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Swiss scholar Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was the first scientist to systematically examine infants’ and children’s thinking and reasoning. Piaget believed that to understand children, we must understand how they think, because thinking influences all behavior. Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory views children and adults as active explorers of their world, driven to learn by interacting with the world around them and organizing what they learn into cognitive schemas, or concepts, ideas, and ways of interacting with the world. Through these interactions, they construct and refine their own cognitive schemas, thereby contributing to their own cognitive development.

Piaget proposed that children’s drive to explore and understand the world—to construct more sophisticated cognitive schemas—propels them through four stages of cognitive development, as shown in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2

Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory transformed the field of developmental psychology and remains one of the most widely cited developmental theories. It was the first to consider how infants and children think and to view people as active contributors to their development. In addition, Piaget’s concept of cognitive stages and the suggestion that children’s reasoning is limited by their stage has implications for education—specifically, the idea that effective instruction must match the child’s developmental level.

Some critics of cognitive-developmental theory argue that Piaget focused too heavily on cognition and ignored emotional and social factors in development (Crain, 2016). Others believe that Piaget neglected the influence of contextual factors by assuming that cognitive-developmental stages are universal—that all individuals everywhere progress through the stages in a sequence that does not vary. Some cognitive theorists argue that cognitive development is not a discontinuous, stage-like process but instead is a continuous process (Birney & Sternberg, 2011), as described in the following section.