a reach toward an object as directed toward a particular goal, rather than just a movement of a certain trajectory; Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005 ).

Experience can also lead to dramatic changes in perceptual and categorical processing. For example, specific experiences can lead to a process known as perceptual narrowing. At 6 months, infants can universally discriminate all the phonemes of the world's languages (e.g., p vs. p; l vs. r). However, with experience with just their native tongue(s), by 12 months infants lose the capacity to distinguish phonemes to which they are not exposed (e.g., infants exposed to just Japanese lose the capacity to distinguish l vs. r; infants exposed to just English lose the capacity to distinguish two different t sounds in Hindi; Werker & Desjardins, 1995 ). Perceptual narrowing is not simply an effect of speech perception, but rather seems to be found in a broad range of perceptual abilities (Scott, Pascalis, & Nelson, 2007 ). One intriguing example concerns face perception, where infants at 3 months show the capacity to discriminate faces of all races equally well, but by 9 months do much better discriminating faces to which they have been exposed; for example, White babies distinguish other White faces better than Asian faces (Kelly et al., 2007 ).

Early Capacities

In the prior section, we reviewed some of the evidence indicating that children are much more capable than traditional Piagetian theory would suggest. In this section we consider what children's early capacities are like. We start by discussing methodological issues. Then, because this topic is too large to review in entirety, we have selected a few key themes: infants can represent objects and events; children are not limited to concrete representations; and learning concepts entails more than forming associations. Collectively, these phenomena illustrate the surprising subtlety and sophistication of early thought.

Methodology Matters

One firmly established lesson from the past 40 years of research on children's cognitive development is that methodology matters: How one operationalizes and assesses children's thinking has a powerful influence on children's performance and on the conclusions we draw about their capacities. Time and again we see that task modifications can lead to much more sophisticated performance. Children—especially young children—face difficulty when presented with tasks that require sophisticated verbal, metacognitive, planning, or information-processing skills. For example, Piaget's object permanence task requires that infants pull a cover off a hidden object to demonstrate knowledge that an object remains in existence even if it is out of sight. This requires an ability to hold and grasp the cover, as well as sufficient memory and planning skills to keep in mind the goal of retrieving the object while focusing on the task of removing the cover. The method of tracking infants' looking-time presents a much less demanding task (all babies need do is look), and it shows that infants do indeed track the existence of hidden objects, expecting them to occupy space of a certain size (and therefore evidencing surprise when a barrier moves through the space that the object should occupy; Baillargeon, 1987 ). More generally, numerous experimental techniques have been devised for infants that make use of the behaviors they have at their disposal (e.g., habituation, head turning, or high-amplitude sucking techniques; Cohen & Cashon, 2006 ).

Moreover, in some cases infants have limitations that interfere with a conceptual understanding they in fact possess. A good example of this is again with object permanence tasks. One clever task that Piaget devised is the “A-not-B” task, where babies see a desired object hidden repeatedly at one location (A), and then see the object hidden at a new location (B). By 10 months of age, infants successfully find the object in location A, but erroneously continue to search at location A even when they saw the desired object being hidden at B. This is known as the A-not-B error. Piaget attributed this error to an incomplete representation of the object. However, it turns out that a difficulty inhibiting well-practiced responses contributes to this error (Diamond, 1991 ).

Even when studying older children, it is easy to underestimate their capacity. One problem is that children have difficulty verbalizing concepts that they possess. For example, children have trouble talking about traits (Livesley & Bromley, 1973 ), yet they show an understanding of cross-situation consistency when tested with more directed questioning (Heyman & Gelman, 1998 ; Liu, Gelman, & Wellman, 2007 ). Another issue involves information-processing demands. For example, one study found that children's pattern of picture recall seemed to differ systematically from that of adults, with children focusing exclusively on individual items and adults focusing exclusively on the category to which the items belonged (Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004a , b ). However, when the length of time each item was presented to participants is controlled, by equating the length of exposure for children and adults, the developmental difference disappeared (Wilburn & Feeney, 2008 ).

Although simpler methods reveal earlier capacities in children, this point does not imply that there are no developmental changes in children's cognitive abilities. At times, simplified tasks reduce the need for sophisticated performance. Similarly, earlier knowledge can be more fragile or limited than later understandings. Thus, for example, although even preschool children can perform analogical reasoning when the perceptual or causal bases for comparisons are made salient (Goswami, 1992 ), there are nonetheless developmental changes in the depth, complexity, and sophistication of the conceptual relations children can consider (Uttal, Gentner, Liu, & Lewis, 2008 ).

Infants Can Represent Objects and Events

As seen by the earlier brief review of object permanence, we now know that preverbal infants can represent objects and events, even when they are out of sight. Not only do infants represent that an object exists, they also represent details of that object, such as its height, density, solidity (e.g., object vs. substance), and capacity to contain things (Baillargeon et al., 2009 ). They can link visual cues with cross-modal cues (e.g., understanding that a visually bumpy surface matches a tactilely bumpy surface; Gottfried, Rose, & Bridger, 1977 ). They expect objects to display unity across time and space (Spelke, 2004 ). They represent the distinction between animate and inanimate objects and expect only animate objects to move on their own (Opfer & Gelman, 2010 ). They can interpret point-light displays and distinguish animate from inanimate motion on this basis (Arterberry & Bornstein, 2002 ). They detect patterns in complex motion, parsing action into distinct events (Baldwin, Baird, Saylor, & Clark, 2001 ). And they represent the number of objects in an array and can perform simple operations of addition and subtraction (Wynn, 1992 ).

Preverbal infants are also capable of representing information over time; that is, they form enduring memories. Thus, upon viewing a novel event, such as a person making a special lightbox light up by pushing down on it with his forehead, 9-month-olds remember the event over a delay, reproducing the event when presented with the box 1 week later (Meltzoff, 1988 ). Infants can remember novel events (e.g., the steps required to form a toy rattle) over periods lasting a year or more, although the quality of the memory and the amount retained over time improve with age (Bauer, 2006 ).

Infants still have a tremendous amount to learn about the world around them, but they have a wealth of early-emerging capacities that make sense of experience.

Young Children Are Not Limited to Concrete Representations

A long-standing and persistent view in the developmental literature is that development entails a process of moving from concrete to abstract. On this view, young children are capable of holding only concrete representations and are unable to form more abstract ideas (see Simons & Keil, 1995 , for review). This position, however, is belied by a variety of evidence showing that even preschool children readily reason about nonobvious, nonvisible, or abstract entities. One realm in which this is powerfully demonstrated is that of reasoning about mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires). Although there is clear improvement over time in children's theory of mind (Wellman, in press; Wellman & Liu, 2004 ), even before 2 years of age, infants implicitly recognize that a person may hold a false belief (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005 ), and that a failed action nonetheless has an intended goal (Brandone & Wellman, 2009 ; Meltzoff, 1995 ).

Another demonstration of children's ability to represent abstraction is in the realm of what is called “generic knowledge” (Prasada, 2000 ). Although children have experience strictly with individuals (this apple, that chair), they rapidly and readily generalize from experience with individuals to abstractions regarding the category as a whole (apples, chairs; Waxman & Markow, 1995 ). For example, by 30 months of age, children make use of subtle linguistic cues (“Blicks drink milk” vs. “These blicks drink milk”) to extend a novel property to a broad class of instances (Graham, Nayer, & Gelman, 2011 ). Generic concepts may even be a default representation for young children, as they seem to learn generics before more formal modes of expressing generalization such as quantified noun phrases (e.g., “all blicks;” Hollander, Gelman, & Star, 2002 ; Leslie, 2008 ).

