Jean Piaget's Preoperational Stage

M3 D1 Jean Piaget’s theory of a Preoperational Stage

According to psychologist Jean Piaget, the progression of children’s cognitive development occurs in four critical stages. Each stage consists of advancements in how the child views and understands the world. Jean Piaget’s theory of the preoperational stage of cognitive development ranges from age two to age seven. Infants and toddlers’ mental representations are impressive, but in early childhood, this representation blossoms. (Berk, 2014, P. 226).

This is the age group that language starts to develop and children begin to engage in symbolic play and learn to manipulate symbols. In a simpler sense, pre-tend play or make-believe play emerges in this stage. Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes (Berk, 2014). Researchers have found that make-believe play strengths a variety of mental abilities such as memory, language, imagination, creativity, and sustained attention.

Children in this stage also lack the ability to understand concrete logic and are unable to take the point of view of another person. This concept by Piaget was termed egocentrism. According to Piaget, when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and simply assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do (Berk, 2014, P. 228). Children in the preoperational stage have the inability to conserve. Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability or the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. With the inability to conserve, preoperational children’s thinking is center based and is focused on one feature while ignoring any other important aspects. They are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects (Berk, 2014, P. 229). They don’t have the ability to reverse their logic to the starting point. Children of this age cannot...