Conservation Of Liquid With A Three Year Old - 1273 Words

Conservation of Liquid with a Three-year-old Cindy Louie San Jose State University Conservation of Liquid with a Three-year-old Jean Piaget is a developmental psychologist who studied young children and analyzed their development at a young age. Piaget is well known for his four cognitive development stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, and formal operations; as mentioned by Siegler and Alibali (2004). Siegler and Alibali (2004) also stated that these four stages begin as soon as the child is born and it continues throughout their young adolescent years all the way to adulthood. Piaget conducted numerous research experiments towards young children in order to prove his hypothesis and drew conclusions for†¦show more content†¦During this stage, children may develop mental representations but lack ability to think logically and understand reversibility. Siegler and Alibali (2004) explained that between the ages of 6 to 12 years old, a child has the ability to learn perception and take information from multiple sources and piece them together. This type of development is also critical in the cognitive stages of a child, because it develops awareness and it allows them to experience world real recognition. This is the third stage of cognitive development, also known as the operational stage. The conservation of liquid task will be apparent in distinguishing a child who is either in the pre-operational stage or operational stage due to their abilities mentioned previously. I do not agree with Piaget’s conclusion about limiting this experiment to older school-aged children because through early education and awareness, any children can pass this experiment. Since Piaget was the only one that transferred the water from one cup into the taller one, the children probably thought it was some kind of magic trick. For this modification, I allowed my little cousin, Waverly, to pour the water into the cup to show that I did not do anything to tinker with the water, and everything she saw is literally in front of her eye s.