By 3 years of age, children can use verbal information to update their representations of absent objects (Ganea, Shutts, Spelke, & DeLoache, 2007 ) and use abstract symbols such as maps or model representations to skillfully to navigate through space (DeLoache, 1987 ; Uttal, Gregg, Tan, Chamberlin, & Sines, 2001 ). They can reason about abstract relations, such as ownership, despite the fact that an owned object is concretely no different from a nonowned object (Blake & Harris, 2009 ; Gelman, Manczak, & Noles, in press; Kim & Kalish, 2009 ; Neary, Friedman, & Burnstein, 2009 ; Williamson, Jaswal, & Meltzoff, 2010 ). For example, they place special value on their own special toys or objects and would much rather own the original attachment object than an exact duplicate (Hood & Bloom, 2008 ). They believe that food or drink can contain invisible particles (Au, Sidle, & Rollins, 1993 ; Legare, Wellman, & Gelman, 2009 ), and that germs can lead to illness (Kalish, 1996 ; Raman, 2009 ). They believe that unseen internal parts or power can have causal effects (Gelman, 2003 ; Gottfried & Gelman, 2005 ; Sobel, Yoachim, Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Blumenthal, 2007 ). They seem to posit an invisible “essence” shared by members of a category (Gelman, 2003 ).

The evidence indicates that children are not limited to concrete representations. Indeed, in some cases the developmental process is from abstract to concrete rather than the reverse: The child at times starts with a more abstract representation that then gets filled in with concrete details over time (Gelman & Williams, 1998 ; Simons & Keil, 1995 ; Wellman & Gelman, 1998 ).

Learning Concepts Entails More Than Forming Associations

Another important theme regarding cognitive development is that when children learn concepts (and words to express those concepts), they are not simply forming associations but instead are creating meaningful interpretations of experience (Waxman & Gelman, 2009 ). For example, Preissler and Carey ( 2004 ) taught 18-month-old and 24-month-old toddlers a new word (“whisk”) while showing them a photograph of the referent (namely, a photo of a whisk). After repeated experience with this name-picture association, children were presented with a test in which they were asked to pick the “whisk,” given a choice between (1) another photo that was highly similar to the one used during teaching and (2) an actual, three-dimensional whisk object. If the word-learning process is merely one of association (see e.g., Sloutsky, 2003 ), then children should select the choice that is more perceptually similar to the taught-upon item, namely, the picture. However, if the word-learning process entails conceptual interpretation, then children should understand the relationship to involve reference (not merely association) and select the object (which the picture symbolizes). When this same experiment is conducted with autistic children, they respond differently, linking the word with the picture—thus arguably treating the word as associatively linked to the object rather than representing the object (Preissler & Carey, 2005 ).

A further important demonstration that children do not treat word-object links as purely associative is that children attend to pragmatic, communicative cues from the speaker. If such cues are unavailable, children will not link a word to a referent. Thus, if a novel word is presented in an incidental, nonintentional manner (e.g., projected over a loudspeaker in the room in which the child is sitting), children fail to link the word to the object. The word must be spoken in an intentional, face-to-face interaction (Baldwin, 1993 ). Furthermore, if the speaker and the child are initially focused on different objects, children check the speaker to gauge her direction of gaze and link the word to the speaker's focus of attention, not to their own initial focus of attention (Baldwin, 1993 ). Put a slightly different way, the association between word and object is blocked when the appropriate communicative cues are not in place. Again, however, autistic children perform differently, linking the word to their own focus of attention rather than that of the speaker (Baron-Cohen, Baldwin, & Crowson, 1997 ). Finally, if the speaker expresses some uncertainty as to the correctness of the label, children also fail to link the word to the referent (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001 ). Again, this suggests that the word-object relationship is one of reference rather than association.

Causal Reasoning and Naive Theories

A number of researchers have advanced the view that children's thought can be construed as sharing important similarities with scientific theories, with a focus on domain-specific ontologies, causal processes, and coherent knowledge structures that undergo qualitative reorganizations over time (Carey, 1985 ; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994 ). Although the analogy is imperfect (e.g., young children are poor at conducting systematic scientific investigations to test their theories; Kuhn et al., 1988 ), the “theory theory” has been a productive framework for characterizing cognitive development. In this section, we focus on the role of ontologies and causation in children's early reasoning, as well as the implications of the theory theory for conceptual change.

Ontological commitments are those that distinguish different kinds of entities that participate in distinct causal laws. For example, everyday intuition tells us that mental states are distinct from physical objects, even though the mind influences the body (and vice versa), and even though mental states ultimately have a physical basis in the brain. Despite these demonstrable links between mental and physical, we act as if mental entities and physical entities are wholly different sorts of things. Indeed, children and adults alike seem to have difficulty even considering a relation between these two domains, maintaining a strict dualism (Bloom, 2004 ; Notaro, Gelman, & Zimmerman, 2001 ; Schulz, Bonawitz, & Griffiths, 2007 ).

From early childhood, children show evidence for ontological commitments in at least three distinct domains: physics, psychology, and biology (Wellman & Gelman, 1998 ). That is, they have expectations regarding three-dimensional, bounded physical objects, expectations regarding mental states and mental activities, and expectations regarding self-moving, spontaneously growing entities. Thus, even infants expect that objects, but not shadows, occupy space (Van de Walle, Rubenstein, & Spelke, 1998 ), that mental states are distinct from physical objects (Wellman, in press), and that people and inanimate objects engage in different patterns of object motion (Opfer & Gelman, 2010 ).

Infants are also highly sensitive to causal relations linking objects or events. For example, 3-month-old infants readily learn the contingency between their own action and a causal effect (e.g., kicking to make a mobile move; Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2001 ), and within the first year of life, infants respond with more positive affect to events that they cause versus those that are uncorrelated with their actions (Gunnar-Vongnechten, 1978 ; Lewis, Alessandri, & Sullivan, 1990 ; Watson, 1972 ). Seven-month-old infants also distinguish a causal physical event (e.g., a ball colliding with another ball, causing it to move) from the backward version of that same event (Leslie, 1984 ; but see Oakes & Cohen, 1990 ).

An attention to causal relations can be seen in older children's commonsense theories as well. Children place special priority on causal features, treating them as more important than other sorts of features (an effect known as the “causal status hypothesis”; Ahn & Kim, 2001 ). For example, if children learn that a novel animal has three features, one of which (promicin in its bones) causes the other two (thick bones, big eyes), they are more likely to classify a new instance as a member of that category if it possesses the causal feature but is missing one of the other two features, than if it possesses the other two features but is missing the causal one (Ahn, Gelman, Amsterlaw, Hohenstein, & Kalish, 2000 ).

Within specific theories, children display a combination of openness to new causal relations (informed by statistical patterns in the input) and expectations or biases that are informed by prior knowledge and/or ontologies. So, for example, children are highly attentive to statistical cues in the input and use them to learn about how a machine works (Gopnik & Sobel, 2000 ), what a new word means (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007 ), or how to generalize a new property from one animal to another (Rhodes, Gelman, & Brickman, 2010 ). At the same time, children have a “self-agency bias,” whereby they are biased interpreters of statistical evidence: They are more likely to interpret their own action as having a causal effect than the actions of another person (Kushnir, Wellman, & Gelman, 2009 ).

As another example, children below about 10 years of age expect that mental states cannot have physical effects, thereby resisting the notion of psychogenic illness (e.g., worrying causing a stomach ache; Schulz et al., 2007 ). However, if children receive repeated empirical evidence in favor of such a causal account, then even 3–1/2-year-olds can overturn this assumption (Bonawitz, Fischer, & Schulz, in press). Children, like scientists, make use of a combination of preexisting theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence to derive new conclusions (see Cheng & Buehner, Chapter 12 ).

