Concrete Operational Stage.

Concrete Operational Stage.

1. STAGE 3. 7-11 years.

   • According to Piaget, a significant change in thinking occurs around the age of 7 years when the child develops the ability to perform mental operations.
     • An operation is a powerful internal schema that enables logical thought process such as serial ordering, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.
       • The operation that affects the child's ability to conserve is that of reversibility, that is, the ability to perform reversible mental operations.
         • Whereas a pre-operational child cannot mentally reverse the transformation in a typical conservation study, a child in the concrete operational stage can mentally reverse the action of pouring the water into the long, thin beaker and can therefore understand that the amount of water is no different to what it was at the start.
           • Similarly, the mental operation of compensation enables the concrete operational child to understand that one feature of the beaker, such as tallness, can be compensated for by another feature, such as width.
     • Although the ability to perform operations leads to significant advances in the child's thinking, logical thought processes are limited to thinking about concrete objects and problems.
       • For example, a child can think about fractions in relation to real objects such as a cake cut into quarters, but cannot perform abstract mathematical operations.
   • Features.
     • Child develops the ability to perform mental operations leading to limited logical thought.
       • However, logical thinking is limited to dealing with concrete objects and problems, rather than in the abstract.
     • Ability to de-centre - begins at around the age of 7 years as child moves from pre-operational stage.
     • Children are no longer affected by egocentrism or centration.
     • Children can carry out reversible operations (i.e. Conservation tasks).
     • Conservation involves the ability to understand that if nothing has been added or taken away, then the amount of something remains the same, even when appearances have changed.
     • Ability to conserve (except area) - begins at around the age of 7 years as child moves from pre-operational stage.

2. Class Inclusion.

   • An understanding that some classes of objects, include other sub-classes of objects. For example, the class of 'flowers' includes the class of 'roses'.
   • Between the ages of 7 and 10 years children become very aware of categories and classification of objects. This awareness is evident in play activities that involve collecting and sorting, such as collecting sets of os cards, dolls and action figures.
     • At this age children start to recognise the relationship between a general category and subcategories within that general category. With this understanding comes the ability to perform what are known as class inclusion tasks.
   • RESEARCH CARD: Piaget and Szeminska (1941).

3. Examples of Logical Thought in the Concrete Operational Child.

   • Conservation.
     • Understanding that the properties of objects and materials can remain the same despite changes in outward appearance.
   • Compensation.
     • Understanding that one feature can compensate for another.
   • Serial Ordering (Seriation).
     • Organising concrete objects into order. For example, ordering seven sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest.
   • Transitivity (Mental Seriation).
     • Making inferences on the basis of information given. As an example, knowing that stick A is longer than stick B, and stick B is longer than stick C, the child could reason that stick A must also be longer than stick C.
       • Andrews and Halford (1998) found that around 50% of 6-year-olds performed well on transitive inference problems.
   • Class Inclusion.
     • Distinguishing between superordinate and subordinate categories.