Evaluate Piaget's view that cognitive development occurs in stages. Draw from material presented throughout the chapter on cognition (and anything appropriate from in-class material)

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Piaget asserted that cognitive development occurred in stages that involved abrupt changes in intellectual functioning when the child acquired new thinking skills and abilities. This view would preclude a preoperational child from showing any evidence of ability to conserve or to deal with other tasks requiring cognitive thought operations. Evidence clearly indicates that children's understanding of conservation, perspective-taking, causality, etc. is not as all-or-none as Piaget maintained. The difficult nature of many of the tasks he used to assess children's understanding led him to miss evidence of rudimentary understanding in younger children. Evidence also indicates that there is little consistency of development across content areas that involve the same type of reasoning ability. An individual may be advanced in highly familiar areas and function at a much lower level in content areas that are unfamiliar. Such inconsistencies in performance are not in keeping with Piaget's view of holistic cognitive stages.