Theory Change

One of the more far-reaching implications of treating children's concepts as organized into naive theories is what this approach suggests about conceptual change. Carey ( 2009 , p. 18) argued that theory change in childhood is analogous to theory change in science: “human beings, alone among animals, have the capacity to create representational systems that transcend sensory representations and core cognition … [they] create new representational resources that are qualitatively different from the representations they are built from.” For example, although infants have an innate capacity to represent quantities (a parallel individuation system that represents individuals and so permits solving simple addition and subtraction problems; Wynn, 1992 ), they do not accurately represent positive integers until 3 or 4 years of age (Carey, 2009 ). Other domains in which conceptual change has been argued for and studied include object kinds, social kinds, theory of mind, matter/substance, and heat/temperature.

Learning From Others

To this point, we have largely focused on the impressive capacities and knowledge of infants and children. However, cognitive development happens not just in the head of the developing individual but also through a process of social interactions with others from whom children can learn (without having to discover everything themselves; see Gelman, 2009 , Rogoff, 2003 ; Vygotsky, 1934 / 1962 ).

Learning from others is a powerful tool for gaining knowledge about a range of topics, and especially those that are difficult to observe firsthand (Harris & Koenig, 2006 ). For example, during the preschool and elementary school years, children learn about how our brains are related to thinking, remembering, and personal identity (Johnson & Wellman, 1982 ); they learn that the earth that we live on is a sphere despite the flat appearance of the surrounding ground (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992 ); and they learn that when a living thing dies, it is often related to the breakdown or cessation of hidden internal body parts (such as a heart that stops beating; Slaughter & Lyons, 2003 ). Coming to these conclusions would be difficult without the provision of information (or “testimony”) from more expert adults (Harris & Koenig, 2006 ).

Pedagogical Stance

From infancy onward, children seem to expect that the people around them have the goal of teaching them new information (i.e., a “pedagogical” stance; Csibra & Gergely, 2009 ). Infants and young children interpret and learn differently from situations that they construe as pedagogical (e.g., where the adult deliberately seeks and maintains eye contact with the child) than from situations that they construe as nonpedagogical (e.g., where the adult makes no attempt to engage the child's attention). They seem biased to interpret intentional communication as conveying information that will generalize to new contexts. For example, to use Csibra and Gergely's example, if I demonstrate how to open a certain type of container (e.g., a milk carton), the child will assume that I am teaching him how to open containers of that kind in general. He does not need repeated demonstrations in order to reach this conclusion. Furthermore, some of children's seeming “errors” can be reinterpreted in light of this bias. For example, consider infants' classic A-not-B error (searching for an object in a location where it has most typically been hidden, rather than in the location where it was last hidden; Piaget, 1954 ). Csibra and Gergely suggest that this error reflects infants' assumption that the adult is teaching them where the toy is supposed to be stored (i.e., they assume that the adult is teaching them something general about this toy). And indeed, consistent with this interpretation, if the experimenter does not provide communicative cues (e.g., by not first making eye contact with the infant), then the A-not-B error is greatly reduced (Topál, Gergely, Miklósi, Erdohegyi, & Csibra, 2008 ).

One important means of obtaining information from others is imitation, or copying the actions of others. It is well established that children can engage in imitation of others from earliest infancy (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977 ; Meltzoff & Williamson, 2010 ). Furthermore, children's imitation appears to have certain qualities that are distinct from that of other species. First, children imitate rather than merely emulate (Tomasello, 1999 ). That is, children attempt to copy the model's (intentional) actions, and they do not simply learn something about the environment as a result of observing the results of the model's actions. For example, if shown how to obtain a toy by holding a tool in a particular fashion, young children will carefully rotate the tool to imitate the precise action of the model, whereas apes will not attend to the manner in which the tool is used (Penn & Povinelli, Chapter 27 ; but see Whiten, McGuigan, Marshall-Pescini, & Hopper, 2009 , for some evidence of imitation in chimpanzees).

Second, children overimitate rather than just focus on the relevant task dimensions (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007 ). For example, if shown how to operate a novel machine using a sequence of actions that includes both causally efficacious (e.g., removing a bolt) and causally irrelevant steps (e.g., tapping on an empty compartment), preschool children will imitate both the efficacious and irrelevant steps. Lyons et al. suggest that children do so because they presume that all the steps provided by the model are causally relevant, even in the face of seemingly contradictory evidence.

And third, children imitate intentional actions and intended actions, rather than just surface behaviors (Meltzoff, 1995 ). Thus, if 18-month-old children view an adult engaging in an unsuccessful attempt to extract a toy from a location, but where the intended goal is clear, they will imitate in such a way as to carry out the intended action, and not simply to carry out the observed (uncompleted) motor movements. Thus, children's imitation does not simply involve mimicking surface features of an action, but it entails consideration of the model's intentions. If an action is highlighted as clearly accidental rather than intentional, toddlers will selectively imitate the intentional aspect (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998 ). Similarly, if an unusual action (e.g., turning on a lightbox with one's head rather than one's hands) has no obvious causal basis, children imitate precisely what the model has done (turning it on with their head), but if the unusual action has an obvious causal basis (e.g., the model's hands are otherwise occupied), then children imitate the more efficient means of carrying out the result (e.g., turning it on with their hands) (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002 ).

Evaluating Testimony

Although children learn in contexts that are intended to be instructional, they also extract a great deal of knowledge from the everyday activities taking place around them (Callanan, 2006 ). For example, everyday conversations provide a rich source of information about gender (Gelman, Taylor, & Nguyen, 2004 ) and natural kind categories (Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998 )—even when adults do not intend to teach children specifically about these topics. In addition, children play an active role in obtaining information through conversation. By 2.5–3 years of age, children begin to actively seek knowledge from others by persistently asking causal questions of adults (Callanan & Oakes, 1992 ; Chouinard, 2007 ; Hood & Bloom, 1979 ). Even from this young age, children appear to be asking these “why” and “how” questions with the goal of obtaining explanations—they react with satisfaction when they get an explanation and are likely to repeat their question when they do not (Frazier, Gelman, & Wellman, 2009 ; see Lombrozo, Chapter 14 ).

However, the information provided by those around us is not always accurate, as informants may intentionally or unintentionally provide incorrect information. Again, children are not passive in this process. Children actively discriminate between different sources of information and choose from whom they should learn (or, alternatively, ignore).

Early work on children's attention to adult “testimony” was focused on word-learning tasks. For example, Koenig, Clément, and Harris ( 2004 ) asked children to observe two individuals: one who gave correct labels for familiar objects, and one who gave incorrect labels (e.g., stating, “That's a shoe” in reference to a ball). The children then saw the same two individuals naming a novel object with two different novel names (“That's a mido/toma”). When asked what the object is called (“Is this a mido or a toma?”), both 3- and 4-year-olds in this study picked the label from the accurate informant over the one provided by the previously inaccurate informant.

This methodology (choosing between two informants with conflicting claims) has been extended from word learning to a variety of tasks, including (but not limited to) causal inferences (Kushnir, Wellman, & Gelman, 2009 ), object functions (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, 2008 ), and emulation of actions (Birch, Akmal, & Frampton, 2010 ). This research has also explored many factors that affect which person's testimony children will choose to use to guide their learning. Children robustly attend to testimony from accurate informants across a variety of situations and types of knowledge. Preschoolers track the relative accuracy of informants (Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, 2007 ), favoring those who provide the highest proportion of accurate answers. Three- and 4-year-olds are sensitive to not only what an informant knows but also whether that informant has been allowed to use that knowledge (e.g., when the knowledgeable informant has been blindfolded; Kushnir et al., 2009 ). Five-year-olds expect that an individual who provides the correct labels for familiar objects will also know more about words, will know more general facts, and, interestingly, will also behave more prosocially (Brosseau-Liard & Birch, 2010 ). Children are even willing to override their own observations when they conflict with the testimony being offered by a previously accurate informant (Jaswal, 2010 ; Ma & Ganea, 2010 ).

