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Piaget's Stages Of Cognitive Development

Decent Essays

From the set of responses given from the surveyed students to the chosen proverbs, it would appear that responses provided by children younger than middle school age are more literal responses to the proverb, whilst responses from the middle school age and beyond show comprehension of the proverb, as this is when elaborate explanation of the proverbs begins. Generally, this conforms with Piaget’s stages of cognitive development; that abstract thought processes accompany the formal operations stage from ages 10-12, and is absent from children aged 9 or younger in the concrete operations stage, where responses were generally more literal applications of the proverb. Students in the qualitive dataset were asked to respond to one of five proverbs, …show more content…

Responses to the first proverb from our surveyed people in the Pre-K/Kindergarten and Primary groups are quite literal responses. One student aged 4 responded “A thousand miles? Somebody is going to walk a lot!”, with many responses reacting similarly through the primary school age. This would seem to indicate that most children, up until ages 9-10 don’t comprehend the idiomatic language of the proverb, and are responding in terms of what they can concretely comprehend – the thousand-mile distance in the proverb. Responses in the middle school age group tend to show a comprehension of the idiomatic language, and begin to explain that the expression is not about a distance, but a goal to be reached. One student, aged 9, responded to the expression by saying “You have to start so you can get somewhere”. While this analysis is basic, and while the student’s comprehension is ambiguous due to the word somewhere having a connotation involving a destination or distance, the explanations from here onward rely less and less upon the word “miles”, and breaks down the meaning of the expression. I believe that the nine-year-old understood the expression’s idiomatic language, as students close to his age begin to provide similar responses. One student, aged 12, replied “Big things happen with smaller steps.”, again signifying a comprehension of the proverb that touches upon it’s idiomatic meaning as opposed to its literal meaning as

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