Cognitive Development In Children Case Study

Children are interesting individuals. I came to this conclusion the week I was babysitting two of my younger cousins: one a jubilant nine year old and the other at the tender age of three. By the end of the week, I understood that a three year old has a significantly different thinking pattern than their older siblings. To me, the different manners through which my cousins learned, thought, and expressed themselves was extremely fascinating. Eager to understand these differences in greater detail, I set out do some research.
While searching for explanations, I learned that cognitive development in children has intrigued many developmental psychologists in the past years. Jean Piaget was one such psychologist, and he was the first to comprehend cognitive development, believing that children undergo four stages of development. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage that begins at birth and lasts until age two. The preoperational stage then occurs between the ages of two to seven with the concrete operational stage developing between the ages of seven to eleven years. Lastly, the formal operations stage takes over at adolescence. By understanding each of these four developmental …show more content…
The main characteristic of this stage is a child’s ability to perform mental operations for physical events. In contrast to the preoperational stage, children are now able to pass conservation tests. However, limitations still exist in performing mental operations regarding abstract or hypothetical situations. This ability would only be possible with experience. For example, if children during this stage are given a set of conditions and asked to infer an outcome of a hypothetical situation, they would be unable to deduce how the conditions relate to each other and manipulate the outcome of the situation. However, as development continues, children eventually move on to the final stage of