Study Objectives, Chapter 12 (Please Note: You are only responsible for pages 428-436 for Chapter 12):

1.      Describe the major characteristics of concrete operational thought, including limitations of cognition during this stage.

2.      Summarize recent research on concrete operational thought. Identify the implications of these findings for the accuracy of Piaget’s concrete operational stage.

3.      Identify basic changes in information processing that occur in middle childhood.

4.      Summarize changes in attention & memory during middle childhood, & discuss the role of knowledge in memory performance.

 1)      Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage: spans from 7-11 years of age; during this period, thought is more logical, flexible, and organized than during early childhood.

a)      Piaget regarded conservation tasks as the most important achievements of this stage because they provide clear evidence of operations (mental actions that obey logical rules).

i)        Decentration is the ability to focus on several aspects of a problem at once and relate to them.

ii)       Reversibility is the ability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse the direction, returning to the starting point.

 

b)      Hierarchical Classification: by the end of middle childhood, children can now group objects into hierarchies of classes & subclasses. Collections become common.

i)        Seriation: the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight.

ii)       Transitive inference is the ability to perform seriation mentally.

 

c)      Spatial reasoning: Piaget found that school-age children have a more accurate understanding of space than they did earlier. Between age 7 & 8, children begin to perform mental rotations, in which they align the self’s frame to match that of a person in a different orientation. As a result, they can identify left and right for positions they don’t occupy.

i)        Around 8 to 10 years, children can give clear directions for how to get from Point A to Point B by using a “mental walk” strategy (imagine another person’s movement along a route).

 

d)      Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought: children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information that they can perceive directly. Their mental strategies work poorly when applied to abstract ideas.

i)        Horizontal decalage is gradual development that occurs within a Piagetian stage. For example, children usually grasp conservation problems in the following order: first number, then length, mass, and liquid.

 

e)      Recent research on concrete operational thought: according to Piaget, brain maturation combined with experience in a rich, varied world should lead children everywhere to reach concrete operational stage.

i)        Impact of culture & schooling: recent evidence indicates that specific cultural and school practices impact mastery of Piagetian tasks.

(1)   For children to master conservation, for example, they must take part in everyday activities that promote this way of thinking. The experience of going to shool promotes mastery of Piagetian tasks. Some researchers believe that forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks are socially generated by practical activities in particular cultures.

 f)       Evaluation of the Concrete Operational Stage:

i)        From early to middle childhood, children apply logical schemes to a wider range of tasks; in the process, their thought seems to undergo qualitative change toward a comprehensive grasp of logical thought.

ii)       Some theorists argue that the development of concrete operational thinking can best be understood in terms of gradual gains in information-processing capacity rather than a sudden shift to a new stage (e.g., with repeated use, cognitive schemes demand less attention and become more automatic; this results in more working memory space and children can focus on combining old schemes and generating new ones).

iii)     Debate about this stage centers on whether development is a continuous improvement in logical skills or a discontinuous restructuring of children’s thinking.

 

2)      Information Processing: researchers believe brain development contributes to 2 basic changes in information processing:  (a) an increase in information-processing capacity & (b) gains in cognitive inhibition (ability to resist interference from irrelevant information).

a)      Attention: during middle childhood, attention becomes more selective, adaptable, and planful.