Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget theory of Cognitive Development

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 preoperational stage, a stage of development that focuses on what children are not able to do yet. Piaget stated that during this stage, children do not yet understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information, and can’t see the point of view of other people. Form this stage Piaget was able to develop the concept of conservation, “the awareness that altering an objects or substances appearance does not change its basic properties (Santrock, 2013)”. Children lack the understanding that things appear different to other people and that objects can change in appearance but still have the same properties.
Piaget employed a variety of conservation tasks to analyze the mental capacities of children. For Piaget's test for conservation of number, he used two rows with same number of objects (example: buttons, fruits, crayons, candy etc.) that were equally spaced. In the begging of the experiment, the child knows that the two rows have same number. Then one of the rows is shortened, yet the child fails ...

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...she continuously stated that after the change in each experiment, the items were not the same. These experiments concluded that Truphena does not have cognitive capacity to successfully manipulate the tasks as Franklin did. Franklin was very consistent in his answers and had no difficulty understanding the directions and procedures whatsoever. The results show that Franklin and Truphena are in different stages of development and their differences in intellectual development is what caused the variation in their responses.

Works cited

Santrock, John W. (2013). Essentials of Life-Span Development (3rd ed). New York City: McGraw-Hill.
Piaget, J. (1977). Gruber, H.E.; Voneche, J.J. eds. The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.