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Jean Piaget and the Conversational Task

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The famous psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget argued that young children were not capable of operations like mental actions that obey logical rules. He compared younger children to older children who he believed were more competent and had reached the concrete operational stage in their life. Piaget believed that younger children’s thinking was limited to only one aspect of a situation at a time. To prove his theory, Piaget conducted some famous conservation tasks for young children between the ages of two and ten to prove his theory that younger children are not yet logical thinkers. By conservation, he refers it to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes (Berk 321). I have recreated three of Piaget’s conservation tasks with my three year old cousin Lola to test Piaget’s theory to see if she was a logical thinker at such a young age or not. I explained to Lola that we were going to have a little fun with some pennies, glasses of water, and some clay. Lola was eager and willing to participate so we didn't waste anytime getting started. The first conservational task that I conducted with Lola was with numbers, so I used twelve pennies. First I spread out a row of six pennies and a second row of six pennies right beneath the first row while Lola watched the entire time. I asked Lola were the same number of pennies in each row. After counting each line to herself twice she told me “Yes." Then in front of her I spread the first row of pennies out to make the row a little longer. I then asked Lola again were there the same amount of pennies in each row or does one row have more. She then counted each row to herself then responded with “Yes!, You just moved some pennies around.” Lola passed the first conservational tasks and actually proved Piaget’s theory wrong. The second conservational task I decided to do with Lola was with liquid. I gathe

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