Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The characteristic is centration.

Centration is the tendency of a pre-operational child (about 2 to 7 years) to focus on one striking feature of a situation and ignore others. In Piaget's conservation task, a child sees water poured into a taller, thinner glass and says there is now more, attending only to the height.

Decentration, attending to several features at once, is the opposite and develops in the concrete operational stage. Transduction is reasoning from one particular case to another, a different pre-operational feature, and causation is not a Piagetian term for this tendency.

Answer: B

Aparna's thinking is animistic thinking.

Animism is the pre-operational child's belief that inanimate objects are alive and have intentions or feelings. Treating a button as alive because it 'helps' to tie her shirt is a clear example, typical of the age range (about 2 to 7) Piaget described.

Transductive reasoning links two particular events as cause and effect; centration is focusing on one feature of a situation; hypothetico-deductive thinking is the systematic hypothesis testing of the formal operational stage. None describes treating an object as alive.

Answer: D

Piaget's four stages represent universal patterns of development of children.

Piaget proposed the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stages as an invariant sequence that every child passes through in the same order, whatever the culture, although the age at which a stage is reached can vary.

He did not claim the stages vary vastly between cultures. His central idea was that children think in qualitatively different ways from adults, not that their minds are miniature adult minds. And he explained progress by the child's active construction through assimilation and accommodation, not by genetic codes alone.

Answer: D

A limitation of Piaget's theory is that it does not account for the influence of culture and social factors on cognitive development.

Piaget pictured the child as a lone scientist constructing knowledge through interaction with objects. Critics, most notably those following Vygotsky, point out that he underplayed the role of social interaction, language and culture, which shape what and how children learn.

The other options misstate the theory. Piaget gave language a secondary role, so he cannot be said to overemphasise it. He did include biological maturation as a factor in development. Individual differences received less attention, but the standard criticism, and the one keyed here, concerns culture and social context.

Answer: D

Such explanations indicate that children have naïve understanding rooted in their cultural context with which they try to understand events.

Children are active thinkers who build their own theories about the world from what they see and hear around them. Sia's explanation of rain draws on stories and beliefs from her surroundings, and it is a genuine attempt to reason about cause and effect. Teachers treat such ideas as starting points to build on, not as mistakes to dismiss.

The explanation does not show that children cannot reason; it is reasoning, though from limited information. It is not egocentric in Piaget's sense of being unable to take another's viewpoint. And the constructivist view is that children's thinking differs from adults' in quality, not that it is simply 'lesser' in amount.

Answer: C

Piaget described cognitive development as occurring in four qualitatively different stages.

The four stages are sensorimotor (birth to about 2 years), preoperational (2 to 7), concrete operational (7 to 11) and formal operational (11 onwards). Each is a different kind of thinking, not just more of the same. They occur in a fixed, invariant order, and Piaget regarded them as universal.

A continuous continuum is the opposite of a stage theory. Piaget did not see his stages as culture-specific; that criticism came from his critics. 'Three progressive levels' describes Kohlberg's levels of moral reasoning, not Piaget's stages.

Answer: B

The difficulty is due to irreversibility.

In Piaget's preoperational stage, children cannot mentally reverse an operation, running a sequence of steps backwards to return to the start. A child who sees that 4 + 5 = 9 but cannot see that this means 9 − 5 = 4 has not yet grasped that subtraction undoes addition. Reversibility develops in the concrete operational stage and underlies conservation.

Animistic thinking is attributing life to objects. Egocentrism is difficulty taking another's point of view. Perceptual centration is focusing on one striking feature of a situation. All are preoperational limitations, but only irreversibility explains a failure to reverse an operation.

Answer: C

The two milestones are object permanence and deferred imitation.

In Piaget's sensorimotor stage (birth to about 2 years), infants come to understand that objects continue to exist when out of sight: object permanence, established around 8 to 12 months. Towards the end of the stage, children can imitate an action they saw earlier, after the model has gone. This deferred imitation shows they can hold a mental representation, the bridge to symbolic thought.

Animism and transformation belong to preoperational thinking. Classification and seriation are concrete operational skills. Reversibility develops in the concrete operational stage, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning in the formal operational stage.

Answer: C

For Piaget, learning experiences depend on children's current level of cognitive functioning.

Piaget held that children actively construct knowledge, and what they can learn from an experience depends on the mental structures (schemas) they already have and their stage of development. New experiences are assimilated to existing schemas or force them to change through accommodation.

So previous knowledge matters a great deal, maturation is one of the factors Piaget named as driving development, and he favoured active experience over memorisation, which rules out the other three statements.

Answer: C

Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

(A) is a true example of a difficulty with class inclusion: young children often struggle to understand that one class (Delhi) is contained in a larger class (India), as Piaget found with his beads and flowers tasks.

(R) is also true, since awareness of how emotions affect memory and learning helps learners regulate their own learning. But it says nothing about classification or class inclusion, so it does not explain (A).