Daniel Willingham on Developmentally Appropriate Practice and Piaget

Unfortunately, Piaget’s theory is not right. He is credited with brilliant insights and many of his observations hold true—for example, kindergartners do have some egocentrism and 9-year-olds do have some trouble with highly abstract concepts. Nonetheless, recent research indicates that development does not proceed in stages after all.

As I said at the outset, teachers generally think of developmentally appropriate practice as instruction that is sensitive to a child’s stage of development, which is assumed to affect his or her thought processes quite broadly. But this characterization of development—discrete stages with pervasive effects—has been carefully tested in the context of Piaget’s theory and has been found not to be true. The problem is not simply that Piaget didn’t get it quite right. The problem is that cognitive development does not seem amenable to a simple descriptive set of principles that teachers can use to guide their instruction. Far from proceeding in discrete stages with pervasive effects, cognitive development appears to be quite variable— depending on the child, the task, even the day (since children may solve a problem correctly one day and incorrectly the next).