Development Theories: A Comparison of Piaget, Erikson, and Bandura

This essay compares and contrasts the findings of Piaget’s theory to explain demonstrate why the knowhow of the normal child and adolescent development is essential in helping children attain their full maturity.

Running head: DEVELOPMENT THEORIES 1
Child and Adolescent Development
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Introduction
The child development process involves their stability and change from the time of
conception through the adolescent age. There is a great significance in prioritizing the
understanding of the history of child development. At past children were viewed as miniature
adults or as a burden and thus researchers did no concentrate much on child’s developmental
advances in physical growth, language use and cognitive abilities. Towards the end of the 19th
century, several advances have been, made in the scientific study of children and adolescent
development. Different theorists have distinguished perspectives towards child development, and
at last, they all come up to a similar thing that influences child development. This essay
compares and contrasts the findings of Piaget’s theory to explain demonstrate why the know-
how of the normal child and adolescent development is essential in helping children attain their
full maturity.
Literature Review
All the theories suggest that children develop in the same manner, but each theorist
stresses different parts of development are of more importance. In the cognitive stage of Piaget
theory, it provides a great deal of explanation for more research on child and adolescent
development (Siegler, 2016). Through his four stages of development Piaget has contributed a
lot to the idea of culture and schooling has played a significant role in the child’s full cognitive
development. Piaget, after dedicating and spreading most of his time within children while
studying their cognitive development, believed that all children’s thought progressed as per his
stages and without omitting any of the stages (McLean, Syed, Yoder & Greenhoot, 2016). Erik
Erikson, a German psychoanalyst, also believed like Jean Piaget in a stage-dependent approach,
but he had eight psychosocial stages of development in his theory (Bjorklund, 2018). According

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to his theory, Erick Erikson believed that the personality of an individual if subjective to the
society he/she lives and an individual develops psychologically through a series of crisis
(Youniss, 2017). Out of Erik Erikson’s eight psychosocial stages, four of them relate to the child
and adolescent development. Unlike the psychosocial theory by Erik Erikson and the cognitive-
stage in Piaget theory, the social learning theory which was developed by the Albert Bandura,
was an American psychologist, it does not involve any timelines or any stages during the
development of an adolescent or a child. The theory demonstrates that the behaviors learned
through observation and imitation of models within the society (De La Sienra Servin, Smith, &
Mitchell, 2017).
Albert believed that a child’s development could only be successful when they are
provided with a safe and well-protected environment so that that they are able to explore both
their actions and their feelings. Albert Bandura also mentioned that learning would be extremely
laborious if people had to only rely on their actions and feelings to direct them on what to do
(Bandura, (Ed.), 2017).
Analysis and Discussion
Jean Piaget, a philosopher, and biologist suggest that a child’s cognitive development
take place in a series four stages which involves distinctive qualitative types of mental functions.
In his study, Piaget involved talking with and observing his children. Later he came up with the
four stages of the Piaget’s theory which includes; preoperational, sensorimotor, concrete and the
operation stage (Barrouillet, 2015).
Between birth and the age of two years, the child is in the sensorimotor cognitive stage.
During this stage, the child understands him/herself and also gets to know how things happen

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around him/her. It is in this level that the child interacts with the environment and learns via the
accommodation and assimilation. Learning through assimilation enables the infants to absorb
new information and incorporate it into existing cognitive structures. For instance and infants
who knows how to clutch a favorite toy and put it into his/her mouth, may utilize this
assimilation process in another abject like car keys. This is applicable through an old schema.
Accommodation helps infants to improve their cognitive structures to allow more space for new
information. It is applicable whereby a child sees a new object and reasons to grab for example a
beach ball, but unluckily the infant’s old schema does not work for that object. After this, the
infants will later create a new schema which will accommodate the new schema (Osherson,
2017).
The preoperational stage which is the second stage occurs between two to seven years
age. Here the child develops a representation system whereby he/she uses symbols such as
creative play and language to symbolize events, laces, and peoples. A creative play can be
demonstrated when a child uses a doll of a kind to represent someone. Girls might use stuffed
animals with tea party while boys do create an argument between their woody figurine and their
buzz light year figurine. In this stage, it has been noted that children are very egocentric and thus
they assume that everybody thinks, reacts and feels the same as they do. They tend to think more
about themselves and rarely think about others (Osherson, 2017).
At the age of seven to eleven years, children are in a stage called the concrete stage. In
this stage, a child develops a logical though not an abstract way of thinking and solving
problems. Here the child can identify concepts through seriation and by classification.
Classification makes the child note the differences and the similarities between various objects
and place them into specific categories. An example to demonstrate this is where a child may

