Piaget explained human learning as a process for making sense of the world. This process is influenced by the biological maturation our bodies and minds undergo, the activities we perform in the environment, and the social interactions we experience with other people.

Piaget's early writings emphasized the human tendency to organize behaviors and thoughts into systematic structures he called schemes. These schemes were mental representations of worldly phenomena, and they became better organized as new schemes developed from maturation, activity and socialization.

According to Piaget, learning occurs as a result of disequilibration, the state of confusion that results when we interact with new phenomena, -- to which we must adapt by either assimilating the information into an existing scheme, altering an existing scheme to accommodate, or by creating a new scheme entirely.

Piaget proposed that most people progress through four sequential stages of cognitive development, beginning with the sensorimotor (age 0-2), where infants begin to utilize memory, develop a sense of object permanence, and egage in goal-directed activity. In the next stage, preoperational (age 2-7) thinkers develop capabilities of language, symbolic thought, and logical thought, although they remain egocentric. Concrete operational (7-11) thinkers are able to solve physical problems and understand principles of classification, seriation, and conservation. Finally, adolescents at the formal operational stage solve abstract problems logically, utilize scientific thought processes, and become aware of their identities and other social issues.