Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development Essay

Children think differently than adults, and therefore develop their thoughts differently. According to the psychology book, cognitive development can be described as the study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember. One can observe a great difference between a 3-year-old preschooler’s thinking pattern and a 9-year-old student’s thinking pattern. Each child has a different thinking ability which falls into a stage of Piaget’s theory of stages of development. According to Piaget’s theory of stages of development, the 3-year-old would be in the preoperational stage. The preoperational stage is between ages two and seven. In this stage, a child has the ability to construct metal representations of experience but not yet perform operations on them. …show more content…
According to Piaget’s study, children in the preoperational stage had difficulty understanding this concept and change their view on amount of liquid when the physical appearance changed. On the other hand, older children, those in the concrete operational stage, were not fooled with the change in appearance of the liquid. They understood that the liquid amount remained constant. This study shows that the mind of a 3-year-old thinks quite differently than the mind of a 9-year-old. Piaget’s theory demonstrates that children are on different stages of development through cognitive thinking. He uses a set of conservation tasks to prove that children in the preoperational stage can not fully understand some concepts. A 3-year-old preschooler and a 9-year-old student have a very distinct way of thinking since the 9-year-old has lived longer and experienced more problems to deal with. Children’s thoughts develop throughout the years as they are exposed to the world and experience more