Piaget believed that toddlers and young children were all in a similar stage of cognitive development, regardless of their background or education. According to Educational Psychology Interactive, Piaget called this the pre-operational stage. He theorized that children at this stage classify objects according to their properties and think symbolically, but can't think abstractly or perform operations with multiple variables. Piaget believed that at about the age of 6, children move to the next stage, concrete operations, where they perform more complex cognitive tasks.
Behaviorist theories of learning emphasize the importance of the child's environment above all else, according to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. B.F. Skinner and his followers believed that children categorize responses to their behavior as either positive or negative and either reinforcement or punishment. Positive cues refer to the introduction of a stimulus, while negative cues refer to the removal of a stimulus. A reinforcement increases the likelihood that the child performs a certain behavior, while a punishment decreases the likelihood. Learning occurs as children see patterns where their responses produces reinforcement and solidify certain behaviors.
The psychologist Howard Gardner rejected Piaget's claim that all children process and retain information similarly, proposing instead that there are multiple types of intelligence, the MommyThink website says. Children could have a high level of one type of intelligence and be much lower in another. Gardner defined seven types of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.
The maturationist theory proposes that a child's knowledge and reasonings skills develop independently of environment, due instead to physical changes in the brain. The University of Saskatchewan College of Education says the constructivist school proposes that young children form a knowledge set based on their experiences, which they alter whenever new experiences provide information contradicting their assumed knowledge.