erception, thus, the child is prevented form understanding the entire perception. Jean Piaget also notes that by the end of this stage the child develops, “language, symbolic play, and mental images (which) permit the representation of thought, but it is a preoperational thought.”The approximate age for the third phase of cognitive development is seven to eleven years of age. The child can not think in abstracts during the concrete operational stage, but can maintain mental operations which allows them to solve problems that are concrete such as addition and subtraction. During this stage, the child has a general knowledge of the requirements and guidelines for a complex task but the child can not complete the task because he or she can not visualize any possibilities. This is because all possibilities are represented by abstractions and the child can only represent objects in the concrete form. However, the child does begin to focus on the entire perception, slowly breaking away from the centration feature that is prevalent during the preoperational stage. Also, the egocentrism that was so obvious during the preoperational stage is usually left behind at that stage. One last improvement in the child’s cognitive development is that the child now understands the idea of matter conservation. The last stage of cognitive growth according to Jean Piaget is the formal operational which usually consists of individuals on the average of eleven years old. The child’s cognitive formal operations, “no longer related directly to objects.” The child can now think in abstracts and he or she realizes that their reality is not the only one that exists. The child also has “all the mental structures needed to go from being nave thinkers to experts.” Piaget described this stage best when he said that “The great novelty of this stage is that the adolescent becomes capable of reasoning correc...
