Piaget's Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

As stated by David Elkind in the book Children and Adolescents, "Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, has been studying the development of children's thinking for more than fifty years. Only in the last decade, however, has American psychology and education come to recognize that Piaget is in fact one of the giants of developing psychology." This idea, as well as others throughout my readings, has given me a better understanding of the way children develop psychologically through education and Piaget's stages of cognitive development.
Piaget proposed four different developmental stages of cognitive development. According to our text book, Educational Psychology Developing Learners, by Jeanne Ellis Ormrod, "Piaget hypothesized that major
The first task was a conservation of liquid. I had two identical cups filled with the same amount of water, and one empty cup that was shorter and wider than the other two cups. I asked each student if the water was equal in the two cups, if they said yes, then I poured one of the cups of water into the third cup, and if they said no I would add a little more water to one of the cups until the student thought it had an equal amount of water in each cup and then I would pour one of the cups of water into the third one. Next I asked each student which cup had more water, the third cup that I just poured water into or the first cup that I never touched that still had water in it. My first thoughts before I started the experiments were how each child would perform. I knew each child personally which caused me to have different predictions based on what I already knew about each child, and I didn't just base my predictions on their age and what stage they most likely should be in according to their age. I work with these students a lot after school, and based on what I know about each child I made my hypothesis about how each child would perform on the
I predicted that he would complete all three tasks correctly and easily with out any problems or difficulties. The first task of conservation was a no brainier for the boy. He said right away they both are equal, so I moved onto the next task. Task two, on classification, was just as easy for the boy. He had to think about it for a second though and then he said, "This one is kind of tricky because you are trying to make me say the red apples, but really all the apples are paper so there are more paper apples." The last task on reversibility the boy thought was confusing. The problem he was given was 5+3=8, at first he wrote 3+5=8 and I told him no you need to reverse the problem. The boy was still confused and then he said, "Oh duh," 8-5=3. It was obvious that the adolescent boy is in the fourth stage, formal operations stage, of Piaget's cognitive development theory, because he can think about concepts that have little or no basis in concrete reality including concepts that are abstract and