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Prenatal and Childhood Development MODULE 10 169following: Whenever Emily goes to school, Meredith also goes to school. Emily went to school. What can you say about Meredith? Every formal operational thinker knows that Meredith also went to school%u2014but so do most second-graders, 36 who do not fit Piaget%u2019s expected age range for this stage. Once again, recent research differs from Piaget%u2019s expectations; the mental skills that form the basis for Piaget%u2019s stages appear earlier than he predicted. Assessing Piaget%u2019s Theory We%u2019ve seen that Piaget%u2019s pioneering research underestimated children%u2019s abilities in virtually every stage of his theory. Further, most developmental psychologists now believe development is fairly continuous , rather than being divided into the discrete stages Piaget proposed. Also, Piaget%u2019s work did not reflect the effects of culture on cognitive development. For example, if you were raised in a cultural environment that made minimal use of numbers (such as the Brazilian indigenous people called the Wuy Jugu), your language might have number words only up to five, with numbers or quantities after that simply called many . This type of language difference appears to delay the development of quantity conservation. 37 , 38 Nevertheless, Piaget%u2019s identification of cognitive milestones broke new ground. Inspired by his work, thousands of psychologists ran experiments on how the mind develops and wrote countless articles on the development of children. Piaget taught us that we learn best when the lesson builds on what we already know (schemas). He showed that new reasoning abilities require the stepping stones of previous abilities. Further, he taught us that children simply cannot reason using adult logic and that it is unrealistic to expect a 3-year-old to reason like a 7-year-old. Piaget provided a wonderful base on which other psychologists could build our current understanding of cognitive development. MAKE IT STICK! 1. Which Piagetian stage is characterized by pretend play and egocentrism? a. Preoperational b. Sensorimotor c. Concrete operational d. Formal operational 2. Which Piagetian stage is characterized by the belief that mass and volume stay the same despite changes in the form of objects? a. Sensorimotor b. Concrete operational c. Formal operational d. Preoperational 3. What do we call adapting your current schemas to incorporate new information? a. Assimilation b. Accommodation c. Maturation d. Abstract logic 4. A child develops the idea that all teachers are female because the child encounters only female teachers. This idea is an example of a. a formal operation. b. preoperational thinking. c. a schema. d. conservation. 5. According to Piaget, a 6-year-old who can%u2019t seem to understand anything other than their point of view is probably going through the ____________ stage. Next time you see a child misbehaving in a public place, stop and consider Piaget%u2019s theory of cognitive development. Is the child spoiled, or are they simply not mature enough to handle the situation they are in? %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.