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and working self systems, representational and regulatory. Progress through Piaget’s stages can be seen in categorical, quantitative, causal, spatial, verbal, social and drawing ‘modules’.

King and Kitchener’s model of reflective judgment (1994)

This is a seven-stage model of progression in adolescent and adult reasoning. Assumptions about knowledge and strategies for solving ill-structured problems can move from pre-reflective through quasireflective to reflective stages.

Pintrich’s general framework for self-regulated learning (2000)

Pintrich identifies four phases of self-regulation. Cognition, motivation/affect, behaviour and context can be regulated by: (1) forethought, planning and activation; (2) monitoring; (3) control; and

(4) reaction and reflection.

Theories of executive function

The main components of executive function are: attention control; task analysis; strategic planning; monitoring progress and taking appropriate action; and maintaining mental flexibility in support of goal-directed or problem-solving behaviour. These processes take place in working memory.

Description and evaluation of theoretical frameworks of cognitive structure and/or development

Piaget’s stage model of cognitive development

Description and intended use

For many, Piaget is the cognitive developmental psychologist of the twentieth century. Drawing upon biology, sociology and philosophy, his psychological theorising and methodologies revolutionised a field that was dominated by the contrasting perspectives of environmentalism and biological determinism. His ‘clinical method’ involving naturalistic observations of, and interviews with, children engaged in various intellectual tasks, originating in the 1920s, but not well known

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in the English speaking world until the 1950s, highlighted the value of seeing and understanding the world from the child’s perspective.

At the heart of his theory of cognitive development was the notion that the child passed through a set of ordered, qualitatively different stages. Intellectually, the child was not seen as a young adult, but rather, as one employing very different cognitive structures and processes. The stage theory was first expressed in a series of lectures presented to French scholars during the Second World War (Brainerd, 2003, p. 257) and subsequently in a series of publications, most notably,

The Psychology of Intelligence, published in 1950.

According to Piaget, development unfolds through a series of stages, characterising an invariant developmental sequence. The child must progress through each of the stages in exactly the same order and no stage can be missed out. The stages are associated with characteristic age periods although considerable individual differences can be observed.

During the sensorimotor stage (0–2 years) the individual is seen to pass through a stage of profound egocentrism whereby the child is unable to separate itself from its environment. As development in this period is so great, this period is divided into six substages from the newborn with built-in schemas and reflexes, to the comparatively sophisticated two-year old. During this period, the infant uses its motor and sensory skills to explore and gain understanding of its world and thus physical experiences are the basis for the development of knowledge. Their senses are largely unrelated to the actions that they perform on objects. Thus, when objects are out of the young infant’s field of vision or reach, they are considered to no longer exist. When an infant begins to search for objects outside of the field of vision (at about 8 months), he or she is said to have acquired object permanence.

During the pre-operational stage (2 to 7 years) the child is still dominated by external appearances. During this stage the child begins to use symbols and language. Piaget considered the ability to grasp the logic of relations and classes as underpinning intelligence and argued that children at this stage tend to focus upon one aspect of an object or a situation at a time. Through a number of ingenious

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experiments, Piaget concluded that children, at this stage, experience difficulty in solving problems involving class-inclusion, conservation and transitive reasoning. At this age children continue to display egocentrism, experiencing difficulty in recognising that their own thoughts and perceptions may differ from those of others.

At the concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years), the child is no longer so easily deceived by perceptually dominant appearance. It is now possible for the child to carry out mental operations such as conservation, classification, seriation, and transitive reasoning. At this stage, egocentricity begins to decline, and children are able to decentre, that is, examine more than one dimension of a problem, and understand the notion of reversibility and identity. However, Piaget believed that at this stage children cannot apply such thinking to consideration of hypothetical events. Such mental operations still require physical manipulation of concrete objects – hence the notion of ‘concrete’ operations.

From about 11 years, the child becomes increasingly capable of formal operational thought. This is characterised by the ability to think logically about abstract, hypothetical or imaginary concepts and situations. The formal thinker no longer requires concrete aids as ideas and reasoning can be carried out by means of internal representations. The approach to problem-solving is now more ordered and systematic. It is now possible to think of possibilities and potentialities that have not been hitherto encountered.

Piaget argued that cognitive change (growth) becomes necessary when present cognitive structures are incapable of reconciling conflict between existing understandings and current experience. Development is achieved through the processes of assimilation, disequilibration and accommodation. Assimilation involves the interpretation of events in terms of existing cognitive structures, whereas accommodation describes the process by which existing representations (schemata) are modified to encompass new experiences that cannot be assimilated (a phenomenon known as equilibration). Cognitive restructuring involving the development of more sophisticated schemata is the natural outcome. Some have likened this process to the operation of a filing system in which assimilation involves filing material

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into existing categories, and adaptation involving modification of the existing system because new material does not fit these.

