This shows that children go through cognitive development in different stages and that conservation only occurs at a later age after the child has gone through all the stages of cognitive development.
Piaget contributed a big breakthrough in understanding how children ‘think’ with the studies that he did. His research has been a success that has now been used in psychology for over 50years.
Although Piaget contributed a large amount of research in analysing the cognitive development in a child, there have been some criticisms and challenges against Piaget’s theory such as disagreeing that all children at ages younger than 7 are unable to conserve.
A criticism was made that not all children are unable to conserve before 7years of age or younger. A psychologist, ‘McGarrigle and Donaldson’, (1968-1974) challenged Piaget’s theory and thus, did a further study.
The study was conducted to investigate whether a child under the age of 7 years is able to conserve in a situation. A laboratory experiment was used and the participants were a sample of children of 4-5 years of age.
They were asked to see a show that involved a glove puppet called ‘naughty teddy’ that had 2 rows of sweets. One row of sweets were then spread out with bigger gaps between them, thus the children were asked again if the sweets still contained the same amount as the 1st row. The naughty puppet was used to spread out the 2nd row of sweets. This is because McGarrigle and Donaldson argued that a child learns from past experience. I.e. when the child is asked the same question twice then, from past experiences, they would have learnt that if an adult would ask the same question the 2nd time then they must have got the 1st answer wrong and therefore would not give the same answer again even if they thought it was right.
The results found that some of the children knew that the row still contained the same amount of sweets however they said that something had changed (Meaning the gaps had become bigger in between the sweets).
The conclusion drawn was that because the sweets were moved by the naughty teddy, it did not affect the child’s answer and therefore the study did provide evidence that conservation is able to take place on children at a younger age than 7. Thus, Piaget accepted that children of around 5years of age are capable of starting to conserve, as the concrete operations stage is able to start at the age of 5.
Another criticism was made by Bower 1982 who studied object permanence.
He was investigating visual abilities in babies. He did a number of different experiments. He used children of only a few months old. In his experiment, he showed a toy to the baby then put a screen in front of it. Then there were two conditions. In the first condition, he removed the screen with the toy still being there. In the second condition he removed the screen and the toy had been disappeared. He monitored the heart rates of the babies in both conditions.
He found that the heart rate was higher in the condition where the toy had been removed.
This was a criticism to Piaget’s work as he had stated that young babies at that age would be ego centric. However this study had found that a child has object permanence from as young as a few months old.
There have also been some other criticisms on Piaget’s work. One of which is on the methodology that he used. Firstly there was only a little quantitative bit of data and Piaget had generalised his findings to a great population therefore criticisms were made on the reliability of his findings. It was again seen unreliable because, as he used a flexible interview method where the questions were not standardised, it would be difficult to replicate thus, would doubt reliability.
In conclusion Piaget did find great new findings on stages of cognitive development however there were also quite a few criticisms on the certainty of his work.
