Describe Piajet’s preoperational stage and how his assessment of conservation has been criticised.

According to Piajet children between the ages of two and seven are in the preoperational stage. In this stage he believes that children start to put their ideas in order. This stage is when children need to acquire new ‘schemas’ or as Piajet calls them ‘operations’ which enable them to manipulate ideas. These ‘schemas’ are the early signs of conceptualised thinking. Children start to create mental pictures of the outside world. However, these operations will not be properly applied and masters until later on. This is why he names this period preoperational.
Children are using language much more than they did previously as well as starting to symbolically represent things in their mind. Despite these developments there are many limitations in the children’s abilities. One such limitation is Animism. This means that the child is attributing feelings and thoughts to inanimate objects. They cannot understand the difference between inanimate and living things. Another lim...