Critically evaluate the evidence that Piaget underestimated childrens Essay

Critically evaluate the evidence that Piaget underestimated childrens abilities in the pre-operational stage - Essay Example This stage of development lasts from age two to six. Critics have stated that Piaget underestimated children’s abilities in the pre-operational stage and this is based mainly on the following grounds (a) the child in the pre-operational stage is unable to conserve the relationship between the different dimensions of an event (b) Piaget’s theory held that children in the preoperational stage may be unable to understand object permanence (c) Piaget has underestimated the ability of children to see the world from another person’s viewpoint and referred to this as egocentrism. One of Piaget’s major findings about the pre-operational stage was that children cannot conserve different dimensions of an event. For example, when a piece of clay is molded into two different shapes, the child is unable to understand that although the shape is different, the piece is essentially the same.(Salkind, 2004, pp 249). However, in experiments conducted by Wynn (1992), on five month old infants, the findings appear to suggest that infants may even be able to calculate results for simple arithmetic operations on a small number of items. Human beings may therefore possess innate arithmetical abilities. Similarly, Xu and Spelke (2000) have also shown that when extraneous variables are controlled, infants are able to discriminate between large sets of objects on the basis of numerosity. This suggests that Piaget’s findings may be lacking in some aspects. Piaget appears to have underestimated the timing of development of children’s abilities and one example of a cognitive defect attributed to the pre-operational stage is the inability to comprehend object permanence, i.e, that an object continues to exist even when it is moved out of sight.(Hetherington and Parke, 2003). In examining object permanence, Piaget concluded from his observations that young children appear to view objects as ephemeral entities which are constantly made and unmade