Experiment Reveiw of Piaget's Conservation Tasks

Jean Piaget was a psychologist who looked at a child’s developing their reasoning skills. Piaget carried out detailed observations of them and as his work started taking shape on how our understanding a child’s intellectual skills and as a result of this he has made changes in education. Piaget understood that cognitive developments occurred in stages, his research concentrated on how children learn and start to gain an understanding of their stage of development to be able to learn new concepts. He identified a four-stage process of cognitive development all the way through childhood. He stated that every child would go through each stage but not at the same time, but he also said that some children would sometimes never reach the later stages.

Psychology is full of theories that explain why we think the way we think. Of those theories, is the popular Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Jean Piaget introduced a variety of ideas and concepts to the world of psychology describing logical thinking in children and adolescents. To fully comprehend just how valuable his theories are today, it is important to explore the life of Jean Piaget, his educational background, and the stages of cognitive development and how the stages impact the classroom. This will give a further analysis and explanation of how Piaget has helped to shape our viewpoints as teachers today.

The sensorimotor stage infants develop their schemas through sensory and motor activities. Followed by the preoperational stage where children begin to think symbolically using words, to represent concepts. Next concrete operational stage children display many important thinking skills, like ability to think logically. Finally, formal operational stage young adolescences formulate their operations by abstract and hypothetical thinking. Piaget’s theory provides ample and insightful perspectives, so it remains the central factor of contemporary

This essay will state Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development. Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Piaget’s hypothesis is that the four stages of cognitive development are; the sensorimotor stage, which ranges from birth to two years old. This essay will discuss aspects of this stage including; Object permanence, Schemas and equilibration and assimilation. The preoperational stage which ranges from two to seven years old. This essay will evaluate Piaget’s hypothesis on conservation and the three mountains and counters task. The concrete

The preoperational stage is when infants become older, young children and they are able to think in a more symbolic way. In this stage children start to learn the difference between real and make believe, past and future. They tend to have more of an imagination as they grow older. Children in the preoperational stage still are not completely logical with their thinking. They go more off intuition. Do more of what they want to do, not what is the best thing to do. They are still too young to grasp the concept of cause and effect. They also do not understand time and comparison yet.

The study of Cognitive theories has many different aspects that have been debated many years ago. Developmental psychologists try to explain cognitive development approaches which describe the process of human 's thought. One of the developmental psychologist who studied on the area of cognitive was Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget a Swiss psychologist was the first developmental researcher who has extensive research on cognitive development. In addition, the revolution of Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory has changed the development psychology forever. In fact, although this theory is one of the most influential theories that have had a major impact on child’s cognitive development, many developmental psychologist has been criticized it as well(Miller,2007). Therefore, the limitations of this theory made the developmental psychologists thinking of information processing theory might complete Piaget’s Theory(Miller,2007). Information processing theory is another theory that was engaged in the era of cognitive development. It is possible to better understand Piaget theory and Information Processing theory by comparing several important aspects of developmental psychology: nature of humans, quantitative or qualitative, and nature or nurture.

“According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, it states that all children go through specific stages as their brain matures. It also stated that these stages are completed in a fixed order within all children, according to their range of age (Atherton).” In other words, one cannot expect a two month old baby to solve simple math problems as that of a five year old. There are four stages in which Piaget grouped the development of a child according to their age groups, in which children interact with people and their environment. The sensorimotor stage (birth until age 2) children use their senses to explore their environment. During this stage, children learn how to control objects, although they fail to understand that these objects if not within their view continue to exist. The preoperational stage (2 until age 7) children are not able to see other's viewpoints other than their own. In other words, if the same amount of water is poured into a short wide glass and then a tall thin glass the child will perceive that the taller glass has more water because of the height. The concrete operational stage (7 until 12) children begin to think logically, but only with a practical aid. The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory is the formal operation stage (12 through adulthood) in which children develop abstract thinking and begin to think logically in their minds (Piaget).

