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Formal Operational stage: which occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here).
Sensorimotor stage
- The child in this stage explores the world with their senses, rather than through mental operations
- This stage marks the development of essential spatial abilities and understanding of the world in six sub stages. Reflexes, habits, coordination between vision and prehension, development of logic, new means to meet goals, and the passage into unique thought
Preoperational stage
- In this stage, symbolic functioning occurs, along with concentration, intuitive thought, Egocentrism, and inability to conserve.
- Towards the end of the second year, a qualitatively quite new kind of psychological functioning occurs.
Concrete Operational stage
- This stage is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are:
-Decentering - where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it
-Reversibility – where the child understands that numbers or objects can be change, then returned to their original state
-Conservation – understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items
-Serialisation – the ability to arrange objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristic
-Classification – The ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic.
-Delimitation of Egocentrism – The ability to view things from anothers’ perspective (even if they think incorrectly).
Formal Operational stage
- This stage commences at around 12 and commences into adulthood
- During this stage, the young adult functions in a cognitively normal manner and therefore is able to understand such things as love, “shades of grey” and values
Criticisms
- Many find that children combine conceptions from different developmental stages, are in different stages in different areas of life, and their advancement in thinking can be seen to vary from minute to minute
- It sites the inability of most adults to reach the formal operational level in all areas of life, this appearing to be largely reserved for students of tertiary education
- Some claim that the theory is only truly applicable for western society
