Concrete Operations Stage

Concrete operations are the one-third st mount up of Pi get ontian cognitive ontogenesis, during which shaverren develop logical simply not abstract thinking (Papalia p. 351). The cover running(a) put begins around age seven and continues until approximately age eleven. During this time, children gain a better disposition of mental operations. Children begin thinking logically about cover events, but have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts. Piaget ascertain that children in the concrete operative stage were fairly good at the enforce of inductive logic.Inductive logic involves going from a peculiar(prenominal) experience to a widely distributed principle. On the other hand, children at this age have difficulty using deductive logic, which involves using a general principle to de landmarkine the outcome of a specific event. This stage is alike characterized by a loss of egocentric thinking. Egocentrism is Piagets term for in might to consider ano ther(prenominal) persons point of put one over a characteristic of young childrens thought (Papalia p. G-3). During this stage, the child has the powerfulness to master most types of conservation experiments, and begins to understand reversibility.Conservation is the realization that meter or amount does not diverseness when nothing has been added or interpreted a sort from an target area or a collection of aims, despite changes in form or spatial arrangement. The concrete operational stage is similarly characterized by the childs might to coordinate two dimensions of an object simultaneously, arrange structures in sequence, and transpose differences between items in a series. The child is capable of concrete bother-solving. Categorical labels such as arrive or animal are now available to the child.The first, and most discussed, of these limitations is egocentrism. The pre-operational child has a self-centred view of the world (Smith, Cowie and Blades, 2003, p. 399), mean ing that she has difficulty understanding that other sight may see things differently, and hence hold a differing point of view. Piagets innocent test for egocentrism is the three mountains task (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956), which concrete operational thinkers spate complete successfully. A second limitation which is overcome in the concrete operational stage is the perceptual domination of one aspect of a situation.Before the stage begins, the childs perception of any situation or task will be dominated by one aspect this is better(p) illustrated by the failure of pre-operational children to pass Piagets conservation tasks (Piaget and Inhelder, 1974). Perhaps the most cardinal limitation, yet the most difficult to describe and measure, is that of the turn to logical operators. A pre-operational child will use mostly simple, heuristic strategies in bother solving. Once a child reaches the concrete operational stage, they will be in possession of a completely new set of strateg ies, allowing job solving using logical rules.This new ability manifests itself most distinctly in childrens justifications for their answers. Concrete operational thinkers will explicitly state their use of logical rules in problem solving (Harris and Butterworth, 2002). This area also indicates the way in which the concrete operational stage whoremonger be negatively defined although children can now use logical strategies, these can scarce be applied to concrete, immediately present objects. Thinking has become logical, but is not yet abstract.These shifts in the childs thinking lead to a number of new abilities which are also major, positively defined characteristics of the concrete operational stage. The most frequently cited ability is conservation. Now that children are no extended perceptually dominated by one aspect of a situation, they can track changes much more easily and recognize that some properties of an object will persevere through change. Conservation is alwa ys gained in the comparable aver, firstly with respect to number, followed secondly by weight, and thirdly by volume. A second new ability gained in the concrete operational stage is reversibility.This refers to the ability to mentally trace backwards, and is of enormous help to the child in both their problem solving and the companionship they have of their own problem solving. For the former this is because they can see that in a conservation task, for example, the change made could be reversed to regain the original properties. With respect to knowledge of their own problem solving, they become able to retrace their mental steps, allowing an altogether new level of reflection. Concrete operational children also gain the ability to structure objects hierarchically, known as classification.This includes the notion of class inclusion, e. g. understanding an object being part of a subset included within a sustain set, and is shown on Piagets inclusion task, asking children to id entify, out of a number of brown and white wooden beads, whether there were more brown beads or wooden beads (Piaget, 1965). Seriation is another new ability gained during this stage, and refers to the childs ability to order objects with respect to a common property. A simple example of this would be placing a number of sticks in order of height.An important new ability which develops from the interplay of both seriation and classification is that of numeration. Whilst pre-operational children are obviously capable of counting, it is only during the concrete operational stage that they become able to apply mathematical operators, thank to their abilities to order things in terms of number (seriation) and to split numbers into sets and subsets (classification), enable more complex multiplication, division and so on. Finally, and also following the development of seriation, is transitive inference.This is the name given to childrens ability to compare two objects via an mediocre obj ect. So for instance, one stick could be deemed to be longer than another by both being individually compared to another (third) stick. Concrete operational stage (Elementary and early adolescence). This stage (characterized by 7 types of conservation number, length, liquid, mass, weight, area, volume), erudition is demonstrated through logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects. Operational thinking develops (mental actions that are reversible). Egocentric thought diminishes.