What is the concrete operational stage of child development? Learn more about the theory and logical principles of Jean Piaget for concrete operational stages.
Concrete Operational Stage | Piaget's Logical Principles
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Frequently Asked Questions
What happens in Piaget's concrete operational stage?
The concrete stage marks the beginning of a child's methodical and logical thinking process. The concrete operational period is from age seven until around age twelve of a child's life. The concrete operational definition is the development of logical or operational thinking toward physical, or concrete, objects.
What are the characteristics of the concrete operational stage?
The characteristics of the concrete operational stage are the ability to classify an object based on size, color, shape, etc; the ability to determine a quantity is the same even if it looks different; the ability to order items using spatial awareness; and the ability to comprehend how different objects are related.
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ShowJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who developed a theory on the developmental stages of children of different ages. Piaget was the first psychologist in the 1920s to study the cognitive development of children. He discovered the following:
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- Children learn and make decisions differently from adults
- Children build up their knowledge about their environment
- The best way to understand a child's reasoning was to see things from their point of view
Piaget worked for the Binet Institute and became interested in cognitive development through his work of assessing French children's IQ's. He became more interested in the wrong answers on the tests than the correct answers. He became curious about when the major concepts, such as numbers, time, quantity, casualty, justice, and other fundamental thoughts began to emerge in children. In the 1950s, he determined that children pass through four developmental stages of cognitive development.
| Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development | ||
|---|---|---|
| Age | Level | Description |
| Birth-18 or 24 Months | Sensorimotor Stage | Develop an understanding of the world through a combination of sensory actions and motor actions |
| 2-7 Years | Preoperational Stage | Children make decisions before an action and cannot use logic or reason to make decisions |
| 7-12 Years | Concrete Operational Stage | Development of methodical reasonable thinking |
| 12 Years and Up | Formal Operational Stage | Ability to think abstractly |
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What is the Concrete Operational Stage? Piaget's concrete operational stage is the third stage and is considered to be the most important developmental stage of a child's cognitive thinking. The concrete stage marks the beginning of a child's methodical and logical thinking process, called mental operation. Mental operation is when you manipulate your mind to solve problems. The concrete operational period is from age seven until around age twelve of a child's life. The concrete operational definition is the development of logical or operational thinking toward physical, or concrete, objects.
The concrete operational stage of development includes:
- Classification
- Conservation
- Seriation
- Transitivity
Classification
Classification is a child's ability to classify objects based on size, color, shape, etc. Children in this stage can identify the properties that make the items the same or different. They use this categorical information to solve problems. The main ability of classification is the ability to group objects based on a quality they share. Children can also identify subgroups within the main group of items.
Piaget developed a test to determine if a child had mastered the classification stage of concrete operational development. He used a group of white and brown wooden beads and showed them to a child. The child was asked, "Are there more white beads or brown beads?" If a child could not give the correct answer, Piaget determined they were still in the preoperational stage of development.
Another psychologist, James McGarrigle, developed a slightly different version to this test to prove his theory that children can in fact show centration, a child's ability to deal with one classification at a time, earlier than Piaget theorized. In McGarrigle's experiment, he showed a child a group of black and white cow cutouts. He laid the cutouts on their side like they were sleeping. He then asked the child two questions about the cows. The first question, "Are there more white cows or black cows?" This was the same question that Piaget asked and children were correct only 25 percent of the time. McGarrigle then went on to ask a second question. He asked, "Are there more black cows or sleeping cows?" to which children answered correctly 48 percent of the time.
McGarrigle determined from the results of his test that children are able to show centration earlier than Piaget had determined, and that the children in Piaget's study were not asked the question correctly.
Conservation
Conservation is a child's understanding that the quantity of an object stays the same even when its appearance might change. An example of this would be a glass of water poured into a taller glass of water. The amount of water stays the same, but the amount will seem greater in the taller glass. Children that had not mastered the concrete operational stage would argue the taller glass held more liquid.