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collect some rocks and arrange them into different categories according to their sizes, either big
or small. In seriation, a child arranges the collected objects based to one or in several
dimensions. This can be shown where a child gets a stack of books of different sizes and starts to
arrange them in one line from the smaller one to the biggest (Osherson, 2017).
The fourth stage of Piaget theory is known as the operations stage that occurs between
the ages of eleven and fifteen years of age. As the final stage of cognitive development, it is
characterized by the child’s capacity to think abstractly (Osherson, 2017). It is the time which
children are I the adolescent period, and they think like adults and now can learn from the past
experiences, plan for their future and also faces challenges of the present time. Adolescent
children can reason hypothetically and deductively. For instance, a student can handle calculus,
and algebraic problems for they have the idea of “X” can represent a number in a mathematics
solution (Carey, Zaitchik & Bascandziev, 2015).
Limitations and learned implications of the Piaget theory
Although this Piaget theory has contributed much towards understanding the
development of the child’s cognitive system, many scientists have questioned it. The main doubt
in the Piaget theory about the order of the stages and whether all the children develop cognitively
in the same manner. Moreover, Piaget does not insist on his idea that all the individuals have to
pass through all his theory’s developmental stages before attaining total maturity. In a certain
study of analysis by a research scientist, the data from adolescent populations shown that 30 to
35% of high school student attains the cognitive development in the formal operations.
According to Bandura, It applies to the modern society that most of the human behaviors are
learned through observation of various models in the surrounding society (Mello & Worrell,
2015).

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Conclusion
In this essay, it is demonstrated that although all theorist shared some similarities, they
based their argument on a different aspect of child development. It is shown that Piaget in his
theory, he focused on the child’s cognitive abilities and senses, Erikson concetrated on the
child’s social and self-orientation while Bandura based on self-efficacy and environmental
factors. The essay discusses how Piaget theory is related to children’s cognitive development. It
is discussed in detail each of the four stages of the Piaget theory concerning cognitive
development from childhood to the adolescent age.

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Reference
Bandura, A. (Ed.). (2017). Psychological modeling: Conflicting theories. Transaction Publishers.
Barrouillet, P. (2015). Theories of cognitive development: From Piaget to today.
Bjorklund, D. F. (2018). A metatheory for cognitive development (or “Piaget is dead” revisited).
Child development, 89(6), 2288-2302.
Carey, S., Zaitchik, D., & Bascandziev, I. (2015). Theories of development: In dialog with Jean
Piaget. Developmental Review, 38, 36-54.
De La Sienra Servin, E. E., Smith, T., & Mitchell, C. (2017). Worldviews, a mental construct
hiding the potential of human behaviour: a new learning framework to guide education
for sustainable development. The Journal of Sustainability Education.
McLean, K. C., Syed, M., Yoder, A., & Greenhoot, A. F. (2016). The role of domain content in
understanding identity development processes. Journal of Research on Adolescence,
26(1), 60-75.
Mello, Z. R., & Worrell, F. C. (2015). The past, the present, and the future: A conceptual model
of time perspective in adolescence. In Time perspective theory; review, research and
application (pp. 115-129). Springer, Cham.
Osherson, D. N. (2017). Logical Abilities in Children: Volume 1: Organization of Length and
Class Concepts: Empirical Consequences of a Piagetian Formalism. Routledge.
Siegler, R. S. (2016). Continuity and change in the field of cognitive development and in the
perspectives of one cognitive developmentalist. Child Development Perspectives, 10(2),
128-133.

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Youniss, J. (2017). The nature of social development: A conceptual discussion of cognition. In
Issues in childhood social development (pp. 203-227). Routledge.