Piaget’s second level of development is the preoperational stage. This stage normally occurs between children of the ages 2-7 years. The term preoperational means before logical thinking (Snowman, et al., 2009) or in other words it is the stage at which children have not yet acquired the ability to think logically. As a result of this, children’s thoughts at this stage are often looked at by adults as being incorrect or immature. However “Piaget researched the fact that children’s thinking was not just immature adult thinking but was quantitivly different” (Puckett & Black, 2001, p263). There are several characteristics of cognitive development that can be seen in children at the preoperational stage.
One of the main characteristics that was looked at quite heavily with preoperational children by Piaget was that of conservation. Conservation problems test children’s ability to recognise “that certain properties stay the same despite a change in appearance or position” (Snowman, et al., 2009, p31). Children at this developmental level find it hard to understand why some things are the same, even though their shape may differ. Piaget developed several conservation tests to look at a child’s level of thinking. He discovered that children at this level used their senses (sight) to develop an answer (Puckett & Black, 2001).
Some other characteristics of the preoperational stage are egocentrism, irreversibility and physiognomic perception. Egocentrism is when children see the world only through their eyes and therefore assume that everyone else around them thinks the same way as them (McInherny & McInherny, 2002). Similarly to the narrowed view of egocentrism, irreversibility is a thought pattern where children are not able to reverse a thought. For example they can not look back on actions or events and think how they could have been different. Another of the characteristics that Piaget lists as common for children 2-7 is physiognomic perception. This is when “lifelike qualities are attributed to inanimate objects” (McInereny & McInherny, 2002, p.28). This may be seen when children of this age bang into an object and say “that silly chair hurt me”. Each one of these characteristic mentioned above, plus several others, Piaget believes to be paramount in the mental development of a young child (Puckett & Black, 2001). By children developing and working through these cognitive characteristics children will gradually develop knowledge and higher order thinking skills.
