Cognitive Development In Symbolic Representation, Conservation And Classification
I subjected my daughter of five years old to a number of stimuli in order to determine her level of cognitive development in symbolic representation, conservation and classification. Her age was crucial to me since I felt she had acquired a reasonable level of maturation and would therefore respond effectively to the stimuli I had selected. The setting was in my dining room. I decided to set the study in the late afternoon since the house was so quite and as a result the child was not faced with any distractions, it was also important since the child was just from having an afternoon nap and would be quite active. I used eight ounces of playdoh, a butterfly toy that the child would use with the playdoh, three inch paper shapes which included 6 paper rectangles, ovals and triangles each group consisting of two red, blue and yellow colored shapes.
I sat down with the child on the dinning table and then explained to her the types of play we were going to have together. I began by giving the child the playdoh and asked her to do with it whatever she pleases. I then placed the toy on the table without suggesting to the child whatever its use was. She gently picked the playdoh flattened it,” I’m making you a cookie and I’m going to add chocolate chips,” She said to me, as she made small circular indentions with her finger. She then took the playdoh and flattened it with her hands,” I’m baking you a cake but I don’t have syrup, I hope you’ll like it still,” She said with a smile on her face. She then stamped the playdoh butterfly with playdoh toy and then removed the excess playdoh around the toy to make a butterfly. I asked for the name of the object she had made; she replied it is a butterfly. She then rolled up the butterfly model she had made into a strip and then took the excess playdoh and attached round objects on the fore end of the object. She started moving the object on the table making the sound “SSS”. According to her, that was a rattle snake she had made. She then rolled the left over playdoh into a ball and then wrapped one of the ‘snakes’ around the ball; she told me that she had made a rainbow and that the ball was the sky.
In the second part of the study, I took the playdoh and formed two identical balls with it. I asked the child to suggest if the balls were identical or not. After a little hesitation, she said they are. I went ahead to explain to her why they are said to be identical. I then took one of the balls and formed a snake with it after which I asked the child to explain if the snake and the ball contained equal amounts of playdoh; her answer was yes. I then reformed the two balls as the child watched and then made a pancake out of one and then asked the child if the two contained the same amount of playdoh; the child explained that the ball was bigger and therefore her answer was no. from there I reformed the two balls as the child watched and asked the child if the two contained equal amount of playdoh and her reply was yes.
I arranged the colored paper shapes on the table randomly on the table and asked the child to group them. She grouped the shapes by color. When I asked her to divide the shapes by using another property, she was able to group them according to shapes of oval, triangle and rectangle.
Erik Erickson’s psychological theory of human development Initiative vs. guilt mean that; If a parent encourage their children to develop independence through praise, then initiative will develop and the child will have a strong will to perform tasks on his or her own, but if the parent is either too harsh or overprotective then the child will develop a sense of guilt. In the study I did, when I allowed the child to freely decide on what to do with the playdoh, she was able to come up with so many objects; the same case was seen when I allowed her to arrange the objects according to various traits. The child was able to exhibit gender identity in the shapes that she made; she was able to clearly define her gender roles as a girl, which was witnessed when she engaged in making a lot of food objects like the pancakes and cookies. This is normally explained by the gender schema theory in which the child starts to identify themselves as feminine or masculine and therefore start organizing there experiences depending on their sex. Since I, her mother, was there with her as she played, it may have been likely that the child could have responded to that by picking gender stereotyped objects to model.
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