Piaget's stages of cognitive development

Piaget's Stages Of Cognitive Development

Child Behavior Evaluations using Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

I was working at the library when two 15 to 16-year-old girls sat down at my table. Remembering that I had to do this assignment, I tried to pay attention to their behavior without seeming to. One of the girls opened up her laptop and began to work on what appeared to be homework, while the other girl sat down and quietly waited for her friend to finish the assignment. The homework seemed to require searching for information online in order to complete the assignment. Her patient friend seemed politely bored while waiting. At one point, the girl doing her homework apologized to her friend and stated that she was "… really sorry for taking so long." The girl doing the homework also received several text messages, which she silenced and ignored so that she could continue her work and (I suspect) not keep her friend waiting any longer than necessary.

The age ranges of Piaget's stages of cognitive development would predict that these girls would likely be in the fourth stage. The expression of empathy by the girl doing homework for her friend's patience represents an ability to understand what another person may be experiencing. While this ability is consistent with stage 3 of Piaget's stages of development, which states that children in this stage become less egocentric, the ability to empathize and feel some of the same feelings she suspects her friend is experiencing suggests this young lady has moved beyond simply being less egocentric to thinking about what her friend may be feeling. In other words, she is capable of generating hypotheses about unseen phenomena (thoughts about thoughts). This cognitive ability was called 'second-order operations' by Piaget, but others have referred to this ability as inferential thinking.

The girl need more than an hour to complete her homework and as time went by became increasingly sensitive to the burden she was placing on her waiting friend. She repeatedly asked if her friend wanted to leave or had some errands to do. She was therefore capable of inferring that her friend's patience could be wearing thin over time. Her friend likewise sensed her growing unease and tried to assure her that she was quite willing to wait ("I'm okay"; "I'm fine") and that she should take her time completing the assignment. The waiting friend was therefore also capable of empathy for her friend's growing concern and thus inferential thinking.

Piaget's stage 4 of cognitive development suggests these girls should also have the ability to consider all possible combinations to a solution. Piaget called this "hypothetico-deductive reasoning." Given the growing state of anxiety experienced by the girl doing her homework, it is not hard to imagine that she used her mental skills to run through different scenarios to determine the fastest way to complete her homework and thus end her friend's suffering. Her willingness to silence incoming text messages without reading them could indicate that she was able to minimize the impact of this variable on her pace of work. Although she could have turned the cell phone off to minimize interruptions, her parents could have told her to keep the phone on. In essence, this young lady was managing the homework assignment, searching the internet for information, screening incoming text messages, and attending to her friendship. There is no difference between the complexity of the girl's behavior and that of an adult's.

While attending church on Sunday morning, I witnessed a little girl come bouncing down the aisle and greet a little boy sitting in the pew ahead of her. The girl was very excited and undaunted by the boy's reticence to appear as excited to see her. She began to 'chat him up', bouncing up to tap him on the shoulder and then sitting back down on the pew in response to her parent's admonition.

In our church, all the young children are called to the front for a short class on some topic. When this time came, the girl jumped up like she had been shot from a cannon and raced around to grab the boy's hand. She urged him by repeatedly saying "C'mon David, c'mon." She obviously wanted to sit next to the boy during the class and was not taking any chances.

The apparent crush the girl had on the boy probably resulted in her dragging her parents to the pew behind the boy so she could be close to him. For the boy's part, he probably did not express a desire for the girl to leave him alone, otherwise the parents would have intervened. However, it seems obvious from the interaction that the girl was focused on what she wanted and seemed indifferent to what the boy might be experiencing. I estimated their ages to be somewhere between 8 and 10 years of age, but based on the girl's behavior I would estimate that she is still in the preoperational stage. Accordingly, she appears to be still wrapped up in a world where she assumes that everyone thinks and feels as she does and that with enough effort she can bring the boy around to see and feel about her, the way she does about him. This egocentrism defines the girl as preoperational.