Preoperational Thought

At this stage, children acquire representational skills in the areas as mental imagery, language, and symbolic thought. They are very self-oriented, and have an egocentric view. Preoperational thought is pre-logical; the child has a subjective grasp of the world. Preoperational children use representational skills only to view the world from their own perspective. The main characteristics are:

·        Egocentrism - child interprets the world in terms of the self

·        Centration Fixation on one situation or object and ignore others

·        Reversibility -child cannot mentally re-

          steps of reasoning 

Preoperational thought is also characterized by animism. The child has the tendency to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects and events. Artificialism is the tendency to assume that natural objects and natural phenomena were created by human beings for human purposes as darkness so that humans may sleep.

Piaget's experiments in preoperational thought are groundbreaking and controversial. In the Three Mountain Task young children are asked to assume the perspective of a doll in relation to a model of mountains. Young children of the age four to five took their own perspectives. Children could not accomplish the task until about age nine.

Class inclusion experiments presented arrangements of six red flowers and two white flowers. When asked are there more red flowers than flowers, preoperational children chose there are greater red flowers. Conservation is also problematic. If two arrays of objects are presented and an experimenter alters the array and not the quantity of objects, preoperational children fail at deducting the transformation of the array.

                                     Concrete Operations

Children in the concrete operations stage are able to take another's point of view and take into account more than one perspective simultaneously. They can also represent transformations as well as static situations. Concrete problems are understood. Children cannot yet perform on abstract problems; they do not consider all of the logically possible outcomes. Reversing operations emerges.