Challenging Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget is known for his psychological work with cognitive development throughout the years of a person's life. Today in class Mrs. VanStraten (Mrs. Wollersheim's mother, I apologize for the spelling) came to class and gave us a kindergarden lesson with shapes. We used Piaget's concepts of schemas, assimilaion, and accomodation to sort and find similarities between various sizes and colors of shapes. We knew that round shapes were considered circles. (schema) We then went on to assimilate that squares can still be squares dispite size differences and further accomodated that squares and rectangles both share four sides, but rectangles have two longer sides than squares do thus showing the difference between shapes.

The lesson was very interesting because I realized the way that Mrs. Van Straten taught us shapes must have been very similar to the way I learned to differenciate a circle from a square. To test Piaget's stages of cognitive development I put his theories to the test on the two children I baby-sit. Maxx is a five-year-old pre-kindergarden student and Maddy is an eight-year-old in second grade. According to Piaget, Maxx would fall into the preoperational stage while Maddy would be in the concrete opperational stage. To test Piaget's theories I asked Maxx and Maddy at different times to identify the shapes and colors of the rectangles, squares, triangles and circles. Maxx knew the difference between the colors and shapes but did not take much more interest in them. When Maddy came home from school I asked her to identify the shapes as well and she knew them all easily. When I asked the kids to pick up the shapes, Maxx started picking up all of the shapes with no particular order or method while Maddy sorted each of the shapes by shape, size, and color. I found that Maddy took a logical approach in sorting the shapes in a sequence that made sense to her while Maxx did not come up with a system to put the shapes together. I believe that Piaget's development stages conicide with the ages of each developmental group. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw33CBsEmR4&feature=related explains Piaget's theories by going through each cognitive stage. Maxx's preoperational stage portrays his lack of concrete logic and egocentrism while Maddy being in the concrete operational stage is able to understand chage and can think logically think through math proplems and sequences.