What Are Piagets Experiments Too Hard For Children?

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.

His views of how children and young people’s minds work and develop have been enormously influential particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation and increasing the capacity to understand their world, they can’t undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. The research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigations his importance comes from his overall vision. Today Piaget’s theories have helped to change how people viewed the child or young person’s world and the way they study them he has inspired many theorist to improve on his studies. Piaget’s ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating, particularly in education. What he didn’t consider was the effect in the

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

Most of the criticism of Piaget’s work is in regards to his research methods. A major source of his inspiration for the theory was based on his observations of his own children. And because of this small sample group, people believe that it is difficult and incorrect to generalise his findings to a larger population. Similarly, many psychologists believe that Piaget underestimated the age which children could accomplish certain tasks and that sometimes children understand a concept before they are able to demonstrate their understanding of it. For example, children in the Sensorimotor stage may not search for a hidden object because their motor skills are not developed, rather than because they lack object permanence. This has been supported by evidence from Bower & Wishart (1972). They found that the way that an object is made to disappear influences the child’s response. As well as this, Piaget’s theory has been said to overestimate that every child and adult reaches the formal operational stage of knowledge development. Dasen (1994) claims that only a third of adults ever reach this stage.

Piaget believed everyone had to go through each stage of development. Although some kids may show characteristics of more than one stage at a time, he was certain that cognitive development always followed the sequence of the stages, stages cannot be skipped, and each stage is marked by new intellectual abilities and more complex understandings of the world. With this experiment I will prove how each toy can improve, or dismantle each stage for children. While in the toy store I watched how kids were interacting with one another, and how they handled some of the toys. Having, a niece, nephew, and Godson who are infants it was easier to find

Jean Piaget is known for his theories in cognitive development theory. His theory is based on the idea that children constantly construct knowledge as they explore and mold their environment. There are four stages in Piaget’s theory, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operations, the stages also corresponds with how old the child is. Not every child will be in the stage that matches the child’s age because some children are exceptional. Piaget’s theory is based on the cognitive development of how the average child shows their learned behavior through performed tasks. As I went through the first interview, I realized that how the children came to develop their answers was what’s important about the assignment. each child with the Piagetian Task Kit, I started to realize The Piagetian Task Kit helped me examine and see where each child was at in their cognitive development level.

I performed an experiment on two little boys similar to the one we were required to watch on youtube, demonstrating the concept of conservation. Both boys are different ages and at different cognitive stages.

The results of the Piagetian conservation tasks that were completed turned out both as expected and a surprise. The child that was the subject of the tasks was a 3 year old girl named Karis. Karis both agreed to and completed both the number and liquid tasks.

Piaget and Vygotsky both believed that young children actively learn from their hands-on, day-to-day experiences. Jean Piaget portrayed children as "little scientists" who go about actively constructing their understanding of the world. His theories hold the essence of developmentally appropriate curriculum since Piaget believed that children undergo cognitive development in a stage-based manner, such that a very young child would not think about things the same way that an adult might. He referred to the knowledge and the manner in which the knowledge is gained as a schema. In order to build on the cognitive stages that children experience, informal learning opportunities, formal instructional sessions, and the utilized curriculum must all dovetail with a child's current cognitive stage so that assimilation of the new knowledge may occur. Working with what the child knows and experiences, parents and teachers create bridges to the next cognitive stage that are characterized by the child's accommodation. Piaget argued that optimal learning took place in this manner and that adults should avoid thinking that they can accelerate a child's development through the age-based, maturity-referenced stages. This is because a child works toward establishing an equilibrium between the assimilation and application of new knowledge and changing their behavior to accommodate their newly adopted schemas.

This is one of the most reoccurring criticism that Piaget’s theory faces. (Lourenco, 1996) This is mostly based on the fact that researchers believe that the children competence were not really revealed because Piaget’s experiments did not include the necessary controlling factors as they have implicated in their studies. Some of these controlling factors are questions with better clarity, scoring criteria’s and instructions. But I agree with this because I believe that if you are going to try to justify a concept that is based on the development of a child there be a scoring criteria, and there should be a certain age limit for that concept. For instance Piaget did a formal operational thought experiment where children of various ages were to balance a scale by hooking weights on the scales are. For them to pass all the children had to do was notice that the weight’s heaviness and its distance from the center in the end affected the balance. Children who were three to five years old could not comprehend this concept, however children who were seven could balance the scale. And for the children who had reached the age of ten they thought about the locations but this is because they trial and error, not logical thinking. (Berger, 2010, p. 334) Such a test that is meant to see if a child can accomplish such a task should be for a child who is much more developed such as in the age range of six to eight not a young child who is merely just three or five. Another reason why I feel that Piaget underestimated a child competence is because it has been stated that some children with intellectual disabilities have “a persistent failure of normal synapse pruning”, this causes it to be difficult for them to think. (Berger, 2010, p. 96) In addition a group of researchers redid Piaget’s construction of the object concept and the

Much of Piaget’s early work involved the “clinical method” – children being asked questions in a somewhat unstructured way, the onus being to establish whether they understood different problems. This approach was criticised for being unscientific, with Piaget and his fellow workers eventually being more precise in their experiments. It was agreed however that Piaget posed problems in a way that young children found difficult to comprehend. (Eysenck,

According to Piaget on conservational skills, Children have a highly developed sensitivity to fairness and justice. Not so much to the idea that certain physical properties remain the same no matter the dimensions of the spaces they occupy. That, in a nutshell, is the definition of conservation. Altogether there are seven Piagetian conservation tasks: length. Liquid, mass, area, weight, and volume. The tasks are listed in this specific order because this is the order in which children come to understand these topics. Experiments, such as conversational tasks, on children, are important because they can offer rare insights into a child’s mind and the pace at which it develops.

Piaget *Missing Works Cited* Piaget work has received world wide acclaim and recognition , as well as having a positive impact in areas such as education and social curricula. Though he had made an impact on understanding of the child cognitive development , his theory of cognitive development has suffered a great deal of critics that it neglects the social nature of human development.(Hook, Watts and Cockroft ,2002).So the following essay will discuss on whether this critic is valid or not based on detail discussion of Piaget theory. The theory of Vygotsky shall also be discussed to prove that indeed social factors play a role .

Several years ago, an insightful and profound man, Jean Piaget, established a theory of cognitive growth during childhood. This theory was viewed as a major model for understanding the intricate steps of mental development from the thinking to understanding for a child. This theory also gave rise to the mentality that cognitive processes during childhood are not minuscule versions of adults but rather an irrational yet unique process with its own rules. Even though Piaget’s theory seems quite reasonable and logical, under the light of recent speculation his theory has been widely challenged. However, Piaget’s theory holds great impact in today’s psychology.

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