Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensory Motor Stage (Birth - 2yrs)

Piaget's ideas surrounding the Sensory Motor Stage are centred on the basis of a 'schema'. Schemas are mental
representations or ideas about what things are and how we deal with them. Piaget deduced that the first schemas
of an infant are to do with movement. Piaget believed that much of a baby's behaviour is triggered by certain
stimuli, in that they are reflexive. A few weeks after birth, the baby begins to understand some of the
information it is receiving from it's senses, and learns to use some muscles and limbs for movement. These
developments are known as 'action schemas'.

Babies are unable to consider anyone else's needs, wants or interests, and are therefore considered to be 'ego
centric'.

During the Sensory Motor Stage, knowledge about objects and the ways that they can be manipulated is
acquired. Through the acquisition of information about self and the world, and the people in it, the baby begins
to understand how one thing can cause or affect another, and begins to develop simple ideas about time and
space.

Babies have the ability to build up mental pictures of objects around them, from the knowledge that they have
developed on what can be done with the object. Large amounts of an infant's experience is surrounding objects.
What the objects are is irrelevant, more importance is placed on the baby being able to explore the object to see
what can be done with it. At around the age of eight or nine months, infants are more interested in an object for
the object's own sake.

A discovery by Piaget surrounding this stage of development, was that when an object is taken from their sight,
babies act as though the object has ceased to exist. By around eight to twelve months, infants begin to look for
objects hidden, this is what is defined as 'Object Permanence'. This view has been challenged however, by Tom
Bower, who showed that babies from one to four months have an idea of Object Permanence

SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (BIRTH TO 2 YEARS OLD)

The infant builds an understanding of himself or herself and reality (and how things work) through interactions
with the environment. It is able to differentiate between itself and other objects. Learning takes place via
assimilation (the organization of information and absorbing it into existing schema) and accommodation (when
an object cannot be assimilated and the schemata have to be modified to include the object.

During this time, Piaget said that a child's cognitive system is limited to motor reflexes at birth, but the child
builds on these reflexes to develop more sophisicated procedures. They learn to generalize their activities to a
wider range of situations and coordinate them into increasingly lengthy chains of behaviour.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: Birth to 2 Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

The infant knows the world through their movements and sensations.

Children learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking, and listening.
 Infants learn that things continue to exist even though they cannot be seen (object permanence).

They are separate beings from the people and objects around them.

They realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them.

During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through sensory
experiences and manipulating objects. Children go through a period of dramatic growth and learning. As kids
interact with their environment, they are continually making new discoveries about how the world works.

The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short period of 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 they interact. Piaget also
broke this stage down into a number of different substages. It is during the final part of the sensorimotor stage
that early representational thought emerges.

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

Pygmalion Effect in classroom

The Pygmalion effect was famously applied to the classroom in the Rosenthal-Jacobson study, published
in 1968. In this study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson showed that if teachers were led to expect
enhanced performance from some children, then the children did indeed show that enhancement.

Teachers usually have higher expectations for students they view as higher achievers and treat these
students with more respect. For example, studies have found that when students are split into ability-
based groups, the students in the higher-ability groups are more likely to demonstrate positive learning
behaviors and higher achievement.

The Pygmalion Effect is a phenomenon where the greater the expectation placed upon a person or team, the
better they perform. It is often referred to as the Self Fulfilling Prophesy, as what you expect from a person or
team will be reflected in the outcome.

Studies have shown that people internalize their positive or negative labels, and corresponding actions and
outcomes mirror this internalization. Essentially, if a Leader has positive expectations, the followers
performance will be reflected by positive outcomes.

The most well-known study on this effect was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. They
fundamentally showed that teachers expectations in an elementary school setting were directly manifested in
students test scores and increase in IQ. The teachers were told a certain number of students were quick learners,
destined to excel. A control group was also studied with no indication to the teachers of any quick learners. At
the end of the study, gains were linearly achieved by all students, in all groups. However, for the students
deemed quick accelerators, the gains were strikingly more significant.
They determined the higher expectations of the teachers greatly improved the atmosphere, mood and
enthusiasm for the accelerated students, leading to increased interaction, engagement, and a more challenging
environment.