Piaget's Stages Of Cognitive Development
Child Behavior Evaluations using Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
I was working at the library when two 15 to 16-year-old girls sat down at my table. Remembering that I had to do this assignment, I tried to pay attention to their behavior without seeming to. One of the girls opened up her laptop and began to work on what appeared to be homework, while the other girl sat down and quietly waited for her friend to finish the assignment. The homework seemed to require searching for information online in order to complete the assignment. Her patient friend seemed politely bored while waiting. At one point, the girl doing her homework apologized to her friend and stated that she was "… really sorry for taking so long." The girl doing the homework also received several text messages, which she silenced and ignored so that she could continue her work and (I suspect) not keep her friend waiting any longer than necessary.
The age ranges of Piaget's stages of cognitive development would predict that these girls would likely be in the fourth stage. The expression of empathy by the girl doing homework for her friend's patience represents an ability to understand what another person may be experiencing. While this ability is consistent with stage 3 of Piaget's stages of development, which states that children in this stage become less egocentric, the ability to empathize and feel some of the same feelings she suspects her friend is experiencing suggests this young lady has moved beyond simply being less egocentric to thinking about what her friend may...
In other words, she is capable of generating hypotheses about unseen phenomena (thoughts about thoughts). This cognitive ability was called 'second-order operations' by Piaget, but others have referred to this ability as inferential thinking.
The girl need more than an hour to complete her homework and as time went by became increasingly sensitive to the burden she was placing on her waiting friend. She repeatedly asked if her friend wanted to leave or had some errands to do. She was therefore capable of inferring that her friend's patience could be wearing thin over time. Her friend likewise sensed her growing unease and tried to assure her that she was quite willing to wait ("I'm okay"; "I'm fine") and that she should take her time completing the assignment. The waiting friend was therefore also capable of empathy for her friend's growing concern and thus inferential thinking.
Piaget's stage 4 of cognitive development suggests these girls should also have the ability to consider all possible combinations to a solution. Piaget called this "hypothetico-deductive reasoning." Given the growing state of anxiety experienced by the girl doing her homework, it is not hard to imagine that she used her mental skills to run through different scenarios to determine the fastest way to complete her homework and thus end her friend's suffering. Her willingness to silence incoming text messages without reading them could indicate that she was able to minimize the impact of this variable on her pace of work. Although she could have turned the cell phone off to minimize interruptions, her parents…
