Piaget was particularly clever in the invention of problems which illustrate
the underlying premises of the child’s thought. The crucial capability that
signals the end of the sensorimotor period is object permanence, the child’s
conviction of the continuing existence of objects that are outside the range
of his or her senses. Piaget established the gradual emergence of object permanence
by hiding from the child familiar toys for progressively longer periods
of time, with the act of hiding progressively less obvious to the child.
Full object permanence is not considered achieved until the child will
search for a familiar missing object even when he or she could not have observed
its being hidden.
The fundamental test of concrete operational thought is conservation. In
a typical conservation task, the child is shown two identical balls of putty.
The child generally affirms their obvious equivalence. Then one of the balls
of putty is reworked into an elongated, wormlike shape while the child
watches. The child is again asked about their relative size. Younger children
are likely to say that the wormlike shape is smaller, but the child who has attained
conservation of mass will state that the size must still be the same. Inquiries
concerning whether the weights of the differently shaped material
(conservation of weight) are the same and whether they would displace the
same amount of water (conservation of volume) are more difficult questions,
generally not answerable until the child is older.
signals the end of the sensorimotor period is object permanence, the child’s
conviction of the continuing existence of objects that are outside the range
of his or her senses. Piaget established the gradual emergence of object permanence
by hiding from the child familiar toys for progressively longer periods
of time, with the act of hiding progressively less obvious to the child.
Full object permanence is not considered achieved until the child will
search for a familiar missing object even when he or she could not have observed
its being hidden.
The fundamental test of concrete operational thought is conservation. In
a typical conservation task, the child is shown two identical balls of putty.
The child generally affirms their obvious equivalence. Then one of the balls
of putty is reworked into an elongated, wormlike shape while the child
watches. The child is again asked about their relative size. Younger children
are likely to say that the wormlike shape is smaller, but the child who has attained
conservation of mass will state that the size must still be the same. Inquiries
concerning whether the weights of the differently shaped material
(conservation of weight) are the same and whether they would displace the
same amount of water (conservation of volume) are more difficult questions,
generally not answerable until the child is older.
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