The preoperational stage is from the age of two to seven years. The most important development at this time is language. Children develop an internal representation of the world that allows them to describe people, events, and feelings.
Children at this time use symbols, they can pretend when driving their toy car across the couch that the couch is actually a bridge. Although the thinking of the child is more advanced than when it was in the sensorimotor stage, it is still qualitatively inferior to that of an adult. Children in the preoperational stage are characterized by what Piaget called egocentric thoughts. The world at this stage is viewed entirely from the child’s own perspective. Thus a child’s explanation to an adult can be uninformative.
Three-year-olds will generally hide their face when they are in trouble--even though they are in plain view, three-year-olds believe that their inability to see others also results in others’ inability to see them. A child in the preoperational stage also lacks the principle of conservation. This is the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects. Children who have not passed this stage do not know that the amount, volume or length of an object does not change length when the shape of the configuration is changed. If you put two identical pieces of clay in front of a child, one rolled up in the shape of a ball, the other rolled into a snake, a child at this stage may say the snake piece is bigger because it is rolled out. Piaget declared that this is not mastered until the next stage of development. The concrete operational stage lasts from the age of seven to twelve years of age. The beginning of this stage is marked by the mastery of the principal of conservation.
Children develop the ability to think in a more logical manner and they begin to overcome some of the egocentric characteristics of the preoperational period. One of the major ideas learned in this stage is the idea of reversibility. This is the idea that some changes can be undone by reversing an earlier action. An example is the ball of clay that is rolled out into a snake piece of clay. Children at this stage understand that you can regain the ball of clay formation by rolling the piece of clay the other way. Children can even conceptualize the stage in their heads without having to see the action performed.
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