¡Descarga Understanding the Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development (7-11 Years) y más Apuntes en PDF de Desarrollo Cognitivo solo en Docsity! LESSON 5. CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE. • The Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years). - The concrete operational stage, which occurs between 7 and 12 years of age, is characterized by the active, and appropriate, use of logic. - Concrete operational thought involves applying logical operations to concrete problems. - During the 2 years before children move firmly into the concrete operational period, they shift back and forth between preoperational and concrete operational thinking. • The Rise of Concrete Operational Thought. - Concrete operational thinking also permits children to understand such concepts as the relationship between time and speed. - For instance, consider the problem, in which two cars start and finish at the same points in the same amount of time, but travel different routes. • Children who are just entering the concrete operational period reason that the cars are traveling at the same speed. • However, between the ages of 8 and 10, children begin to draw the right conclusion: that the car traveling the longer route must be moving faster if it arrives at the finish point at the same time as the car traveling the shorter route. - Examples of operational thought: • Conservation: - The recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way. - Concrete operational children can easily solve several of Piaget’s conservation problems: • Faced with the conservation of liquids puzzle, for example, a 7 year old concrete operator can decenter by focusing simultaneously on both the height and width of the two containers. • He also displays reversibility—the ability to mentally undo the pouring process and imagine the liquid in its original container. - Armed with these cognitive operations, he now knows that the two different containers each have the same amount of liquid; he uses logic, not misleading appearances, to reach his conclusion. • Relational Logic: - An important hallmark of concrete operational thinking is a better understanding of quantitative relations and relational logic. - Do you remember an occasion when your gym teacher said, “Line up by height from tallest to shortest”? Carrying out such an order is really quite easy for concrete operators, who now are capable of mental seriation— the ability to mentally arrange items along a quantifible dimension such as height or weight. - By contrast, preoperational youngsters perform poorly on many seriation tasks and would struggle to comply with the gym teacher’s request. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT -Concrete operational thinkers also have mastered the related concept of transitivity, the ability to recognize relations among elements in a serial order (e.g., if A > B and B > C, then A > C) which describes the necessary relations among elements in a series. - If, for example, Juan is taller than Pedro, and Pedro is taller than Pablo, who is taller, Juan or Pablo? - It follows logically that Juan must be taller than Pablo, and the concrete operator grasps the transitivity of these size relationships. - Lacking the concept of transitivity, the preoperational child relies on perceptions to answer the question and might insist that Juan and Pablo stand next to each other so that he can determine who is taller. - Preoperational children probably have a better understanding of such transitive relations than Piaget gave them credit for (Trabasso, 1975), but they still have difficulty grasping the logical necessity of transitivity (Chapman & Lindenberger, 1988; Markovits & Dumas, 1999). • The sequencing of Concrete Operations. - Some forms of conservation (e.g., mass) are understood much sooner than others (volume). Piaget was aware of this and other developmental inconsistencies, and he coined the term horizontal décalage to describe them. - Horizontal décalage: Piaget’s term for a child’s uneven cognitive performance; an inability to solve certain problems even though one can solve similar problems requiring the same mental operations. - Why does the child display different levels of understanding of conservation tasks that seem to require the same mental operations? • According to Piaget, horizontal décalage occurs because problems that appear quite similar may actually differ in complexity. • For example, conservation of volume is not attained until ages 9 to 12 because it is a complex task that requires the child to simultaneously consider the operations involved in the conservation of both liquids and mass and then to determine whether there are any meaningful relationships between these two phenomena. - Piaget always maintained that operational abilities develop gradually and sequentially as the simpler skills that appear first are consolidated, combined, and reorganized into increasingly complex mental structures. - After reviewing some of the intellectual accomplishments of the concrete operational period, we can see why many societies begin formal education at 6 to 7 years of age. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
