Piaget divided children's cognitive development into the following four stages:

1. Sensory Motor Stage (Sensory Motor Stage, 0-2 years old): 1 At age one develops the concept of object permanence and uses sensory actions to function as archetypes. From instinctive reflex actions to purposeful activities.

2. Pre-Operations Stage (Pre-Operations Stage, 2-7 years old): Can already use language and symbols to represent external things, without retaining concepts, without reversibility, and with self Centered, able to think but illogically, unable to see the comprehensiveness of things.

3. Concrete Operations Stage (Concrete Operations Stage, 7-11 years old): Can solve problems based on concrete experience thinking, can use the operation of concrete objects to assist thinking, and can understand reversibility and The principle of conservation.

4. Formal Operations Stage (Formal Operations Stage, 11-16 years old): Begins to be able to make analogies, logical thinking and abstract thinking. Able to think and solve problems according to scientific rules for hypothesis verification. ?

These four stages have the following characteristics:

1. The development sequence remains unchanged, but there are individual differences.

2. Universal (not culturally specific).

3. Depends on cognitive development, but can be generalized to other functions.

4. Each stage of development is a logically organized whole.

5. The order of each stage is a natural hierarchy (all stages of successful development will have elements from the previous stages participating in the cooperation, but the latter stage is more different and more integrated than the previous stage) .

6. At each stage, there will be qualitative differences in thinking modes, not just quantitative differences.

Practical Application

There are many ways parents can use Piaget’s theory to support their children’s development. Teachers can also use Piaget's theory to help their students. For example, recent research shows that children in the same grade and same age perform differently on tasks that measure basic addition and subtraction accuracy.

Children at the preoperational and concrete operational levels of cognitive development perform arithmetic operations (such as addition and subtraction) with similar accuracy; however, children at the concrete operational level are already able to do so with greater accuracy Addition and subtraction problems. Teachers can use Piaget's theory to understand where each child in the class stands on each subject by discussing the syllabus with students and their parents.

One person’s stage of cognitive growth differs from another’s. Cognitive development or thinking is an active process from the beginning to the end of life. Intellectual progress occurs because people at every age and stage of development seek cognitive balance. The easiest way to achieve this balance is to understand new experiences through the lens of existing ideas.

Babies learn that novel objects can be grasped in the same way as familiar objects, while adults interpret the day's headlines as evidence of their existing worldview.