Question

REVIEW: Children’s performance on conservation tasks illustrates a continuum of acquisition of logical concepts. Review the preceding sections, and list additional examples of gradual development of operational reasoning.

REVIEW: Explain why gains in working-memory capacity and executive-function skills are vital for mastery of reading and math in middle childhood.

Answer 1

1. The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development which occurs in children around seven to eleven years of age, and is characterised by the development of organized and rationale thinking or ‘operations’.

Concrete operational children are mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but they can only apply logic to physical or concrete objects and not abstract or hypothetical ideas. Thus for instance, if they are produced with a problem of inferential reasoning such as :

If A is taller than B and B is taller than C who is tallest?” This problem calls for the use of the ability to think about things which the child has not actually experienced and to draw conclusions. But children in concrete operations stage cannot solve such questions until they are able to physically manipulate or draw the figures.

A second example of the gradual development of operational thought is the ability of conservation such as when children can understand that when water is poured into a different shaped glass from a tall one to a narrow and short one, the quantity of liquid remains the same, even though its appearance has changed.

Lastly, reversibility is another feature that occurs in operational thinking. Reversibility is the ability to mentally go back through a series of steps to solve a problem. Thus for instance, concrete operational stage is marked by reversibile thinking as younger children are able to recognize that numbers or objects can be changed and returned to their original condition and that a playing ball that has gets deflated is not damaged but can be filled with air again and put back into original it’s shape.

In this way, operational thinking develops gradually in children beginning from the concrete operational stage at 7 years of age and increasing in sophistication in terms of hypothetical reasoning during the former operational stage in adolescence. children can solve problems in a logical fashion, they are typically able to think abstractly or hypothetically.