Child Development: Piaget's Theory and Preoperational Stage Analysis

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental theory, focusing on how children construct their understanding of the world. It delves into key concepts such as schema, assimilation, accommodation, and cognitive disequilibrium, explaining how children adapt and organize their knowledge. The essay then concentrates on the preoperational stage of development (ages 2-5), detailing its characteristics including symbolic function, egocentrism, animism, and intuitive thought. It further explores the substages of this phase, highlighting the limitations and advancements in children's thinking during this critical period, and the impact of Piaget's research on child development, including the importance of real-world experiences and play in early childhood classrooms. The essay also includes references to other researchers in the field.

Running head: CHILD DEVELOPMENT
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Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

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Piaget and his cognitive developmental theory
Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, Neuchatel, Switzerland. He was a Swiss
psychologist who was the first person to make a systematic study about the acquisition of
understanding in the children. He had been one of the major figures in the 20th century in the
field of development biology.
Theory of how children think and learn
Piaget proposed the theory of cognitive development having studied about how human
beings interact with the world. His theory traces the child development through various stages till
a child becomes an adult. Based on the research Piaget has conferred that every human beings
have tendency towards organization and adaptation (Galotti, 2015). Organization can be
referred to as “combining, rearranging of behaviors and thoughts in to a system that is coherent.
Piaget had witnessed a child constantly creating and recreating his own model of reality,
achieving the mental growth by the integration of the simpler contexts in to higher levels of
concepts at each of the stages (Galotti, 2015).. While discussing about the developmental
concepts, Piaget developed the concept of schema, which is actually a sensory motor map
helping the learner to construct their knowledge (Mooney, 2013). Gradually a child learns to
develop the ability to represent the outer world in the internal images and thoughts. The schema
of a child is normally constructed by the process of assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation can be defined as a way of bringing new objects or information in to a scheme that
already exists (Mooney, 2013). Some misunderstandings are common when it is tried to force
new objects in an ill fitting schemes, hence in order to resolve this conflict, a child has to adjust

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the understanding by adding new information. These adjustments are the examples of
accommodation, that is the process of modifying the old skills, or by creating the new ones for
fitting better with the assimilate information (Mooney, 2013). According to Piaget, children try
to understand new experience by assimilating in to the scheme or the cognitive structures that
already existed. If the assimilation does not work perfectly, there becomes an imbalance of the
old and the new experiences. This state of imbalance Piaget described as cognitive
disequilibrium (Mooney, 2013). Equilibration is therefore termed as dynamic process of
moving between the states of cognitive disequilibrium, as one dissimilates new and the old
schemes. Piaget regarded accommodation as the engine driving the development of the learner.
In the equilibrium process the accommodation and the assimilation interacts with each other
continuously and it is the accommodation that opens up the possibilities of assimilation and vice
versa and eventually in to an expanding cycle (Mischel, 2013).
Achievements
Piaget is considered to be a distinguished and a well known theorist in the field of child
development due to the fact, that the cognitive developmental theory has helped the teachers to
see the importance of children to experience things that we want them to learn by providing them
with real world experiences. Again it is largely due to Piaget, that the uninterrupted playing
sessions in the early child hood classrooms are being encouraged.
Image of a Child in Piaget’s Perception
According to Piaget, children are able to construct their own knowledge in response to
their experiences. Children learn several things on their own, without the assistance of the adults

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and children are likely to become intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from
the adults for motivating the learning.
Preoperational stages of development (children aged 2-5 years)
According to Piaget, the development of a child takes place through four stages and
necessarily do not takes place in the same order for each and every child. During each of the
phases of development there are unique stages of analysis, internal organization and the
understanding of the environmental information. Piaget has shown that the understanding of the
child is entirely based on the stage where the child has reached (Berk, 2017). The preoperative
stage is the second of the four stages of cognitive development. By observing the sequence of the
play Piaget was successful in demonstrating the new type of psychological functioning occurring
at this stage. At this stage the child is able to reason and provide concrete and logical thoughts.
At this stage the child cannot conceptualize abstractly and requires concrete physical situations.
The child learns to represent objects with the help of words, images and drawings (Davidson
Films,1989). At this stage the language, thinking, problem solving capability of the child
develops faster than any stages. The preoperational stage can be featured by animism,
transductive reasoning, and lack of decentering, ego-centrism, lack of classification and fast
acquisition of the language. The child is able to form stable concepts and mental reasoning and
magical beliefs. However the child still cannot perform some operations physically than
mentally.
There are two sub stages of the pre-operative stages- The symbolic function substage,
which occurs between the years 2-4. In this stage the child is able to formulate the designs of the
objects that might not be present in the reality (Rathus & Rinaldi, 2015). Some of the other

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examples of the mental abilities are the language and imaginative play. Although there can be an
advancement of the process, but there are some limitations like animism and egocentrism
(Mischel, 2013).
Egocentrism mainly occurs when a child is not able to differentiate between his/her own
viewpoint and the perspective of the other person. Children tend to have their own view of
anything that they see, rather than the actual view shown to the others. One example is an
experiment performed by Piaget and Barbel inhelder. In the experiment, three images of
mountains are shown to a child and was asked, what a travelling doll would see at various angles
and the child picks up his / her own view in comparison to the doll that was placed at different
angles (Rathus & Rinaldi, 2015).
Another feature that is observed at this stage is animism. Animism can be referred to as
the beliefs that inanimate objects have life like qualities. One example is children talking to a
doll assuming it to be his / her real friend.
The Intuitive thought sub stage occurs between the age 4-7, when children becomes
curious and tends to ask several questions, thus beginning to use primitive reasoning capability.
There is an emergence in the interest of reasoning. Centration can be defined as the tendency to
focus only on one aspect of a situation at a time (Rathus & Rinaldi, 2015). If a child can focus
one more than one aspect at the same time, then he /she has got the ability to decentralize.
Centration can be noticed in conservation, the awareness that altering the appearance of a
substance does not necessarily alters its basic properties (Rathus & Rinaldi, 2015). For example,
in one of the famous task of Piaget, a child is represented with two identical beakers having the
same quantity of liquid. The child usually notes that both the beakers have the same quantity of

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the liquid. When liquid from one of the beaker is poured in to a thinner and a taller container,
children younger than 7-8 years says that the two beakers says that the two beakers now contain
different amounts of liquid. Hence, the child mainly focuses on the height and the width of the
containers in comparison to the general concepts (Berk, 2017). Piaget believed that if a child
failed the conservation of the liquid task, then he/she is in the preoperational stage.

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References
Berk, L. (2017). Development through the lifespan. Pearson Education India.
Davidson Films (1989).Piaget's development theory: An introduction ( video). New York, NY:
Infobase
Galotti, K. M. (2015). Cognitive development: Infancy through adolescence. Sage Publications.
Mischel, T. (Ed.). (2013). Cognitive development and epistemology. Academic Press.
Mooney, C. G. (2013). Theories of Childhood: An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson,
Piaget & Vygotsky. Redleaf Press.
Rathus, S.A. & Rinaldi, C.M. (2015). Voyages in Development. Toronto, ON: Nelson
Education