Pre Operational And Initiative Vs. Guilt Stages

It was fascinating working with four (4) year old children, during this stage of Initiative vs. Guilt, they involve mostly in interacting with other children at school. This stage provides them with the opportunity to explore their interpersonal skills through initiating activities.

These experiments seem to agree with Piaget’s theory that children from the ages of two and six cannot understand conservation. However, some believe that this was inaccurate and that simple changes to Piagets’ initial experiments would have different outcomes and children can grasp conservation at the pre-operational stage. As described by Oates et al. (2005), Donaldson argued that children could operate at higher levels than Piaget predicted. They made changes to the conservation of liquid experiment so that it would make more sense to children. They observed forty children and instead of using water they used pasta shells and were told that they were going to use these in a competitive game. After the children agreed that the two beakers had the same amount of pasta shells, the experimenter pointed out that there was a chip on the rim of one beaker. The beaker was then changed to a wider one and the pasta shells were poured into it. The children were asked if they had the same amount of shells or were they different and this time 70 per cent of children said that they were the same. This would suggest that children could conserve from the age of four as long as it made sense to the child. Having a logical reason

During this stage, the child can engage in symbolic play, and have developed an imagination. This child may use an object to represent something else, such pretending that a broom is a horse. An important feature a child displays during this stage is egocentrism. This refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. To test whether or not children are egocentric, Piaget used the ‘Three Mountain Task’. Piaget concluded that the four-year olds thinking was egocentric, as the seven year olds was not. Children, at this stage, do not understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

The teacher could place two cups that have the same amount of liquid in the cups but because one of the cups is taller than the other the child is going to think the taller glass has more liquid in it. The third stage is the concrete operational stage which occurs during ages seven to eleven. The term concrete operational means the child can reason only about tangible objects presents. So the child can conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. Thinking becomes less egocentric with increased awareness of external events. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage which occurs during ages eleven to fifteen. This stage focuses on hypothetical thinking and scientific reasoning. Piaget believed that only children can learn when they are ‘ready’ to learn. He also believed that development couldn 't be ‘sped up.’ Piaget believed that children learned through the resolution of disequilibrium (self discovery, active participation). He believed that teachers should ‘bend’ to children’s needs, provide an appropriate environment, promote self discovery, exploratory learning, self-motivated learning, and set challenges to existing schemes.

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

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

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, made substantial findings in intellectual development. His Cognitive Theory influenced both the fields of education and psychology. Piaget identified four major periods of cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operations stage, and the stage of formal operations. The preoperational stage includes children two to four years of age and is characterized by the development and refinement of schemes for symbolic representation. During the preoperational stage lies, what Piaget coined, the intuitive period. This phase occurs during the ages of 4-7 and during this time, the child’s thinking is largely centered on the way things appear to be rather than on

In Initiative vs Guilt, Erikson illustrates the turmoil one undergoes, when as a preschooler, new activities and levels of supervision contribute to a child’s sense of purpose. He goes on to illustrate how a child’s ability or inability to succeed can either lead to feelings of accomplishment or ineffectiveness. Feelings of self-worth can be dashed or cultivated. This early childhood spans from three years old to 5th grade. (see charts on pages 13-14, and 136). For my part, I was so shy, that I did not even want my teacher to call role. The first day was always the worst as it led to two events. One was that inevitability, that the teacher would say my name wrong. That led to two more equally disastrous events in my little

During this stage, children may develop mental representations but lack ability to think logically and understand reversibility. Siegler and Alibali (2004) explained that between the ages of 6 to 12 years old, a child has the ability to learn perception and take information from multiple sources and piece them together. This type of development is also critical in the cognitive stages of a child, because it develops awareness and it allows them to experience world real recognition. This is the third stage of cognitive development, also known as the operational stage. The conservation of liquid task will be apparent in distinguishing a child who is either in the pre-operational stage or operational stage due to their abilities mentioned previously. I do not agree with Piaget’s conclusion about limiting this experiment to older school-aged children because through early education and awareness, any children can pass this experiment. Since Piaget was the only one that transferred the water from one cup into the taller one, the children probably thought it was some kind of magic trick. For this modification, I allowed my little cousin, Waverly, to pour the water into the cup to show that I did not do anything to tinker with the water, and everything she saw is literally in front of her eyes.

During the preoperational stage, the child tends to focus on single dimension. This was proven by Piaget’s conservation problems (Siegler, 2014). Other children like this 3 year-old tends to make similar errors. In this case, the grandmother poured milk from a taller container into a smaller bottle. The 3 year-old would perceived that the taller container would have more volume of milk and would not completely fill the smaller baby bottle; however, they actually had equal volume which brought startling/amazement as the unconditioned response to this behavior. The grandmother took the initiative of imitating a monkey when presenting the monkey cup to the baby. The 3 year-old baby was fascinated by the magic that this conservation measure

“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).

Piaget believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

At the preoperational stage children think in strikingly differently ways compared to adults. They look at the world only from their own point of view-Egocentrism! A related limitation is centration. They only experience physical objects when the object is visually present. In Piaget’s theory, pre-operational children lack the ability to reflect on operations. They focus on one dimension of objects or events and on static states rather than transformations. Similarly, such children are unable to comprehend points of view different from their own, and Piaget devised an experiment to explore this.

The study of conservation task by Piaget typically yields the result that children at a certain age group exhibit certain understanding of conservation. A child younger than 7 or 8 is incapable of understanding the basis of conservation (Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). Piaget’s theory suggests that a child’s understanding of conservation marks a transitional period in their development where cognitive perceptions change from pre-operational to operational (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). Conservation is defined as the knowledge that appearance may change but quantity and weight or number remain unchanged in a child’s mind despite transformations such as changing the object’s shape, sectioning it into pieces or displacing it into different containers (Siegal, 2003). Piaget himself has found out that the conservation of certain variables is not achieved together at the same time (Flavell, 1963). According to Flavell (1963), Piaget’s subject’s showed that conservation of matter is common at 8 to 10 years of age, weight at 10 to 12 and volume only at 12 years onwards. Piaget’s study of conservation of number yielded similar results when administered to children of age 4 to 7 (Flavell, 1963).

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)