Children's ability to evaluate informants also demonstrates appropriate flexibility; information regarding the social characteristics of the informant interacts with information regarding their accuracy in the decisions children make about whom to believe. For example, children evaluate an expert as more knowledgeable than a nonexpert (Lutz & Keil, 2002 ). And when given the choice between a child and an adult informant, if both are accurate, 3- and 4-year-old children prefer the adult (Jaswal & Neely, 2006 ). However, if the adult provides inaccurate labels, preschool-aged children trust the testimony of a child over that of the inaccurate adult (Jaswal & Neely, 2006 ). In addition, providing trait labels (referring to an informant as “very good” or “not very good” at answering a question as opposed to “right” or “wrong”) can lead 4-year-olds to prefer an accurate informant after only one trial (Fitneva & Dunfield, 2010 ). Even 2-year-old children use nonverbal cues from a single instance to select confident informants over informants who appear uncertain (Birch et al., 2010 ). However, an open question in this research concerns developmental changes in children's ability to critically evaluate the statements of deceptive individuals with self-serving motives (Heyman, 2008 ).

A larger open question for this body of research concerns how children's trust in testimony relates to their important social relationships. We know that preschoolers ask questions and that they are capable of focusing on the accuracy of testimony (even in the presence of other conflicting, tempting factors), but we do not yet know much about whose testimony children seek out and pay attention to within their everyday lives. A study by Corriveau et al. (2009) begins to explore this question in an interesting way. These researchers looked at the relationship between the attachment status of preschoolers and their willingness to accept their mother's versus a stranger's claims. The researchers found that children with secure attachment status preferred their mother's claims over that of the stranger (unless there were conflicting perceptual cues favoring the stranger's claim). However, regardless of the perceptual cues, children classified as having an avoidant attachment status were more likely to favor the stranger's claim over their mother's, and the children classified as reactive attachment status showed the opposite pattern (relying more on their mother's claims even with conflicting perceptual information that favored the stranger's claim).

Conclusions and Future Directions

Children's thinking is of broad interest to cognitive scientists, because it provides insight into fundamental issues concerning the building blocks of cognition, the role of experience, and how conceptual change comes about. As reviewed in this chapter, prior research provides a wealth of evidence regarding these issues. Nonetheless, many open questions remain. One set of questions concerns the early capacities in infancy that have been uncovered over the past 30 years. Increasingly sophisticated methods have revealed increasingly sophisticated understandings in preverbal infants, yet we still do not fully understand the basis of these capacities. What is innate, and what is learned rapidly during the first few months of life? Is early infancy a kind of critical period? In a related vein, what kinds of input should children receive at a young age? For example, to what extent do the first few months or years of life represent a special period during which rich exposure to different languages, faces, and so on is crucial, and to what extent can these capabilities be acquired later in development? Another puzzle raised by the findings of early capacities in infancy is why infants sometimes succeed on tasks that older children fail (e.g., theory of mind understanding; grasp of physical laws; e.g., Hood, Carey, & Prasada, 2000 ; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005 ).

Another set of open issues stems from the finding that much of children's knowledge comes about from social interactions with others (Gelman, 2009 ). Clearly, social understanding plays a major role in cognitive understanding. This then raises the question of how children determine which sources of knowledge to attend to and learn from. Children must somehow sort out the different sources of knowledge, to figure out whom to believe and trust, and whom not to believe or trust. To what extent do (and should) children learn from media sources (e.g., TV, books, videos)? Other useful endeavors would be to integrate the research on testimony with research examining the questions children ask in informal learning contexts, and to investigate how children and adults work together to build an understanding of a phenomenon (e.g., Crowley et al., 2001 ; Siegel, Esterly, Callanan, Wright, & Navarro, 2007 ; see Callanan & Valle, 2008 for a related integration).

Finally, future research would benefit from examining cognitive development from new perspectives—both new from a comparative approach and new from a methodological approach. Examining children's thought in a variety of social and cultural contexts promises to reveal new insights. New advances are being made in examining what (if anything) is unique to humans versus other species. And of course it will be crucial to understand the neurological bases of cognitive performance and cognitive change.

Acknowledgments

Support for this chapter was supported by NICHD grant HD-36043 to Susan A. Gelman. We thank Keith Holyoak and Bob Siegler for very helpful comments on a prior draft.

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Developmental Psychology 101: Theories, Stages, & Research

You can imagine how vast this field of psychology is if it has to cover the whole of life, from birth through death.

Just like any other area of psychology, it has created exciting debates and given rise to fascinating case studies.

In recent years, developmental psychology has shifted to incorporate positive psychology paradigms to create a holistic lifespan approach. As an example, the knowledge gained from positive psychology can enhance the development of children in education.

In this article, you will learn a lot about different aspects of developmental psychology, including how it first emerged in history and famous theories and models.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is developmental psychology, 4 popular theories, stages, & models, 2 questions and research topics, fascinating case studies & research findings, a look at positive developmental psychology, applying developmental psychology in education, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Human beings change drastically over our lifetime.

The American Psychological Association (2020) defines developmental psychology as the study of physical, mental, and behavioral changes, from conception through old age.

Developmental psychology investigates biological, genetic, neurological, psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors of human growth (Burman, 2017).

Over the years, developmental psychology has been influenced by numerous theories and models in varied branches of psychology (Burman, 2017).

History of developmental psychology

Developmental psychology first appeared as an area of study in the late 19th century (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2007). Developmental psychology focused initially on child and adolescent development, and was concerned about children’s minds and learning (Hall, 1883).

There are several key figures in developmental psychology. In 1877, the famous evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin undertook the first study of developmental psychology on innate communication forms. Not long after, physiologist William Preyer (1888) published a book on the abilities of an infant.

The 1900s saw many significant people dominating the developmental psychology field with their detailed theories of development: Sigmund Freud (1923, 1961), Jean Piaget (1928), Erik Erikson (1959), Lev Vygotsky (1978), John Bowlby (1958), and Albert Bandura (1977).

By the 1920s, the scope of developmental psychology had begun to include adult development and the aging process (Thompson, 2016).

In more recent years, it has broadened further to include prenatal development (Brandon et al., 2009). Developmental psychology is now understood to encompass the complete lifespan (Baltes et al., 2007).

Each of these models has contributed to the understanding of the process of human development and growth.

Furthermore, each theory and model focuses on different aspects of development: social, emotional, psychosexual, behavioral, attachment, social learning, and many more.

Here are some of the most popular models of development that have heavily contributed to the field of developmental psychology.

1. Bowlby’s attachment styles

The seminal work of psychologist John Bowlby (1958) showcased his interest in children’s social development. Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) developed the most famous theory of social development, known as attachment theory .

Bowlby (1969) hypothesized that the need to form attachments is innate, embedded in all humans for survival and essential for children’s development. This instinctive bond helps ensure that children are cared for by their parent or caregiver (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980).

Bowlby’s original attachment work was developed further by one of his students, Mary Ainsworth. She proposed several attachment styles between the child and the caregiver (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970).

This theory clearly illustrates the importance of attachment styles to a child’s future development. Consistent and stable caregiving results in a secure attachment style (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). In contrast, unstable and insecure caregiving results in several negative attachment styles: ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Main & Solomon, 1986).

Bowlby’s theory does not consider peer group influence or how it can shape children’s personality and development (Harris, 1998).

2. Piaget’s stage theory

Jean Piaget was a French psychologist highly interested in child development. He was interested in children’s thinking and how they acquire, construct, and use their knowledge (Piaget, 1951).

Piaget’s (1951) four-stage theory of cognitive development sequences a child’s intellectual development. According to this theory, all children move through these four stages of development in the same order (Simatwa, 2010).

The sensorimotor stage is from birth to two years old. Behaviors are triggered by sensory stimuli and limited to simple motor responses. If an object is removed from the child’s vision, they think it no longer exists (Piaget, 1936).

