Question One (4 marks) Identify which of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development Mollie and her friends are in. Describe some key characteristics of children in this stage of cognitive development. Describe two examples from the chapter that illustrate characteristics of this stage of cognitive development. “Developmental psychology studies the way human develop and change over time.” (Burton, Westen, & Kowalski, 2014, p. 464). Piaget has proposed 4 stages in his theory of cognitive development; the first is sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, concrete operational stage and finally, formal operational stage. Mollie and her friends are in the Pre-operational stage of cognitive development. This can be shown as they are in a pre-school …show more content…
The author even note how the children use toys to interact, how they develop friendships in their play, and how they explore gender roles (Gussin Paley, 2000). Also, Mollie believes that fantasy characters and real people all communicate in the same language (Gussin Paley, 2000). Question Two (4 marks) Explain Piaget’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation and how these processes contribute to children’s cognitive development. Describe one example of assimilation and one example of accommodation that Mollie and her friends display. Assimilation as explained by Piaget in Burton et al. (2014), it involves interpreting actions or events in terms of one’s present schemas, which is fitting reality into one’s existing ways of understanding. A schema is an organised, repeatedly exercised pattern of thought or behaviour. In accommodation the child’s knowledge of the environment is modified to incorporate new experiences or knowledge that able them to adapt to the broad aspect of cognitive demands imposed by the environment (Simatwa, 2010). Mollie and her friends display assimilation