■■ Do Piaget’s stages occur in the same order in different cultures? Studies that have addressed this question have demonstrated that Piaget’s stages occur in the same order across various cultures. For instance, a study of Zinacantec children from Mexico and children from Los Angeles, California, in the United States, showed similar movement from the preoperational to concrete operational stages (Maynard & Greenfield, 2003). We do not find cultures in which four-year-olds typically lack an awareness of object permanency or five-year-olds that understand the principle of conservation. Thus, we know that children from very different cultures do indeed learn groups of Piagetian tasks in a similar order.
One thing that is less clear, however, is what defines a stage in Piaget’s cognitive theory. Evidence accumulated across cultures suggests that children’s thinking does not undergo abrupt, qualitative general shifts that are applied across all situations, but rather a gradual accumulation of many, many skills across many situations, changing incrementally, over time (Mishra, 2014).