Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development Questions and Answers

Answer: B

A major accomplishment of the concrete operational stage is the ability to conserve.

In Piaget's concrete operational stage (about 7 to 11 years), children understand that quantity, number, mass and volume stay the same when only the appearance changes, for example that water poured into a taller, thinner glass is still the same amount. This rests on reversibility and decentration, which pre-operational children lack.

Animistic thinking (treating objects as alive) belongs to the pre-operational stage. Hypothetico-deductive reasoning appears only in the formal operational stage. Secondary circular reactions are a sub-stage of the sensorimotor period in infancy.

Answer: B

Piaget called these structures schemes.

Schemes (or schemas) are organised patterns of action or thought that a child uses to make sense of experience, from the sucking and grasping schemes of infancy to the mental operations of later childhood. Children adapt their schemes through assimilation and accommodation, and organise them into more complex systems.

'Mental tools' is Vygotsky's term for culturally developed aids to thinking, such as language. Images and mental maps are forms of representation, not Piaget's term for the basic psychological structures.

Answer: A

The sequence is action-based, image-based, symbol-based.

Jerome Bruner described three modes of representation that develop in order: enactive (knowing through actions), iconic (knowing through images) and symbolic (knowing through language and symbols). Teaching a concept therefore moves from concrete activity to pictures to symbols.

The other sequences start with images or symbols, reversing the order in which children's cognitive abilities develop.

Answer: D

This demonstrates assimilation.

In Piaget's theory, assimilation is fitting a new experience into an existing scheme. Jagriti has a scheme for 'dog' built on Rusty, and she applies it to a new dog of a different breed without changing the scheme.

Accommodation would be changing the scheme to fit something that does not match it. Egocentrism is difficulty in seeing another's viewpoint, object permanence is knowing an object exists when out of sight, and conservation is understanding that quantity stays the same when appearance changes.

Answer: D

The pre-operational stage is characterised by symbolic play and animism.

In Piaget's pre-operational stage (about 2 to 7 years), children can represent objects with symbols, as in pretend play, where a block becomes a car. They also show animism, attributing life and feelings to non-living things.

Classification, seriation, conservation and reversibility develop in the concrete operational stage (about 7 to 11 years), and abstract thinking in the formal operational stage. Pre-operational children lack conservation and reversibility.

Answer: C

She is promoting naturalistic intelligence.

In Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, the naturalist intelligence is the ability to recognise, classify and categorise objects in the natural environment, such as plants, animals, rocks or weather patterns. Classifying objects in the environment and analysing classification schemes is its defining activity.

Linguistic intelligence concerns words and language, interpersonal intelligence understanding other people, and bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence control of body movement.

Answer: C

Piaget's theory implies that curriculum should be designed keeping children's age-group and stage in mind.

Piaget held that children pass through qualitatively different stages of thinking, each with its own capabilities and limits. Teaching should match the learner's stage, for example using concrete materials with children in the concrete operational stage before expecting abstract reasoning.

Conditioning with rewards and punishments is behaviourist. Teaching from complex to simple reverses the sensible order, and Piaget valued the process of thinking over the outcome, so the last option is also wrong.

Answer: C

For Piaget, children's thinking is qualitatively different from that of adults.

Piaget argued that children do not simply know less than adults; they think in a different way. At each stage, such as the preoperational child's egocentrism or failure to conserve, reasoning follows different rules from adult logic.

A merely quantitative difference, adults knowing more, is the view Piaget rejected. Dependence on adults is a social fact, not a claim about thinking.

Answer: A

The formal operational stage in Piaget's theory begins at about 11 or 12 years and goes on into adulthood, so the range of 12 to 15 years given here is the one that fits. The concrete operational stage is 7 to 11, the preoperational 2 to 7 and the sensorimotor from birth to 2 years. The answer is option A.

Answer: A

Egocentric thinking is not a characteristic of the concrete operational stage in Piaget's theory. It belongs to the preoperational stage.

In the concrete operational stage children think logically about concrete things, understand reversibility and can reason from observed cases.

Piaget placed egocentric thinking in the preoperational stage, up to about seven years of age. Concrete operations begin after that and bring logical thinking about concrete events, conservation and reversibility.