The pre-operational stage occurs between two and six years old. The child learns language but cannot mentally manipulate information or understand concrete logic (Wadsworth, 1971).

The concrete operational stage takes place from 7 to 11 years old. Children begin to think more logically about factual events. Abstract or hypothetical concepts are still difficult to understand in this stage (Wadsworth, 1971).

In the formal operational stage from 12 years to adulthood, abstract thought and skills arise (Piaget, 1936).

Piaget did not consider other factors that might affect these stages or a child’s progress through them. Biological maturation and interaction with the environment can determine the rate of cognitive development in children (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Individual differences can also dictate a child’s progress (Berger, 2014).

3. Freud’s psychosexual development theory

One of the most influential developmental theories, which encompassed psychosexual stages of development, was developed by Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996).

Freud concluded that childhood experiences and unconscious desires influence behavior after witnessing his female patients experiencing physical symptoms and distress with no physical cause (Breuer & Freud, 1957).

According to Freud’s psychosexual theory, child development occurs in a series of stages, each focused on different pleasure areas of the body. During each stage, the child encounters conflicts, which play a significant role in development (Silverman, 2017).

Freud’s theory of psychosexual development includes the oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages. His theory suggests that the energy of the libido is focused on these different erogenous zones at each specific stage (Silverman, 2017).

Freud concluded that the successful completion of each stage leads to healthy adult development. He also suggested that a failure to progress through a stage causes fixation and developmental difficulties, such as nail biting (oral fixation) or obsessive tidiness (anal fixation; Silverman, 2017).

Freud considered personality to be formed in childhood as a child passes through these stages. Criticisms of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development include its failure to consider that personality can change and grow over an entire lifetime. Freud believed that early experiences played the most significant role in shaping development (Silverman, 2017).

4. Bandura’s social learning theory

American psychologist Albert Bandura proposed the social learning theory (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). Bandura did not believe that classical or operant conditioning was enough to explain learned behavior because some behaviors of children are never reinforced (Bandura, 1986). He believed that children observe, imitate, and model the behaviors and reactions of others (Bandura, 1977).

Bandura suggested that observation is critical in learning. Further, the observation does not have to be of a live actor, such as in the Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1986). Bandura et al. (1961) considered that learning and modeling can also occur from listening to verbal instructions on behavior performance.

Bandura’s (1977) social theory posits that both environmental and cognitive factors interact to influence development.

Bandura’s developmental theory has been criticized for not considering biological factors or children’s autonomic nervous system responses (Kevin, 1995).

Overview of theories of development – Khan Academy

Developmental psychology has given rise to many debatable questions and research topics. Here are two of the most commonly discussed.

1. Nature vs nurture debate

One of the oldest debates in the field of developmental psychology has been between nature and nurture (Levitt, 2013).

Is human development a result of hereditary factors (genes), or is it influenced by the environment (school, family, relationships, peers, community, culture)?

The polarized position of developmental psychologists of the past has now changed. The nature/nurture question now concerns the relationship between the innateness of an attribute and the environmental effects on that attribute (Nesterak, 2015).

The field of epigenetics describes how behavioral and environmental influences affect the expression of genes (Kubota, Miyake, & Hirasawa, 2012).

Many severe mental health disorders have a hereditary component. Yet, the environment and behavior, such as improved diet, reduced stress, physical activity, and a positive mindset, can determine whether this health condition is ever expressed (Śmigielski, Jagannath, Rössler, Walitza, & Grünblatt, 2020).

When considering classic models of developmental psychology, such as Piaget’s schema theory and Freud’s psychosexual theory, you’ll see that they both perceive development to be set in stone and unchangeable by the environment.

Contemporary developmental psychology theories take a different approach. They stress the importance of multiple levels of organization over the course of human development (Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan, 2016).

2. Theory of mind

Theory of mind allows us to understand that others have different intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, behaviors, and emotions (American Psychological Association, 2020).

It was first identified by research by Premack and Woodruff (1978) and considered to be a natural developmental stage of progression for all children. Starting around the ages of four or five, children begin to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. This shows an emergence of the theory of mind (Wellman & Liu, 2004).

However, the ability of all individuals to achieve and maintain this critical skill at the same level is debatable.

Children diagnosed with autism exhibit a deficit in the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985).

Individuals with depression (psychotic and non-psychotic) are significantly impaired in theory of mind tasks (Wang, Wang, Chen, Zhu, & Wang, 2008).

People with social anxiety disorder have also been found to show less accuracy in decoding the mental states of others (Washburn, Wilson, Roes, Rnic, & Harkness, 2016).

Further research has shown that the theory of mind changes with aging. This suggests a developmental lifespan process for this concept (Meinhardt-Injac, Daum, & Meinhardt, 2020).

1. Little Albert

The small child who was the focus of the experiments of behavioral psychologists Watson and Rayner (1920) was referred to as ‘Little Albert.’ These experiments were essential landmarks in developmental psychology and showed how an emotionally stable child can be conditioned to develop a phobia.

Albert was exposed to several neutral stimuli including cotton wool, masks, a white rat, rabbit, monkey, and dog. Albert showed no initial fear to these stimuli.

When a loud noise was coupled with the initially neutral stimulus, Albert became very distressed and developed a phobia of the object, which extended to any similar object as well.

This experiment highlights the importance of environmental factors in the development of behaviors in children.

2. David Reimer

At the age of eight months, David Reimer lost his penis in a circumcision operation that went wrong. His worried parents consulted a psychologist, who advised them to raise David as a girl.

David’s young age meant he knew nothing about this. He went through the process of hormonal treatment and gender reassignment. At the age of 14, David found out the truth and wanted to reverse the gender reassignment process to become a boy again. He had always felt like a boy until this time, even though he was socialized and brought up as a girl (Colapinto, 2006).

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Contemporary theories of developmental psychology often encompass a holistic approach and a more positive approach to development.

Positive psychology has intersected with developmental disciplines in areas such as parenting, education, youth, and aging (Lomas et al., 2016).

These paradigms can all be grouped together under the umbrella of positive developmental psychology. This fresh approach to development focuses on the wellbeing aspects of development, while systematically bringing them together (Lomas, et al., 2016).

Positive parenting is the approach to children’s wellbeing by focusing on the role of parents and caregivers (Latham, 1994).
Positive education looks at flourishing in the context of school (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009).
Positive youth development is the productive and constructive focus on adolescence and early adulthood to enhance young people’s strengths and promote positive outcomes (Larson, 2000).
Positive aging , also known as healthy aging, focuses on the positivity of aging as a healthy, normal stage of life (Vaillant, 2004).

Much of the empirical and theoretical work connected to positive developmental psychology has been going on for years, even before the emergence of positive psychology itself (Lomas et al., 2016).

We recommend this related article Applying Positive Psychology in Schools & Education: Your Ultimate Guide for further reading.

In the classroom, developmental psychology considers children’s psychological, emotional, and intellectual characteristics according to their developmental stage.

A report on the top 20 principles of psychology in the classroom, from pre-kindergarten to high school, was published by the American Psychological Association in 2015. The report also advised how teachers can respond to these principles in the classroom setting.

The top 5 principles and teacher responses are outlined in the table below.

There are many valuable resources to help you foster positive development no matter whether you’re working with young children, teenagers, or adults.

To help get you started, check out the following free resources from around our blog.

Adopt A Growth Mindset This exercise helps clients recognize instances of fixed mindset in their thinking and actions and replace them with thoughts and behaviors more supportive of a growth mindset.
Childhood Frustrations This worksheet provides a space for clients to document key challenges experienced during childhood, together with their emotional and behavioral responses.
What I Want to Be This worksheet helps children identify behaviors and emotions they would like to display and select an opportunity in the future to behave in this ideal way.
17 Positive Psychology Exercises If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.
Developmental Psychology Courses If you are interested in a career in Developmental Psychology , we suggest 15 of the best courses in this article.

