Case Study Of Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development

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Jean Piaget proposed four major periods of cognitive development the sensorimotor stage (birth- 2 years), the preoperational stage (ages 2-7), the concrete operational stage (7-11), and the formal operational stage (ages 11- adulthood). He called these stages invariant sequence and believed that all children went through all these stages in the exact order without skipping one. The ages in these stages are only average ages some children progress differently. The point of this message is that humans of different ages think in different ways (Sigelman and Rider, 2015) Ahmad is a six-year-old first grader who lives at home with his mother Edwina and 2 older brothers A.J. and Tre in an apartment in the city of Meridian, Ms. He often spends every other weekend with his dad on the other side of town. Ahmad loves watching movies, going to school and doing homework. …show more content…

According to Piaget in the “preoperational stage, which goes through 2 to 7 years of age a child should have the ability to use symbols to represent objects in the world and thinking remains egocentric and centered” (Slavin ,2015) For example, I lined up two sets of quarters on a table in front of Ahmad. Each set of quarters had four in a row, I asked Ahmad which set of quarters had the most he told me that they all had the same amount. For the second part I lined the quarters up differently, but they still had the same amount the second row of quarters I spaced them out. I then proceeded to ask Ahmad the same question which row of quarters had the most he replied the second row. I asked Ahmad why did he think the second row had the most, he replied because it is larger. This method would be conforming to Piaget’s principle of conservation, “one manifestation of a general trend from a perceptual-intuitive to an orientation, which characterizes the development of conceptual thinking” (operational Zimiles

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