Question

What is conservation? Describe conservation tasks and discuss. Are they typical of children in the preoperational stage? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Answer:

Piaget's theory of cognitive development:

According to Piaget, cognitive reversibility is a tangible operation state in which children initially habituate and gain knowledge to understand the things how it works and alter they gain knowledge to return to their original state.

Paiget illustrated children’s cognitive development in four stages

They are 1. Sensory motor stage

2. Pre-operational stage

3. Concrete operational

4. Formal operations      

Preoperational stage defined as the stage at which children mainly habituate and gain knowledge to speak at the age of 2 to 7 years. In this stage child develops to use symbols initially and finally form enduring and manipulating symbols. In this stage children do not develop logical thinking or reasoning.

Egocentrism is the defined as the process of inability to differentiate self perspective with other. Preoperational stage includes the following stages of features such as a. animism; b. artificialism c. transductive reasoning.

According Piaget conservation is illustrated as the process in which children at the age of 2 to seven are unable to think logically. But their logical thinking starts at the age of seven to eleven years.

Paigets Conservation tasks:

Decentration: it is conservation task that can look into all together properties of an object associate with a lot logical thinking

Reversibility classification and is associated seriation to describe capability to order items along a qualitative dimension, according to their length or weight.Transitive inference seriate mentally followed by spatial reasoning.

For example a child at the age of 2 to 7 years old was asked to denote and represent the height of the two trees located on the hill. More often children confirmed that the tree which is located at hill top is taller and higher than the tree located at the base of the hill. In this representation child failed to think logically that he has to measure the height of the tree exactly.

In another example, a 2 to 7 year old child was asked why stars are blinking and shining in the sky? Child has replied that because they are happy. Egocentric nature of the children and also inability to think logically are the two phenomenons were expressed.

According to theorist Erickson there are total 8 behaviorsl associated developmental changes in the children during their development. They are changing along with the age and children’s environmental exposure to the society. But in case of theorist Paiget, he explained only two to three stages of children psychological development and explained the egocentrism and children logical thinking but he did not address andy “aim or purpose” associated with initiative vs. felling of guilt at time of child locomototion mediated through genital origin to preschool age 4 to 5 years. Theorist Paiget did not explain anything about children “Will” associated with autonomy developing characters such as shame and doubt. But Erickson explained all these principle developmental stages.