Child Development Case Study

One precious little girl, charming responses, and thirty well spent minutes adds up to a successful Piaget project. The time spent on interviewing a child for cognitive development was insightful, and gave me a first hand look at how a child’s mind matures with age.

N.G., 4 years, 11 months, embodied all I could ask for in a child to conduct such an interview on. Nearing her fifth birthday in the upcoming week, her age is central between ages three and seven, providing me with information that is certainly conducive to our study. Within moments upon entry into our interview it was apparent that my child fell into the preoperational stage of Piaget’s cognitive development. More specifically, N.G. fell into the second half of the preoperational stage. What initially tipped me off was her first response to my conduction of the conservation of length demonstration. Upon laying out two identical straws, her rational for why one straw was longer than the other was, “it’s not to the one’s bottom”. This is a perfect example of an intuitive guess, though showing a lack of logic in the statement. A crucial factor of the preoperational stage of development is that children cannot yet manipulate and transform information into logical ways which was plainly seen through the conservation of number demonstration. Though N.G. was able to correctly identify that each row still contained an equal number of pennies upon being spread out, it required her to count the number of pennies in each row. In the preoperational stage of development children do not yet understand logical mental operations such as mental math as presented in the demonstration. Another essential element that leads me to firmly support N.G.’s involvement in the preoperational ...

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...a number of years before reaching the concrete operation stage of development, which is triggered at age seven and older when a child’s thinking is no longer dominated by appearance. Additionally, as part of the concrete operational stage, logic and reasoning and the ability to sort objects into classes is present as well as conservation. From part one it was apparent that N.G. didn’t possess conservation which leads to my confirmation that she should be categorized as a preoperational stage child.

Over the course of this “interview” came a new found understanding for the cognitive development of a child, and their reasoning which came as a great surprise. Answers that were presented, and rationales for why things were as they were sincerely amazed me. Mental capabilities mature with age, and I now understand how brilliant Piaget was for classifying such behaviors.