In this assignment, you will conduct a very simple experiment; a test of conservation using children who are currently in Piaget's stage of preoperational thought which begins in toddlerhood and goes into middle childhood (approximately 2-6 or 7 years of age).  Preoperational children tend to centrate:  they focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others, often coming to illogical conclusions.  They cannot think simultaneously about several aspects of a situation. 

           A classic example is Piaget's most famous experiment.  He designed it to test children's development of conservation - the awareness that two things that are equal remain so if their shape is altered so long as nothing is added or taken away.  He found that children do not fully understand this principle until the stage of concrete operations, normally in middle childhood. 

Your task is to show a child (4-6 years old) two identical clear glasses, both short and wide and holding the same amount of water or juice.  Then pour the water from one glass into a third taller, thinner glass.  Now ask the child whether both glasses contain the same amount of water, or whether one contains more.  Wait for the child to answer (most likely he/she will say that the tall glass has more water).  Then ask the child why he/she answered the way they did.  Then pour the water from the tall glass back into the short glass and ask the child whether the glasses now the same amount of water have (if the child is truly preoperational he/she will say they are equal again).

1. Record the child's age.
2. Record exactly what you ask the child.
3. Record the child's exact answers to your questions.
4. Answer the question: Is the child in the stage of preoperational thought?  What leads you to draw this conclusion?

 

The thought Stage of Preoperational

The age of the child that I interviewed was four years old. In an attempt to elicit Piaget's stage of preoperational thought, I conducted a simple test that entailed two identical glasses. I used two glasses were short and wide and while the third one was tall and thin. First, I poured the water into two identical glasses that contained equal amounts of juice. Then I took and poured from one glass to the tall glass.

I then enquire from the kid if the glass contained equal amount of juice or if the tall or the short glass had more juice. The kid responded and said that the shorter glass had less water while the taller glass had more juice. I then asked the child to explain why she thought the taller glass had more juice compared to the short glass. The child answered and said the water level is higher in the taller glass than the broader glass (Hanfstingl et al. 513). I further removed juice from the tall glass by pouring some juice into the shorter glass and enquired from the kid, the quantity of water in comparison to the two glasses.  The child answered and said the glasses contained equal amounts of water.

The child is in the stage of preoperational thought. They have difficulties decentering in any social situation. At this stage, children have a cognitive challenge. This experiment challenged the child as it had to do with the volume property of the matter, the number, and the length (Marwaha, n.p). The child is demonstrating that they can keep track of only one property at a time. The continuous attention to one variable is known as centering or inability to decenter. The child is centric, only focusing on one aspect of the glass and disregarding other factors. In the preoperational stage, children experience difficulties in thinking about more than one aspect of the in any situation during the same time. They have one-directional logic and one-directional thought (Marwaha n.p).

Children at this stage also are curious and use primitive reasoning to ask questions. They are interested in finding out how things work and why they are the way they are. This is an intuitive substage that children realize the significant knowledge they possess, but they are not aware hoe the knowledge was acquired. Other characteristics of preoperative thought include conversation, irreversibility, class inclusion, and transitive inference (Hanfstingl et al., 535).