17 Top-Rated Positive Psychology Exercises for Practitioners

Expand your arsenal and impact with these 17 Positive Psychology Exercises [PDF] , scientifically designed to promote human flourishing, meaning, and wellbeing.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Earlier developmental psychology models and theories were focused on specific areas, such as attachment, psychosexual, cognitive, and social learning. Although informative, they did not take in differing perspectives and were fixed paradigms.

We’ve now come to understand that development is not fixed. Individual differences take place in development, and the factors that can affect development are many. It is ever changing throughout life.

The modern-day approach to developmental psychology includes sub-fields of positive psychology. It brings these differing disciplines together to form an overarching positive developmental psychology paradigm.

Developmental psychology has helped us gain a considerable understanding of children’s motivations, social and emotional contexts, and their strengths and weaknesses.

This knowledge is essential for educators to create rich learning environments for students to help them develop positively and ultimately flourish to their full potential.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

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MSU Extension Child & Family Development

The importance of critical thinking for young children.

Kylie Rymanowicz, Michigan State University Extension - May 03, 2016

Critical thinking is essential life skill. Learn why it is so important and how you can help children learn and practice these skills.

We use critical thinking skills every day. They help us to make good decisions, understand the consequences of our actions and solve problems. These incredibly important skills are used in everything from putting together puzzles to mapping out the best route to work. It’s the process of using focus and self-control to solve problems and set and follow through on goals. It utilizes other important life skills like making connections , perspective taking and communicating . Basically, critical thinking helps us make good, sound decisions.

Critical thinking

In her book, “Mind in the Making: The seven essential life skills every child needs,” author Ellen Galinsky explains the importance of teaching children critical thinking skills. A child’s natural curiosity helps lay the foundation for critical thinking. Critical thinking requires us to take in information, analyze it and make judgements about it, and that type of active engagement requires imagination and inquisitiveness. As children take in new information, they fill up a library of sorts within their brain. They have to think about how the new information fits in with what they already know, or if it changes any information we already hold to be true.

Supporting the development of critical thinking

Michigan State University Extension has some tips on helping your child learn and practice critical thinking.

Encourage pursuits of curiosity . The dreaded “why” phase. Help them form and test theories, experiment and try to understand how the world works. Encourage children to explore, ask questions, test their theories, think critically about results and think about changes they could make or things they could do differently.
Learn from others. Help children think more deeply about things by instilling a love for learning and a desire to understand how things work. Seek out the answers to all of your children’s “why” questions using books, the internet, friends, family or other experts.
Help children evaluate information. We are often given lots of information at a time, and it is important we evaluate that information to determine if it is true, important and whether or not we should believe it. Help children learn these skills by teaching them to evaluate new information. Have them think about where or who the information is coming from, how it relates to what they already know and why it is or is not important.
Promote children’s interests. When children are deeply vested in a topic or pursuit, they are more engaged and willing to experiment. The process of expanding their knowledge brings about a lot of opportunities for critical thinking, so to encourage this action helps your child invest in their interests. Whether it is learning about trucks and vehicles or a keen interest in insects, help your child follow their passion.
Teach problem-solving skills. When dealing with problems or conflicts, it is necessary to use critical thinking skills to understand the problem and come up with possible solutions, so teach them the steps of problem-solving and they will use critical thinking in the process of finding solutions to problems.

For more articles on child development, academic success, parenting and life skill development, please visit the MSU Extension website.

This article was published by Michigan State University Extension . For more information, visit https://extension.msu.edu . To have a digest of information delivered straight to your email inbox, visit https://extension.msu.edu/newsletters . To contact an expert in your area, visit https://extension.msu.edu/experts , or call 888-MSUE4MI (888-678-3464).

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71 Critical thinking

Critical thinking requires skill at analyzing the reliability and validity of information, as well as the attitude or disposition to do so. The skill and attitude may be displayed with regard to a particular subject matter or topic, but in principle it can occur in any realm of knowledge (Halpern, 2003; Williams, Oliver, & Stockade, 2004). A critical thinker does not necessarily have a negative attitude in the everyday sense of constantly criticizing someone or something. Instead, he or she can be thought of as astute : the critical thinker asks key questions, evaluates the evidence for ideas, reasons for problems both logically and objectively, and expresses ideas and conclusions clearly and precisely. Last (but not least), the critical thinker can apply these habits of mind in more than one realm of life or knowledge.

With such a broad definition, it is not surprising that educators have suggested a variety of specific cognitive skills as contributing to critical thinking. In one study, for example, the researcher found how critical thinking can be reflected in regard to a published article was stimulated by annotation —writing questions and comments in the margins of the article (Liu, 2006). In this study, students were initially instructed in ways of annotating reading materials. Later, when the students completed additional readings for assignments, it was found that some students in fact used their annotation skills much more than others—some simply underlined passages, for example, with a highlighting pen. When essays written about the readings were later analyzed, the ones written by the annotators were found to be more well reasoned—more critically astute—than the essays written by the other students.

In another study, on the other hand, a researcher found that critical thinking can also involve oral discussion of personal issues or dilemmas (Hawkins, 2006). In this study, students were asked to verbally describe a recent, personal incident that disturbed them. Classmates then discussed the incident together in order to identify the precise reasons why the incident was disturbing, as well as the assumptions that the student made in describing the incident. The original student—the one who had first told the story—then used the results of the group discussion to frame a topic for a research essay. In one story of a troubling incident, a student told of a time when a store clerk has snubbed or rejected the student during a recent shopping errand. Through discussion, classmates decided that an assumption underlying the student’s disturbance was her suspicion that she had been a victim of racial profiling based on her skin color. The student then used this idea as the basis for a research essay on the topic of “racial profiling in retail stores.” The oral discussion thus stimulated critical thinking in the student and the classmates, but it also relied on their prior critical thinking skills at the same time.

Notice that in both of these research studies, as in others like them, what made the thinking “critical” was students’ use of metacognition —strategies for thinking about thinking and for monitoring the success and quality of one’s own thinking. This concept was discussed in the chapter, “The learning process,” as a feature of constructivist views about learning. There we pointed out that when students acquire experience in building their own knowledge, they also become skilled both at knowing how they learn, and at knowing whether they have learned something well. These are two defining qualities of metacognition, but they are part of critical thinking as well. In fostering critical thinking, a teacher is really fostering a student’s ability to construct or control his or her own thinking and to avoid being controlled by ideas unreflectively.

How best to teach critical thinking remains a matter of debate. One issue is whether to infuse critical skills into existing courses or to teach them through separate, free-standing units or courses. The first approach has the potential advantage of integrating critical thinking into students’ entire educations. But it risks diluting students’ understanding and use of critical thinking simply because critical thinking takes on a different form in each learning context. Its details and appearance vary among courses and teachers. The free-standing approach has the opposite qualities: it stands a better chance of being understood clearly and coherently, but at the cost of obscuring how it is related to other courses, tasks, and activities. This dilemma is the issue—again—of transfer , discussed in the chapter, “The learning process.” Unfortunately, research to compare the different strategies for teaching critical thinking does not settle the matter. The research suggests simply that either infusion or free-standing approaches can work as long as it is implemented thoroughly and teachers are committed to the value of critical thinking (Halpern, 2003).

A related issue about teaching critical thinking is about deciding who needs to learn critical thinking skills the most. Should it be all students, or only some of them? Teaching all students seems the more democratic alternative and thus appropriate for educators. Surveys have found, however, that teachers sometimes favor teaching of critical thinking only to high-advantage students—the ones who already achieve well, who come from relatively high-income families, or (for high school students) who take courses intended for university entrance (Warburton & Torff, 2005). Presumably the rationale for this bias is that high-advantage students can benefit and/or understand and use critical thinking better than other students. Yet, there is little research evidence to support this idea, even if it were not ethically questionable. The study by Hawkins (2006) described above, for example, is that critical thinking was fostered even with students considered low-advantage.

