What Piaget can teach us about children’s thinking

Children build explanations, then change them

Jean Piaget studied how knowledge develops. In his account, a child organises experience into patterns of action and understanding, often called schemas. Assimilation means using an existing pattern to understand something; accommodation means changing the pattern when it no longer fits.

Consider an invented example: a child expects every cup to have a handle. A handleless cup creates a reason to revise that idea. The interest lies in the relationship between the child’s explanation and the new example, rather than whether they immediately say the expected word.

For Mia, this suggests making space for an explanation, offering a relevant example, and helping a child connect the two. It is our application of a theory, not proof of a learning effect from talking with an AI.

Sources: Piaget (1964): Le développement mental de l’enfant

What are Piaget’s stages?

The familiar four-stage outline describes a historical theory of development. Its approximate ranges summarise broad changes Piaget proposed; they are not eligibility rules for a subject or milestones every child reaches on a birthday.

Piaget himself distinguished the proposed order of stages from fixed chronological dates. Later evidence also makes it important to separate a child’s underlying understanding from what a particular question or task reveals.

• Sensorimotor, birth to about 2: coordinating perception and action.
• Preoperational, about 2–7: using symbols and representations, before the logical organisation proposed for the next stage.
• Concrete operational, about 7–11 or 12: reasoning about concrete relationships and reversible changes.
• Formal operational, emerging around 11 or 12 and developing through adolescence: reasoning about hypotheses and propositions.

Sources: Piaget (1972): Le temps et le développement intellectuel de l’enfant

A question can hide what a child understands

In a classic conservation task, two collections contain the same number of objects. Moving one collection farther apart changes its appearance without adding or removing anything. Researchers ask whether the amounts are still equal.

McGarrigle and Donaldson found that young children’s answers differed when the rearrangement seemed accidental rather than intentional. A later study by Moore and Frye complicated that result: the friendlier procedure could also produce incorrect answers when objects really were added. Neither a wrong answer nor a reassuringly correct one tells the whole story.

The useful lesson for conversation is to check what was communicated. Were the starting collections established? Was the change clear? Did the child think a repeated question meant their first answer was wrong? Mia should repair a missing explanation before treating uncertainty as a conceptual limit. A counting activity should never become an informal diagnosis.

Sources: McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974–1975): Conservation accidents; Moore & Frye (1986): Experimenter intention and conservation

Exploration works with explanation

Active learning need not mean discovering everything without help. Alfieri and colleagues’ meta-analyses, covering 164 studies, distinguished unassisted discovery from discovery supported by feedback, examples, and other guidance. The overall findings favoured explicit instruction over unassisted discovery, while supported discovery compared favourably with its varied alternatives.

This does not prescribe a single method for every child or topic. It supports a practical balance: provide the knowledge needed to begin, invite a meaningful action or comparison, and offer help when it is useful. Repeating a question more cheerfully is not the same as explaining the missing step.

Sources: Alfieri and colleagues (2011): Does discovery-based instruction enhance learning?

How these ideas inform Mia

For ages 4–6, we emphasise concrete setup and a small understandable relationship. At 7–9, an exploration can compare arrangements or categories. At 10–12, it can connect a claim to supplied evidence and explain how to make a fair comparison. These are flexible starting points for our design, not findings that all children in a band need the same task.

For ages 13–15 and 16–18, the teenager chooses the goal first. A brief hello and an offer of help leave room for homework, a creative project, a question, or no lesson at all. Abstract reasoning is an available tool, not a reason to impose a challenge.

At every age, actual topic knowledge, access needs, language, and interest matter. A concrete example can help an expert encounter an unfamiliar idea. A child’s preference can change with the day. Mia should support that flexibility without assigning a permanent stage or learning-style label.