The Preoperational StagE
The preoperational stage is the second stage in Piaget’s theory of development. It the stage that children ages two to seven are experiencing. During this stage, children have already mastered object permanence and senses, are starting to have a theory of mind and language, but still lack conservation. Having theory of mind means they are starting to understand how people’s feelings, perceptions and thoughts predict their behavior. Lacking conservation means the child cannot understand that the quantity of an object stays the same despite a change in shape or form.
This is a link to children lacking conservation in the preoperational stage
This is a diagram of conservation experiments. Children in the preoperational stage would say the two objects in the second column are different volumes, numbers, matters, and lengths just because they aren’t the same shape
My 5-year-old niece does not understand conservation because one time we were playing with play dough and I divided the play dough into equal balls. We were playing for a little and I squished my ball down to look like a pancake. She felt bad for me “having less” and gave me some of hers. She lacked conservation because the shape of my play dough tricked her into thinking I had less even if we had the same amount to start.
Children in the preoperational stage are egocentric as well. This means that they can only see things from their point of view and cannot understand other’s point of view. An example would be a child expecting their parent to know what their teacher was wearing at school without the parent seeing the teacher.
My 5-year-old niece lives in Connecticut and I live in Pennsylvania so when we talk it is often over the phone or on FaceTime. When she was about 3-years-old, I was talking to her on the phone and she told me “Look at that puppy”. She did not understand that I was not with her and could not see things from her perspective because I was on the phone. She was being egocentric which means she thought I knew things just because she was aware of them. She was unable to distinguish between herself and her aunt.
Your blog post was very well written. You tied the class concepts into real life experiences very well. Your example of how children between the ages of two and seven lack the concept of conservation illustrated the concept very well. The play doh illustration was a good way to show that children in the preoperational stage do not yet understand that the quantity present remains the same even if the shape changes. Another way to illustrate this concept would be to use an example where children of this age can count, but do not know how to logically see equivalent amounts. For example, let’s say that I have two squares of chocolate and a child has one. They will see this as unfair, which it is. However, if I split their one piece into two, the child will think we now have the same amount of chocolate and everything is fair. In reality, they still have the same quantity of chocolate, which is half as much as I do.