Hawkins, J. (2006). Accessing multicultural issues through critical thinking, critical inquiry, and the student research process. Urban Education, 41 (2), 169–141.

Liu, K. (2006). Annotation as an index to critical writing. Urban Education, 41 (2), 192–207.

Warburton, E. & Torff, E. (2005). The effect of perceived learner advantages on teachers’ beliefs about critical-thinking activities. Journal of Teacher Education, 56 (1), 24–33.

Williams, R., Oliver, R., & Stockade, S. (2004). Psychological versus generic critical thinking as predictors and outcome measures in a large undergraduate human development course. Journal of General Education, 53 (1), 37–58.

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Second Opinion

Cognitive Development in the Teen Years

What is cognitive development.

Cognitive development means the growth of a child’s ability to think and reason. This growth happens differently from ages 6 to 12, and from ages 12 to 18.

Children ages 6 to 12 years old develop the ability to think in concrete ways. These are called concrete operations. These things are called concrete because they’re done around objects and events. This includes knowing how to:

Combine (add)

Separate (subtract or divide)

Order (alphabetize and sort)

Transform objects and actions (change things, such as 5 pennies = 1 nickel)

Ages 12 to 18 is called adolescence. Kids and teens in this age group do more complex thinking. This type of thinking is also known as formal logical operations. This includes the ability to:

Do abstract thinking. This means thinking about possibilities.

Reason from known principles. This means forming own new ideas or questions.

Consider many points of view. This means to compare or debate ideas or opinions.

Think about the process of thinking. This means being aware of the act of thought processes.

How cognitive growth happens during the teen years

From ages 12 to 18, children grow in the way they think. They move from concrete thinking to formal logical operations. It’s important to note that:

Each child moves ahead at their own rate in their ability to think in more complex ways.

Each child develops their own view of the world.

Some children may be able to use logical operations in schoolwork long before they can use them for personal problems.

When emotional issues come up, they can cause problems with a child’s ability to think in complex ways.

The ability to consider possibilities and facts may affect decision-making. This can happen in either positive or negative ways.

Types of cognitive growth through the years

A child in early adolescence:

Uses more complex thinking focused on personal decision-making in school and at home

Begins to show use of formal logical operations in schoolwork

Begins to question authority and society's standards

Begins to form and speak his or her own thoughts and views on many topics. You may hear your child talk about which sports or groups he or she prefers, what kinds of personal appearance is attractive, and what parental rules should be changed.

A child in middle adolescence:

Has some experience in using more complex thinking processes

Expands thinking to include more philosophical and futuristic concerns

Often questions more extensively

Often analyzes more extensively

Thinks about and begins to form his or her own code of ethics (for example, What do I think is right?)

Thinks about different possibilities and begins to develop own identity (for example, Who am I? )

Thinks about and begins to systematically consider possible future goals (for example, What do I want? )

Thinks about and begins to make his or her own plans

Begins to think long-term

Uses systematic thinking and begins to influence relationships with others

A child in late adolescence:

Uses complex thinking to focus on less self-centered concepts and personal decision-making

Has increased thoughts about more global concepts, such as justice, history, politics, and patriotism

Often develops idealistic views on specific topics or concerns

May debate and develop intolerance of opposing views

Begins to focus thinking on making career decisions

Begins to focus thinking on their emerging role in adult society

How you can encourage healthy cognitive growth

To help encourage positive and healthy cognitive growth in your teen, you can:

Include him or her in discussions about a variety of topics, issues, and current events.

Encourage your child to share ideas and thoughts with you.

Encourage your teen to think independently and develop his or her own ideas.

Help your child in setting goals.

Challenge him or her to think about possibilities for the future.

Compliment and praise your teen for well-thought-out decisions.

Help him or her in re-evaluating poorly made decisions.

If you have concerns about your child's cognitive development, talk with your child's healthcare provider.

A Crash Course in Critical Thinking

What you need to know—and read—about one of the essential skills needed today..

Posted April 8, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

In research for "A More Beautiful Question," I did a deep dive into the current crisis in critical thinking.
Many people may think of themselves as critical thinkers, but they actually are not.
Here is a series of questions you can ask yourself to try to ensure that you are thinking critically.

Conspiracy theories. Inability to distinguish facts from falsehoods. Widespread confusion about who and what to believe.

These are some of the hallmarks of the current crisis in critical thinking—which just might be the issue of our times. Because if people aren’t willing or able to think critically as they choose potential leaders, they’re apt to choose bad ones. And if they can’t judge whether the information they’re receiving is sound, they may follow faulty advice while ignoring recommendations that are science-based and solid (and perhaps life-saving).

Moreover, as a society, if we can’t think critically about the many serious challenges we face, it becomes more difficult to agree on what those challenges are—much less solve them.

On a personal level, critical thinking can enable you to make better everyday decisions. It can help you make sense of an increasingly complex and confusing world.

In the new expanded edition of my book A More Beautiful Question ( AMBQ ), I took a deep dive into critical thinking. Here are a few key things I learned.

First off, before you can get better at critical thinking, you should understand what it is. It’s not just about being a skeptic. When thinking critically, we are thoughtfully reasoning, evaluating, and making decisions based on evidence and logic. And—perhaps most important—while doing this, a critical thinker always strives to be open-minded and fair-minded . That’s not easy: It demands that you constantly question your assumptions and biases and that you always remain open to considering opposing views.

In today’s polarized environment, many people think of themselves as critical thinkers simply because they ask skeptical questions—often directed at, say, certain government policies or ideas espoused by those on the “other side” of the political divide. The problem is, they may not be asking these questions with an open mind or a willingness to fairly consider opposing views.

When people do this, they’re engaging in “weak-sense critical thinking”—a term popularized by the late Richard Paul, a co-founder of The Foundation for Critical Thinking . “Weak-sense critical thinking” means applying the tools and practices of critical thinking—questioning, investigating, evaluating—but with the sole purpose of confirming one’s own bias or serving an agenda.

In AMBQ , I lay out a series of questions you can ask yourself to try to ensure that you’re thinking critically. Here are some of the questions to consider:

Why do I believe what I believe?
Are my views based on evidence?
Have I fairly and thoughtfully considered differing viewpoints?
Am I truly open to changing my mind?

Of course, becoming a better critical thinker is not as simple as just asking yourself a few questions. Critical thinking is a habit of mind that must be developed and strengthened over time. In effect, you must train yourself to think in a manner that is more effortful, aware, grounded, and balanced.

For those interested in giving themselves a crash course in critical thinking—something I did myself, as I was working on my book—I thought it might be helpful to share a list of some of the books that have shaped my own thinking on this subject. As a self-interested author, I naturally would suggest that you start with the new 10th-anniversary edition of A More Beautiful Question , but beyond that, here are the top eight critical-thinking books I’d recommend.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , by Carl Sagan

This book simply must top the list, because the late scientist and author Carl Sagan continues to be such a bright shining light in the critical thinking universe. Chapter 12 includes the details on Sagan’s famous “baloney detection kit,” a collection of lessons and tips on how to deal with bogus arguments and logical fallacies.

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results , by Shane Parrish

The creator of the Farnham Street website and host of the “Knowledge Project” podcast explains how to contend with biases and unconscious reactions so you can make better everyday decisions. It contains insights from many of the brilliant thinkers Shane has studied.

Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World , by David Robert Grimes

A brilliant, comprehensive 2021 book on critical thinking that, to my mind, hasn’t received nearly enough attention . The scientist Grimes dissects bad thinking, shows why it persists, and offers the tools to defeat it.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know , by Adam Grant

Intellectual humility—being willing to admit that you might be wrong—is what this book is primarily about. But Adam, the renowned Wharton psychology professor and bestselling author, takes the reader on a mind-opening journey with colorful stories and characters.

Think Like a Detective: A Kid's Guide to Critical Thinking , by David Pakman

The popular YouTuber and podcast host Pakman—normally known for talking politics —has written a terrific primer on critical thinking for children. The illustrated book presents critical thinking as a “superpower” that enables kids to unlock mysteries and dig for truth. (I also recommend Pakman’s second kids’ book called Think Like a Scientist .)

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters , by Steven Pinker

The Harvard psychology professor Pinker tackles conspiracy theories head-on but also explores concepts involving risk/reward, probability and randomness, and correlation/causation. And if that strikes you as daunting, be assured that Pinker makes it lively and accessible.

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion , by David McRaney

David is a science writer who hosts the popular podcast “You Are Not So Smart” (and his ideas are featured in A More Beautiful Question ). His well-written book looks at ways you can actually get through to people who see the world very differently than you (hint: bludgeoning them with facts definitely won’t work).

A Healthy Democracy's Best Hope: Building the Critical Thinking Habit , by M Neil Browne and Chelsea Kulhanek

Neil Browne, author of the seminal Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, has been a pioneer in presenting critical thinking as a question-based approach to making sense of the world around us. His newest book, co-authored with Chelsea Kulhanek, breaks down critical thinking into “11 explosive questions”—including the “priors question” (which challenges us to question assumptions), the “evidence question” (focusing on how to evaluate and weigh evidence), and the “humility question” (which reminds us that a critical thinker must be humble enough to consider the possibility of being wrong).

Warren Berger is a longtime journalist and author of A More Beautiful Question .

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Abstract Thought in Adolescence: How to Nurture Critical Thinking in Schools

The Role of Abstract Thought in Adolescence

The phase of adolescence is marked by two particularly striking cognitive developments: the capacity to explore hypothetical scenarios and the budding of critical thinking. Both play a pivotal role in shaping how teenagers interpret and engage with the world around them.

Exploring Hypothetical Scenarios and Critical Thinking

The development of abstract thought allows adolescents to consider “what if” questions, envisaging multiple outcomes from a single scenario. This ability is crucial for effective decision-making, empathy, and risk assessment. Additionally, the emergence of critical thinking skills enables teenagers to question, analyse, and evaluate information more thoroughly, preparing them for informed citizenship and complex problem-solving in adulthood. A study from the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (2014) affirmed that this ability to theorise and predict outcomes without direct experience enhances decision-making, risk assessment, and empathy.

Navigating the Modern World

In today’s fast-paced, interconnected society, the capacity for abstract thought is invaluable. It equips young people to sift through vast amounts of information, differentiate between fact and opinion, and understand global issues from multiple perspectives. This cognitive skillset is indispensable for navigating the challenges of the digital age, including assessing online content critically and engaging with complex socio-political issues. The Educational Psychology Review (2017) highlighted that this analytical approach is crucial for academic pursuits and cultivating informed, discerning citizens in a complex digital age.

Challenges in Developing Abstract Thought

The journey from concrete to abstract thinking is not without its challenges. Adolescents may struggle with egocentric perspectives or find it difficult to fully embrace multiple viewpoints. Recognising and addressing these obstacles is crucial for educators and parents to support teenagers effectively.

The Influence of External Factors

Peer Pressure: One cannot underestimate the impact of peer validation in adolescence. While peers can be a source of support, the desire to ‘fit in’ might sometimes curtail independent, abstract thinking. Navigating peer influence while developing one’s identity can be a delicate balancing act for many adolescents.

Digital Distractions: While offering unprecedented access to information, the digital age also presents a myriad of distractions. The constant barrage of notifications, the allure of social media, and the instant gratification of online games can potentially hamper the sustained, deep thinking required for abstract reasoning.

Limited Exposure to Diverse Scenarios: Encountering a variety of scenarios — both in life and literature — fosters abstract thought. Limited exposure due to an overly sheltered upbringing or a narrow curriculum can inadvertently limit the opportunities to flex and develop these cognitive muscles.

Strategies for Educators and Parents

Fostering an environment that encourages open-ended questions, debates, and complex problem-solving can significantly enhance adolescents’ abstract thinking skills. Encouraging exploration, curiosity, and creative thinking prepares them for higher education and professional success. By supporting teenagers as they navigate these cognitive shifts, we lay the groundwork for a future characterized by innovative thinking and lifelong learning.

Encouraging Open-Ended Questions

A study by the University of Cambridge found that open-ended questions don’t have one definitive answer and stimulate expansive thinking. For instance, instead of asking, “What happened in the story?” try, “What do you think would have happened if the main character made a different choice?” Such questions prompt adolescents to contemplate, reason, and imagine various outcomes.

Engaging in Debates and Group Discussions

Debates offer a platform for students to present, defend, and challenge viewpoints, fostering a depth of understanding. Moreover, group discussions encourage collaborative thinking, where students build upon each other’s ideas. The British Council recommends structured debates as a means to hone both linguistic and analytical skills in students.

Introducing Complex Problem-Solving Scenarios

Real-world problems, whether in mathematics, science, or social studies, nudge students to apply abstract reasoning. Problems that don’t have straightforward solutions, ones that require connecting multiple concepts, or those that offer multiple solutions, are particularly effective. For instance, scenarios around climate change, ethical dilemmas, or predicting future trends can spark more profound analytical thought.

The progression to abstract thought during adolescence is a transformative phase, marking the transition from black-and-white thinking to a world of complex ideas and hypotheses. For educators, recognising and nurturing this cognitive evolution is key to developing curricula that challenge and engage young minds. As we support adolescents through this intellectual journey, we contribute to the cultivation of the next generation of thinkers, innovators, and leaders.

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Piaget’s Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development

Key Takeaways

Stages of Development

The Sensorimotor Stage

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

Individual Differences

The Preoperational Stage

The Concrete Operational Stage

The Formal Operational Stage

Piaget’s Theory

1. How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s intelligence:

2. Piaget’s Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

Examples of Schemas

4. The Process of Adaptation

5. Assimilation

6. Accommodation

7. Equilibration

Applications to Education

Plowden Report

How to teach

Classroom Activities

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years):

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years):

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and older):

Curriculum Development

Social Media (Digital Learning)

Applications to Parenting

Play Activities

Critical Evaluation

Piaget’s Theory vs Vygotsky

What is cognitive development?

What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?

What are some of the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?

What are Piaget’s concepts of schemas?

Further Reading

Child Cognitive Development: Essential Milestones and Strategies

Key Takeaways

Child Cognitive Development Stages

Sensorimotor Stage

Preoperational Stage

Concrete Operational Stage

Formal Operational Stage

Key Factors in Cognitive Development

Environmental Influences

Nutrition and Health

Emotional and Social Factors

Language and Communication Development

Nonverbal Communication

Parent and Caregiver Interaction

Cognitive Abilities and Skills

Reasoning and Problem Solving

Attention and Memory

Decision-Making and Executive Function

Academic and Cognitive Milestones

Developmental Delays and Early Intervention

Resources and Support for Parents

Professional Evaluations and Intervention Strategies

Fostering Healthy Cognitive Development

Supportive Home Environment

Promoting Independence and Decision-Making

Healthy Lifestyle Habits

Frequently Asked Questions

What factors influence cognitive development in children?

How do cognitive skills vary during early childhood?

What are common examples of cognitive development?

How do cognitive development theories explain children’s learning?

Why is it essential to support cognitive development in early childhood?

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Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained

Important Cognitive Development Concepts

History of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget vs. Vygotsky

The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

The Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

Assimilation

Accommodation

Equilibration

Metacognition