Piaget's Theory

I. Introduction Nikita is six year old, and she is at Piaget’s preoperational stage. According to Piaget’s description of the preoperational stage children, they cannot understand his conservation tasks. This preoperational stage, “children can use representations (mental images, drawings, words, gestures) rather than just motor actions to think about objects and events. Thinking now is faster, more flexible and efficient, and more socially shared. Thinking is limited by egocentrism, a focus on perceptual states, reliance on appearances rather than underlying realities, and rigidity (lack of reversibility)” . The young children do not have abilities to have “operations mental actions that obey logical rules. Instead, their thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment” .

According to Piagetian conservation tasks, preoperational stage: 2-7 years old children lacked the knowledge to conserve. Conservation means, “ the understanding that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes” . Piaget’s test for conservation of number is described as two rows with same number of things (examples: coins, fruits, and candies that are equally spaced. Initially, young children knew these two rows had same number. If one row is shortened, children failed to notice that the two rows are the same. Piaget said young children did not realize these two rows are still the same number because they confused and did not see what adults see that help them to understand the task. Piaget said the ability to understand this task is “ in the face of a perceptual change,” and the “young child tends to be fooled by the misleading perceptual appearance” . On the Piaget’s task for conservation of length, he described this task as showing young children the two pencils, two pens, or two sticks with the equal length and children knew they were the same...