Evaluation Of Jean Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development

One of Jean Piaget’s contribution in the field of Developmental Psychology is his theory that children progress through four stages of cognitive development. These four stages are: sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, operational stage and formal operational stage. This assessment helps illustrate the stage a child is in through conservation tasks. The first segment showed a little caucasian girl with two bows on her hair; she was between the ages of 4-6 years old. She underwent the liquid conservation task. In this task, there were two glasses of the same size, containing equal amount of “juice.” The experimenter then transferred one of the juice into a taller glass. She then asked the little girl whether the amount of the juice n the taller glass was less, more or equal to the liquid found in the smaller glass. The little girl answered that the juice in the taller glass was “more” because it was “taller.” The child is clearly in the second stage of the cognitive development which is the pre-operational stage. Despite …show more content…
The experimenter had three graham crackers. She then placed two graham crackers in front of her and placed the a single graham cracker in front of the little girl. The experimenter asked whether the crackers were shared “fairly” to which the child answered, “no.” When asked why she felt that way, the child replied (complete with hand gestures), “Because you have those, and I have this one.” The experimenter then proceeded to cut the little girl’s cracker in half and asked whether the division was now fair. The child nodded her head and concluded that it was “fair” because now “we both have two.” Again, if a child is in the pre-operational stage, he or she fails to recognize the law of conservation. In this stage, children still think very concretely, thus they have a hard time with rationalization and