In this assignment, I will be giving specific examples to help me distinguish between the thinking patterns of 3-year-old preschooler and a 9-year-old student using Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Before I begin with the purpose of this assignment, I will talk about Jean Piaget and his contributions to the discipline of cognitive development of children. Piaget was the first person to present us with a comprehensive model of cognitive development by trying to identify the stages that children pass through to get to the adult way of thinking. Piaget was a stage theorist; meaning he suggested that children’s development path is identifiable by major reorganization of thinking at transitioning points followed by it being stabilized overtime. Piaget’s utmost insight was the fact that children are not tiny models of adults. He proposed that cognitive change is the result of children’s need to achieve equilibration between their two process of thinking assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process of absorbing new information and accommodation is the process where if the new information is inconsistent with their experience they will alter their belief to make it compatible. Piaget developed four stages of cognitive development of children; Sensorimotor (from birth to 2 years of age), pre-operational (two to seven years of age), Concrete operational (seven to eleven years of age) and lastly formal operational (eleven years of age to adulthood). That being said, to distinguish between a 3-year-old preschooler and a 9-year-old student, I will be differentiating between the 3-year-old preschooler in the pre-operational stage and the 9-year-old student in the concrete operational stage. According to Piaget, the pre-operational stage is characterized by the child's ability to construct mental representation of their experiences by using symbols such as drawings, language and objects to represent their ideas. For e