He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.
Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults.
According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.
iaget (1936) described his work as genetic epistemology (i.e. the origins of thinking). Genetics is the scientific study of where things come from (their origins). Epistemology is concerned with the basic categories of thinking, that is to say, the framework or structural properties of intelligence.
What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice and so on emerged.
Piaget (1936) was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions include a theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities.
Preoperational stage
The preoperational stage is the second stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage begins around age two as children start to talks and last until approximately age seven. During this stage, children begin to engage in symbolic play and learn to manipulate symbols. However, Piaget noted that they do not yet understand concrete logic.
Characteristics of the Preoperatonal stage:
The preoperational stage occurs roughly between the ages two and seven. Language development is one of the hallmarks of this period. Piaget noted that children in this stage do not yet understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information, and are unable to take the point of view of other people, which he termed egocentrism.
During the preoperational stage, children also become increasingly adept at using symbols, as evidenced by the increase in playing and pretending. For example, a child is able to use an object to represent something else, such as pretending a broom is a horse. Role playing also becomes important during the preoperational stage. Children often play the roles of "mommy", "daddy", "doctor", and many other characters.
Egocentrism:
Piaget used a number of creative and clever techniques to study the mental abilities of children.
One of the famous techniques to demonstrate egocentrism involved using a three-dimensional display of a mountain scene. Often referred to as the "Three Mountain Task," children are asked to choose a picture that showed the scene they had observed.
Most children are able to do this with little difficulty.
Next, children are asked to select a picture showing what someone else would have observed when looking at the mountain from a different viewpoint.
Invariably, children almost always choose the scene showing their own view of the mountain scene. According to Piaget, children experience this difficulty because they are unable to take on another person's perspective.
Conservation
Another well-known experiment involves demonstrating a child's understanding of conservation. In one conservation experiment, equal amounts of liquid are poured into two identical containers. The liquid in one container is then poured into a different shaped cup, such as a tall and thin cup or a short and wide cup. Children are then asked which cup holds the most liquid. Despite seeing that the liquid amounts were equal, children almost always choose the cup that appears fuller.
Piaget conducted a number of similar experiments on the conservation of number, length, mass, weight, volume, and quantity. He found that few children showed any understanding of conservation prior to the age of five.
Piaget's Thoughts on the Preoperational Stage
As you might have noticed, much of Piaget's focus at this stage of development focused on what children could not yet do. The concepts of egocentrism and conservation are both centered on abilities that children have not yet developed; they lack the understanding that things look different to other people and that objects can change in appearance while still maintaining the same properties.
However, not everyone agrees with Piaget's assessment of children's abilities. Researcher Martin Hughes, for example, argued that the reason that children failed at the three mountains task was simply because they did not understand it. In an experiment that involved utilizing dolls, Hughes demonstrated that children as young as age four were able to understand situations from multiple points of view, suggesting that children become less egocentric at an earlier age than Piaget believed.
Sources:
McLeod, S. ( published 2009, updated 2015) “Jean Piaget” Simply Psychology , http://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html (accessed 24.10.2016)
Cherry K. (June 6, 2016) “Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development: Major Characteristics and Events of the Preoperational Stage” Very Well, https://www.verywell.com/preoperational-stage-of-cognitive-development-2795461 (accessed 2.10.2016)
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