Piaget's Stage Theory

Jean Piaget was one of the 20th century's most influential figures in child development and learning, and identified the following stages of development.

Age	Period	Characteristics
0-2	Sensori-motor	The infant learns to differentiate between itself and other objects within its environment, learning the difference between 'me' and 'not me'.
2-4	Pre-operational thought	The child is still very egocentric, but now classifies objects in simple ways - particularly by individual important features.
4-7	Intuitive	The child now classifies things more generally, but is not aware of the classes that he or she uses.
7-11	Concrete operations	Here, the child can use logical operations, such as reversal, deliberate classification and serialization.
11-15	Formal operations	Now things become more conceptual as the child is able to think in terms of abstract ideas.

Piaget developed this theory after noticing that his 7-month-old daughter, Jacqueline, did not look further for a rubber duck that 'disappeared' behind a fold in the sheets. He also noticed that she started looking for hidden objects around 9 months. This triggered a series of experiments to discover how children learn and when they make significant breakthroughs.

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Piaget's Stage Theory

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