Ed602 Lesson 1

Lecture Information: Concrete Operations

Characteristics of this stage
Far and away the major descriptor for this stage of cognitive development is "Hands-On Thinking." If you want a student at this stage to think deeply about a topic, then you put it, literally, in their hands. Piaget proposes that children at this stage is still tied mainly to the real world, and therefore basically to sensory input. If you ask them to expand on the implications of a certain topic on people that they don't know, you will be frustrating them in no time. However students are still tethered by their sensory input, Piagetian researchers have found that this stage is significant for cognitive growth and sophistication.

It is at this stage that children establish "Conservation Reasoning" skills that were virtually an impossibility during the previous stage. A researcher does the water demonstration for a 5th grader and they will, of course, find the task much too easy . So the researcher extends the research by asking an additional question, "How did you know that?" They did this a large number of times and sorted the answers that the concrete operating students used to reason through to the correct answer. Styles of conservation reasoning are as follows:

Identity - They understands the physical properties of the material. "That's just what water does!"
Reversibility - They mentally reverses the steps of the operation. "Well, if you poured that water back into the glass..."
Compensation - They understand that height can be compensated for with width. "Yeah, but that glass is wider..."

A hallmark of Piaget's influence on American education is very much in this stage. The use of Manipulatives in American education is pervasive and effective. It is the use of concrete objects to reason through the lesson. For example, using a felt pizza to help students practice their fractions. The teacher demonstrates a "whole pizza" cut into 8 pieces. She takes one piece away and asks the students how many pieces of the pizza are left (7), and how many made up a "whole pizza" (8), so what fraction of the pizza is left? And so the math lesson goes.

Cognitive challenges of this stage
During concrete operations, Piaget believed that the child is still at the data gathering stage of cognitive development. While still at the concrete level, a child at this stage is far more sophisticated in their thinking, as demonstrated above, than at earlier stages. In that last example of conservation reasoning, compensation, the child demonstrates the ability to keep track of height, width, and depth; multiple dimensions of an object or material. Multi-dimensional thought! This becomes a fascination for them. They begin to process their observations of the world in fairly sophisticated ways. They begin to use classification skills to sort their collections of all their possessions, such as baseball cards, bugs, Barbie dolls, trolls etc. Not only do they simply collect and classify things but they order those collections as well. This is called serriation. If you were to go into any 4th grade classroom in the nation and ask any randomly selected student, "Who is the fastest kid in class?" they wouldn't so much as hesitate. They point right at that student.

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