Piaget Stages Of Cognitive Development Essay

Piaget was the first psychologist to consider children as different from adults instead of just smaller, younger versions of adults. This was a monumental insight in the field of developmental psychology and radically changed how cognitive development was thought about. His theory considered development to be an active process that occurred in four stages, happening at approximately the same age for all children. The stages are: sensorimotor (0-2 years), preoperational (2-7 years), concrete operations (7-11 years), and formal operations (11 years and older). Comparing two children at ages three and nine, the three years old would be in the preoperational stage, and the nine years old in the concrete operational stage, both stages will be described

At this stage children can now represent things symbolically with language, objects, and images. During this stage children often play pretend, demonstrating their ability to think symbolically. Despite this new found ability to think symbolically children at this stage are still held back by two major limitations to their thinking, egocentrism and an inability to perform mental operations. Egocentrism is an inability to understand things from other’s perspectives. Children in this stage often believe that everyone perceives the world the same way they do; this can lead to strange beliefs, such as, teachers live at school, because that’s the only place children ever encounter them. An inability to perform mental operations means that children at this stage fail conservation tasks. In one conservation task an individual looks at two lines formed by equal numbers of pennies, equally spaced out, at this point a three years old child at the preoperational stage can identify that the lines have the same number of pennies. Then the pennies in one of the lines will be spread out more, the number of pennies is the same, but now one line is longer than the other. A child at the preoperational stage will say that the number of pennies in the spaced out line is greater than the number of pennies in the other, unchanged line, even if they saw them get spread