Recall from the last chapter that during early childhood children are in Piaget’s preoperational stage, and during this stage, children are learning to think symbolically about the world. As children continue into elementary school, they develop the ability to represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically. Their rules of thinking still seem very basic by adult standards and usually operate unconsciously, but they allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.” This simple principle helps children to understand certain arithmetic tasks, such as in adding or subtracting zero from a number, as well as to do certain classroom science experiments, such as ones involving judgments of the amounts of liquids when mixed. Piaget called this period the concrete operational stage because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events. Show Concrete Operational Thought From ages 7 to 11, children are in what Piaget referred to as the concrete operational stage of cognitive development (Crain, 2005). This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly. The concrete operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the physical world. For example, the child can understand principles of cause and effect, size, and distance. The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child uses inductive reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion. For example, a child has one friend who is rude, another friend who is also rude, and the same is true for a third friend. The child may conclude that friends are rude. We will see that this way of thinking tends to change during adolescence as deductive reasoning emerges. We will now explore three of the major capacities that the concrete operational child exhibits. Thought becomes multidimensional. Concrete operational children no longer focus on only one dimension of any object (such as the height of the glass) and instead can coordinate multiple dimensions simultaneously (such as the width of the glass). (That is, they are no longer limited by centration, which is why this gain is also known by the term “decentration”). Multidimensionality allows children to take multiple perspectives at the same time, to understand part-while relationships, and to cross classify objects using multiple features. Figure 6.13. Children looking at these glasses demonstrate multidimensional thinking when looking at more than one attribute i.e. tall, short, and wide narrow.
Thought becomes operational. A second major shift in cognitive development during middle childhood coccus when thought becomes operational, by which Piaget meant that it consists of reversible, organized systems of mental actions. These systems allow children to mentally undo actions (reversibility) and to understand that certain properties of objects (like their number, mass, volume, and so on) remain constant despite transformations in appearance (conservation). Figure 6.11. Understanding that ice cubes melt is an example of reversibility.
Thought becomes logical. A third major accomplishment of concrete operational development is that thought becomes logical, and children can reason logically about concrete events.
Limitations of concrete operational thought. These new cognitive skills increase the child’s understanding of the physical world, however according to Piaget, they still cannot think in abstract ways. Additionally, they do not think in systematic scientific ways. For example, when asked which variables influence the period that a pendulum takes to complete its arc and given weights they can attach to strings in order to do experiments, most children younger than 12 perform biased experiments from which no conclusions can be drawn (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). ReferencesCrain, W. (2005). Theories of development (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York: Basic Books. OER Attribution: “Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective, Second Edition” by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 “Educational Psychology” by Kevin Seifert, OpenStax CNX, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 license / One sentence rephrased /Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]. “Understanding the Whole Child: Prenatal Development Through Adolescence” by Jennifer Paris, Antoinette Ricardo, and Dawn Rymond, College of the Canyons is licensed under CC BY 4.0 / A derivative from the original work Which is a characteristic of a child in the concrete operational stage?The concrete-operational stage depicts an important step in the cognitive development of children (Piaget, 1947). According to Piaget, thinking in this stage is characterized by logical operations, such as conservation, reversibility or classification, allowing logical reasoning.
Which of the following statements is true of concrete operational children's thinking quizlet?Which of the following statements is true of concrete-operational children? They have the decentration capacity to allow them to seriate in two dimensions.
What are concrete operational children?Children are much less egocentric in the concrete operational stage. It falls between the ages of 7 to 11 years old and is marked by more logical and methodical manipulation of symbols. The main goal at this stage is for a child to start working things out inside their head.
Which of the following is true about the concrete operational stage of reasoning quizlet?Which of the following is true about the concrete operational stage of reasoning? One important skill at this stage of reasoning is the ability to classify or divide things into different sets or subsets and to consider their interrelations.
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