During the third "concrete operational stage," children aged 8–11 develop cognitively through the use of logic that is based on concrete evidence. Piaget considered this a major turning point in development because it marked the beginning of logical or operational thought. The child is mature enough to use logical thought or operations (rules) but can only apply that logic to physical objects (hence the term concrete operational). They become less egocentric and better at conservation tasks (conservation refers to a logical thinking ability). If two round balls of playdough of exactly the same size are balanced opposite each other on a scale, a child can be shown that they weigh the same. However, if one is squashed and the child is asked

This stage is known as the concrete operational stage, which is made up of children that fall in the age range of seven to eleven years old. During the concrete operational stage, children are able to think more logically and critically than they were able to while in an earlier stage of development, thus their symbolic thought is increasing. A nine-year-old would also display less egocentric characteristics. For example, in the previous mountain example, a nine-year-old would realize that an individual standing at a different point of the mountain would see the mountain from a perspective other than that of the nine-year-olds. The nine-year-old also no longer displays the effects of centration. However, the nine-year-old will have a hard time thinking abstractly; they will only understand concrete ideas. A key factor to this stage of development is conservation. Conservation is the ability to understand that an object stays the same even if superficial aspects are changed. For example, if a certain volume of water were to fill a small cup, and was then transferred into a larger cup, the nine-year-old would realize that the amount of water in the larger cup is the same as it was when it was in the smaller

The Formal Operational Stage of Piaget’s Cognitive Stages of Development is the stage that this child is in. This child was able to manipulate thoughts in his head, think creatively, and use abstract reasoning. These are all things a child of this age should be doing and he fits well into this stage of Piaget’s Cognitive

“I have some works here, with which I need some help. Would you like to help me?” My invitation to Max, Sophie, Christian and Kate accepted, I proceeded to share, challenge, interview, and observe. The tasks I presented illustrated the phenomena of cognitive development in early childhood, the stage Jean Piaget calls preoperational. While Piaget refers to his developmental theory in “stages” he does not feel that the stages happen at specific times but that they are sequential and one depends on the previous. The distinguishing characteristics of the preoperational stage stand as barriers to logic and the

It has been generally believed that what he proved is the fact that a child moves through cognitive developmental stages from a simple pre-operational to a concrete level and then to a more complex and abstract operational cognitive level in the process of maturation. Piaget’s theories have been heavily critiqued, both in terms of his assumptions of developmental stages as well as in terms of the smooth progression from stage to stage, however, the necessity of the shift from the concrete to the abstract level of cognition still appears to be firmly embedded in most educational theories today.

Next, the "pre-operational stage" is the second stage of Piaget’s theory. This stage lasts from around 2 - 7 years. In this stage, Piaget proposed that a child fails to understand the concept “conservation” - the belief that things remain constant in terms of number, quantity and volume irrespective of variations in appearance. In experiments to test number conservation, Piaget showed the child two sets of checkers, which had exactly the same number of checkers in each set. He then changed one of the checker sets, keeping the same amount of checkers in it, so that it was only different in appearance. When the experiment ended, the results showed that the children believed that the sets were of different quantity, thereby, proving Piaget’s theory factual. (Piaget 1952)

For this paper I will be exploring Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that children progress through four key stages of cognitive development that change their understanding of the world. By observing his own children, Piaget came up with four different stages of intellectual development that included: the sensorimotor stage, which starts from birth to age two; the preoperational stage, starts from age two to about age seven; the concrete operational stage, starts from age seven to eleven; and final stage, the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. In this paper I will only be focusing on the

Jean Piaget, a cognitivist, believed children progressed through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. These four major stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, are marked by shifts in how people understand the world. Although the stages correspond with an approximate age, Piaget’s stages are flexible in that if the child is ready they can reach a stage. Jean Piaget developed the Piagetian cognitive development theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that a child’s intellect, or cognitive ability, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.