Piagetian Tasks

I performed the Piagetan tasks with my nephew Reed, he is in Kindergarten and is 5 years old. The three tasks that I performed were the penny task, the water conservation task, and the beads task.

I really enjoyed doing these tasks with Reed and it was interesting to see what his responses were. I thought that he would be able to give the correct answer on all the tasks but he failed to give the correct answer on any of them. There were a lot of people around while I was doing it and it wasn't very quiet, so he might have been able to understand the task better if there was not so many other things going on. The thing that was interesting to me was that Reed did not have to think about his answers very long. He was able to decide very quickly what he believed was the correct answer and he was very confident in his answer. I was performing the tasks on one of his neighbor friends that was over, and he gave the wrong answer on one of the tasks. When I asked him why he thought that was correct he replied, "Because I know everything."

The first task was the water conservation task. I asked him if the two cups had even amounts and then poured one cup into another and asked if those two cups had the same amount. He said they did not because one water line was higher than the other.

The second task was the penny task. I lined up two rows and asked is they had the same amount. He said they did. Then I spread one row of pennies out and asked the same question again. He said the spread out row contained more pennies.

The third task was the bead task, which personally I found a little confusing when I was first asked to do it. He was able to correctly identify which color had more beads, but he wasn't able to recognize that there were more beads than silver beads.

The most interesting thing I found about this was that I was spreading out the pennies right in front of him, or pouring the water into a different cup right in front of him, and he still would get the answer wrong. He would be in the pre-operational stage. At that stage they are very egocentric (as displayed by his friend who knows everything.) They also cannot understand conservation or use logical thinking.