Evaluation

Piaget’s work ‘remains the single most comprehensive theory of intellectual development. . . No theory even comes close’ (Sternberg, 2002b, p. 483). Piaget’s ideas were subsequently harnessed along cognitive psychology’s information-processing paradigm resulting in the neo-Piagetian theories of writers such as Pascual-Leone (1970), Fischer (1980), Case (1985) and Demetriou (1998a). His work ultimately ‘caused a revolution in developmental theory with . . . such concepts as activity, adaptation, self-regulation, construction, and cognitive structures occurring in a universal sequence of qualitatively different developmental stages’ (Weinert and Weinert, 1998, p. 17).

Piaget’s ideas have also had a major impact upon educational practice, particularly in primary (elementary) education. Although more concerned with epistemology, the nature and development of thought, than with prescribing educational practice, his ideas revolutionalised ideas about pedagogy. The notion of the child as a lone scientist exploring his or her world, and developing intellectually by means of disequilibration, underpinned the child-centred educational philosophies of the 1960s and 70s and still has strong resonance today. The key principle was that the children should not be seen as passive recipients of external knowledge but, rather, as active constructors of their own knowledge. The teacher’s role was to provide a context whereby the child was challenged to engage with activities requiring adaptation that are appropriate to their developmental level. According to Pascual-Leone (Cardellini and Pascual-Leone, 2004), teachers should function like sports coaches. They should provide appropriate tasks, strategic advice, endeavour to motivate, yet recognise that ultimately everyone has to learn from their own existing repertoire. For this reason, Pascual-Leone advocates minimising any emphasis upon errors and, instead, advocates the highlighting of positive achievements geared to increasing productive and creative thinking.

The importance of ensuring challenge suited to the child’s present capacities resulted in the notion of readiness, whereby tasks beyond

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the child’s level were deemed to be inappropriate. Unfortunately, some academics and practitioners understood these ideas in an overly rigid fashion and, on occasions, this resulted in the important role of the teacher being underplayed and undervalued. A further misunderstanding of the theory led to a belief on the part of some that students, particularly those in primary and elementary schools should not be stretched by demanding material, as this might result in harmful ‘pressure’ (Damon, 1995, p. 204). The subsequent popularity of Vygotskian theory, in part, reflected recognition that teachers had a more direct role in instruction; although the differences, particularly in relation to the social nature of learning, between Piaget and Vygotsky are not as great as sometimes claimed (cf. Smith, 1996).

Piaget’s theory has been highly influential in the development of thinking skills intervention programmes (e.g. Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) and mathematics education (CAME); Bright Start (Haywood, Brooks and Burns, 1992)); and in the derivative generation of other taxonomies, models or stages of thinking that were applied to the teaching of academic subjects, for example, in the arts (Gouge and Yates, 2002), and mathematics (Griffin and Case, 1997).

There have been many theoretical and methodological criticisms of Piaget’s theories:

1.Although studies, repeating Piaget’s methodology, have largely supported his findings, other investigations, adopting different approaches, have demonstrated that children are capable of performing many cognitive tasks and operations at an earlier age than Piaget outlined. It is now widely accepted that Piaget underestimated the importance of the social meaning and context of his experiments, and the importance of children’s linguistic facility in understanding and responding to his questions. As a result, many children failed to demonstrate their true capability in the experiments.

2.Much of Piaget’s work centred upon scientific, logico-mathematical thinking. Other modes of thought, such as those encompassed by the arts, were comparatively neglected.

3.Studies have indicated that individuals operate at different levels in different domains, thus challenging Piaget’s notion that

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developmental stages had overarching structures that operated across multiple domains (Bidell and Fischer, 1992).

4.There appears to be so much overlap (decalage) between stages, it may be more appropriate to consider development as a continuous, rather than a stepwise, process.

5.Piaget’s ideas neglected to take into sufficient consideration, important social processes on development (although this is now disputed by Piagetian scholars such as Smith, 1996).

6.Piagetian-inspired constructivist pedagogy has been widely attacked by politicians and the popular press.

Summary: Piaget

Purpose and				Relevance for teachers
structure		Some key features		and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to increase	•	many complex terms	•	Piaget’s theory was not
	understanding of		are introduced that		designed for pedagogical
	the ways by which		have now entered		purposes, but has had a
	children develop		the educational lexicon		significant impact upon
	knowledge				educational practice
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	material in primary	•	early years, primary
			sources is often		and secondary school
			complex and difficult		education
			to grasp, but many
			simplified outlines
			have been written
Broad categories		Theory base:		Pedagogical stance:
covered:		•	Piaget’s genetic	•	teachers should provide
•	reflective thinking		epistemology		learning contexts that
•	productive thinking		integrates ideas		maximise opportunities
•	building		from biology,		for disequilibration and
	understanding		psychology and		cognitive restructuring
•	information-		philosophy
	gathering