Piaget's Equilibration Theory

Introduction
Development of children has been one of the hotly-debated topics among scholars. Piaget’s stages of cognitive development provided insights for mental development of children. Piaget proposed that children need to go through different developmental stages within a specific age range so as to acquire different cognitive skills. One concept Piaget emphasized was conservation. Piaget suggested that after seven, children will be able to understand that physical properties of an object remain unchanged even the appearance of the object changes as children’s physical and mental operation are reversible (Piaget, 1965). According to equilibration theory, during continuous process of learning, children try to strike a balance between applying

Equilibration is an internal self-regulation process that structures the developing intelligence by adapting to internal and external change (Furth, 1977). Individuals are active in forming new patterns of reasoning through interaction of assimilation and accommodation by solving problems and learning from others(Karplus, & Butts, 1977). However, some scholars argue that tests used in Piaget’s experiment is inaccurate as some children may acquire the required skills, but they fail to apply skills to solve the problems in the test (Smith, 2013). There are other factors influencing children’s conservation ability, like training, intelligence and socioeconomic status of children(DeVries, 1974; Gaudia, 1972; Kingsley, & Hall, 1967). In the following study, differences between Piagetian test and test done under modern Hong Kong society were investigated. Factors influencing the conservation ability of children

Research shows that play helps cognitive development of preschoolers. Some scholars pointed out that constructive play and playing with adults help children more in learning and promotion of cognitive skills (Hutt, 1981). In most kindergartens in Hong Kong, teaching occurs in structured classroom setting. Children are mostly passive learners. To facilitate learning of children, patterns of learning can be modified and more elements of cognitive training can be added in play of students. On the other hand, different students may achieve different levels of cognitive skills. It is important for teachers to notice the difference of progress of students. Different levels of intervention of framing of knowledge can be adopted by teachers, which influence students’ understanding of knowledge (Arcidiacono, & Perret-Clermont, 2009). Next, since only performance of one subject is observed, it is suggested to enlarge the scale of research and observe the performance of different participants. Also, some scholars argued out that performances of these Piagetian tasks of students predict their academic readiness (Arlin, 1981). Follow-up study is suggested to track the relationship between subject’s conservation ability and academic