Cognitive Development Stages
Key concepts
Environmental Influence
Criticisms and Revisions
Practical applications
100

This stage focuses on sensory exploration and object permanence.

What is the sensorimotor stage?

100

This term refers to the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible.


What is object permanence?

100

This factor plays a crucial role in cognitive development, according to Piaget.

What is environmental experience?

100

This more recent approach has questioned some of Piaget’s ideas.

What are dynamic systems approaches?

100

This type of classroom is based on Piaget’s ideas and promotes active exploration.

What is an open education classroom?

200

In this stage, children use language but have egocentric thinking.

What is the preoperational stage?

200

This type of play is common in the preoperational stage and allows children to use symbols.


What is symbolic play?

200

Social interaction is fundamental to cognitive development, an aspect Piaget underestimated.


What is the sociocultural environment?

200

This aspect of cognitive development was considered insufficient by some critics of Piaget.


What is the influence of the social context?

200

This type of play is fundamental to cognitive development in childhood.

What is play?

300

During this stage, children can perform logical mental operations on concrete objects.


What is the concrete operational stage?

300

This process involves adapting mental schemas to new experiences.

What is accommodation?

300

This type of education is based on Piaget’s ideas and focuses on the child.


What is child-centered education?

300

This type of research was not available to Piaget in his time.

What is modern neuroscientific research?

300

This type of question can influence how children respond in cognitive development experiments.


What is the effect of phrasing in questions?

400

This stage allows adolescents to reason abstractly and hypothetically.


What is the formal operational stage?

400

This process refers to integrating new experiences into existing schemas.


What is assimilation?

400

This approach refers to the importance of a rich and supportive learning environment.


What is an enriched learning environment?

400

Some critics argue that Piaget did not adequately consider this type of variability in development.


What is individual variability in cognitive development?

400

This type of justification is important to evaluate a child’s cognitive development.


What is response justification?

500

Piaget identified four of these in his theory of cognitive development.


What are the stages of cognitive development?

500

Piaget believed this type of learning is active and constructive.

What is constructivist learning?

500

Piaget argued that this type of discrepancy drives cognitive development.


What is the discrepancy between prior knowledge and new information?

500

This term refers to children’s limited ability to see things from different perspectives in the preoperational stage.


What is egocentric perspective?

500

This type of reasoning develops in the formal operational stage.


What is hypothetical reasoning?