Jean Piaget Argued That When Children of Certain Ages Watch Water Being Poured from a Short, Wide Container Into a Tall, Thin Container, They Think That the Amount of Water Has Changed. Discuss with Reference to Research Evidence

Piaget believed that all children are born with a very basic mental structure where all learning and knowledge is based and that children construct their own mental structures. He called these the building blocks of cognition and intelligence (Galotti,

Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. Piaget’s work includes a detailed observational study of cognition in children. Piaget showed that young children think in different ways to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent knowledge is based.

Jean Piaget is a key figure for development, focusing on cognitive constructivism – that being that we must learn from experience and development, building on knowledge that has already been developed. The strengths and weaknesses of Piaget 's cognitive development theory will be discussed.

Mildred Parten and Jean Piaget are two theorists that have had great influences on the way we understand children. Piaget constructed the idea that a person’s thinking passes through four stages and as the person grows, their way of thinking changes thus entering a different stage. He emphasized mostly the preoperational stage, which is for ages two to seven years old. In this stage children are seen as illogical thinkers but they do engage in make-believe games by using objects for purposes other than their actual intended use. Between the ages of four and seven, they still do not think logically but they become interested in games that have rules, structure, and social interaction. Unlike Jean Piaget, Mildred Parten did not see types of

Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children 's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve ', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if ' something was to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational ' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility '. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

C. regard children as active beings who modify their own thinking in response to environmental demands.

The next stage is at the age of 7-11 years old. This stage is known as the concrete operational stage. This stage is when the children learn the idea of conservation. What is conservation? This is where you take two identical cups and pour the same amount of water into each of the identical cups. Then you ask the child which glass contains the most amount of water? The child will respond with the answer that bother glasses contain the same amount of water. Then right away without waiting grab a small fat glass and a tall skinny glass. Fill both of the glasses up with the identical glasses of the same amount of water in to the small fat glass and then the tall skinny glass. Ask the child now which glass contains the most amount of water.

Bryant believes that Piagets experiments into conservation skills were too difficult for children to give the correct answers. He argues that it was only the way in which Piaget presented his tasks that the results showed the children as being non-conservers.

Jean Piaget is best known for his theory that suggested children think differently than adults. His theory proposed that children’s cognitive development developed in

Figure 2 contains results from the experiment. The results bear strongly on the experimental hypothesis. 4a. The experimental hypothesis, based on Piaget's theory of object permanence in infants, is that if infants stared and analyzed an object for an extensive amount of time, it could mean they can’t visualize what the outcome may be. However, an alternative hypothesis, inspired by McCrink and Wynn theory, is that infants would be able to determine the outcome through their natural understanding of mathematical operations 4b. An outcome of the current experiment that would support the experimental hypothesis is that infants do not dishabituate and because of their lack of object permanence, as theorized by Piaget, would not even acknowledge

Jean Piaget was one of the most influential theorist of the 20th Century. A constructivist, he was born in Switzerland in 1896, he published his first paper at the age of 10 on an Albino Sparrow. At the age of 16 he was offered a position as curator of a museum but had to turn down as he was still at school. Piaget went on to University and studied Biology, Psychology and Philosophy and rather than choose one he combined all three into a new discipline which he called “genetic epistemology”, meaning “the developmental theory of knowledge”, how we know the world. https://moodle.ncirl.ie/course/view.php?id=2389&section=

Piaget believed that human development involves a series of stages and during each stage new abilities are gained which prepare the individual for the succeeding stages. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the differences between two stages in Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory—the preoperational stage and concrete operational stage. Cognitive development refers to how a person constructs thought processes to gain understanding of his or her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors. The development of new cognitive structures (mental maps or schemas) will be a result of the individual's ability to adapt through mental processes such

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 the purpose of this paper, I will replicate the conservation tasks experiment to test Piaget’s theories. My test subject is a five year old girl named Truphena, she -according to Piaget-is categorized to be in the pre-operational stage of intellectual development. Therefore she wouldn’t be expected to succeed at the conservation tasks that will be presented to her. I also have another subject named Franklin who is nine year old, he

The endogeneous constructivism claims knowledge is formed through cognitive abstraction based on prior knowledge. Piaget’s (1952) theory of cognitive development included environmental influences into knowledge construction. However, Piaget gave more credit to children’s thinking capability in his theory. Children can interpret and respond to new events using existing schemes (Piaget, 1952; Ormrod, 2008). Piaget’s idea of conservation posits children/people knowledge is held in one’s mind until another experience pertaining to the person’s knowledge is challenged/changed (Piaget,