Developmental Psychology Has Been Able to Contribute to Improving Children’s Lives

These experiments seem to agree with Piaget’s theory that children from the ages of two and six cannot understand conservation. However, some believe that this was inaccurate and that simple changes to Piagets’ initial experiments would have different outcomes and children can grasp conservation at the pre-operational stage. As described by Oates et al. (2005), Donaldson argued that children could operate at higher levels than Piaget predicted. They made changes to the conservation of liquid experiment so that it would make more sense to children. They observed forty children and instead of using water they used pasta shells and were told that they were going to use these in a competitive game. After the children agreed that the two beakers had the same amount of pasta shells, the experimenter pointed out that there was a chip on the rim of one beaker. The beaker was then changed to a wider one and the pasta shells were poured into it. The children were asked if they had the same amount of shells or were they different and this time 70 per cent of children said that they were the same. This would suggest that children could conserve from the age of four as long as it made sense to the child. Having a logical reason

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.

During this stage, the child can engage in symbolic play, and have developed an imagination. This child may use an object to represent something else, such pretending that a broom is a horse. An important feature a child displays during this stage is egocentrism. This refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. To test whether or not children are egocentric, Piaget used the ‘Three Mountain Task’. Piaget concluded that the four-year olds thinking was egocentric, as the seven year olds was not. Children, at this stage, do not understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

In Piaget 's concrete operations period the key development of this is the acquisition of operations, which are mental representations of dynamic and static aspects of the environment. Here children not only master the static states, but also are able to represent transformations. The importance of concrete operations can be identified in understanding of three types of conservation: liquid

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

In order to create play, they must represent these activities mentally and translate them into actions. While the thinking of preoperational children is more advanced, Piaget emphasizes that children at this stage of cognitive development are still immature and are limited by egocentrism. They are all about self and perceive the world based on their own assumptions and experiences, they have difficulty relating to differences such as lighter, smaller, and softer.

Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children 's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve ', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if ' something was to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational ' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility '. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

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 believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

Experiments highlighted one of the major flaws in Piagets work – he failed to take notice of the context of the tasks he gives to children. He concentrated on a few tasks which often led to an under-estimation of the

The study of conservation task by Piaget typically yields the result that children at a certain age group exhibit certain understanding of conservation. A child younger than 7 or 8 is incapable of understanding the basis of conservation (Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). Piaget’s theory suggests that a child’s understanding of conservation marks a transitional period in their development where cognitive perceptions change from pre-operational to operational (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). Conservation is defined as the knowledge that appearance may change but quantity and weight or number remain unchanged in a child’s mind despite transformations such as changing the object’s shape, sectioning it into pieces or displacing it into different containers (Siegal, 2003). Piaget himself has found out that the conservation of certain variables is not achieved together at the same time (Flavell, 1963). According to Flavell (1963), Piaget’s subject’s showed that conservation of matter is common at 8 to 10 years of age, weight at 10 to 12 and volume only at 12 years onwards. Piaget’s study of conservation of number yielded similar results when administered to children of age 4 to 7 (Flavell, 1963).

Looking at the two stages for Piaget which are the Preoperational and the Formal Operational stages. These two stages consist of different ages, brain comprehension, and construct ideas that are presented in front of them. Conducting an Interview with children from both stages gave an understanding of Piaget theories and why the ages of the children hold a different perspective. This interview that has been completed has four types of conservation in which are liquid, number, and matter, and lastly, length. Each of these types of conservation have an experiment that is specifically designed to test these theories hands on. Each of these conservations consists of two sets of the same things and the child then determines what is seen.

This theory states that children’s understanding of the environment comes through immediate direct (sensory) experiences and motor activities (Otto, 2010, p. 30). It supports the idea of active, hands on learning. Piaget also placed emphasis on the concept of object permanence (the awareness that an object remains even though it is removed from sight) and believed it was a precursor to language development (Otto, 2010).

Conservation – The child learns that objects are not always the way they appear to be. In this aspect,

Children grow, learn, and develop as individuals throughout their lifespan. Not only do they physically change, but also they mentally mature. Jean Piaget researched and created four stages of cognitive development to describe how children’s thinking patterns change as they become older (Grison, Heatherton, and Gazzaniga, 2015). He describes their shifts in thinking into sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.