To test the cognitive development of a child's conservation level, Piaget would show a child two rows of checkers. He first would show the two rows evenly spaced and ask which row had more. He then spaced one row of checkers out more than the other, and asked the question again. He determined that children who answered the second question incorrectly were in the preoperational stage, and children that answered that question correctly were determined to be in the concrete operational stage.
In 1974 psychologists Rose and Blank challenged Piaget's determinations, stating that asking a child the same question twice made the child assume the first answer was incorrect, so they would change the answer for the second time the question was asked. Rose and Blank conducted the same experiment but only asked a child the question once. They poured liquid from one container to a different size container and asked, "Which has more?" They determined more children were able to answer correctly and at an earlier age than Piaget had concluded in his testing.
Seriation
Seriation is the logical ordering of items by spatial awareness in quantity or magnitude. To test if a child had developed seriation, Piaget tasked a child with ordering a set of sticks from smallest to largest. If a child was able to correctly order the sticks, Piaget determined they had reached the concrete operational level of development.
In 1966 a psychologist, Greenfield, argued that Piaget's results were false and that a child's level of seriation was based on prior schooling and education level, and was not considered part of a developmental stage.
In 1994 a psychologist, Dasen, argued that he had determined that seriation, as well as Piaget's other levels of development, happened at different ages than Piaget had theorized. Dasen studied children of different nationalities, and determined that different nationalities developed at different stages at different ages. He determined Piaget's theories of age groups of cognitive development were incorrect.
Transitivity
Transitivity is the ability to comprehend how different objects are related to one another. This theory concludes that a child can reason that if a car is a vehicle and a Toyota is a car, then a Toyota is a vehicle. Piaget tested this level of cognitive development by asking a child a series of questions, then determining if they could compare items to one benchmark item.
Jean Piaget was a psychologist throughout the 1920s and 1950s that studied cognitive development of children. Piaget theorized that there are four stages of cognitive development that children progress through on their way to adulthood. He determined that cognitive development started at birth and continued throughout childhood.
The Four Stages of Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory are:
- Birth to age 2: Sensorimotor
- Age 2 to 7: Preoperational
- Age 7 to 12: Concrete Operational
- Age 12 and up: Formal Operational
The third stage, concrete operational, is thought to be the most crucial to a child's cognitive development. According to Piaget, it is during this stage that a child begins to have a logical thinking process. The concrete operational stage is ages seven to twelve, however other psychologists have theorized Piaget's age classifications are too narrow.
Within the concrete operational stage are four subcategories of development.
- Classification: the ability to classify objects based on size, shape, color, etc.
- Conservation: the ability to determine the quantity of an item stays the same even if appearance changes
- Seriation: the ability to order logically based on spatial awareness
- Transitivity: the ability to comprehend how different objects are related to each other
Video Transcript
Concrete Operations
Marty is nine years old. He's not like other kids, though. He likes order. He lines his socks up inside the drawer so that they are coordinated by color. He puts his pencils on his desk in a line from largest to smallest. He finds it fascinating that things vary and likes to tease out the differences between things and sort them in different ways.
Marty is in the period of childhood known as middle childhood, which lasts from age seven to twelve. Psychologist Jean Piaget named this time of life the concrete operational stage of development. He called it this because this is the time of life when children begin to perform mental operations, which is when you manipulate the world in your mind to solve problems.
To understand mental operations, imagine that you have a big puzzle on the table in front of you. One of the pieces has a side that has a rounded edge sticking out from the side. You know that you need to find a piece that has an indentation that will fit the piece that you have.
When you look at the other pieces on the table, you notice that some have indentations and others don't. Not only that, but some have colors and shapes that seem to go along with the piece in front of you. With each piece, you imagine putting the piece next to the one you have and try to figure out whether it might be a match, based on color and whether it has an indentation or not. Then, if you find a piece that's a possibility, you pick it up and try to connect it to your piece.
But if you ask a toddler to solve a puzzle, they can't do the same deductions that you or I could. Whether the piece has an indentation or not, whether the colors are right or not, they will pick up every single piece and try to fit it. They can't mentally imagine whether each piece will fit. They cannot yet perform mental operations.
Classification
As part of the concrete operational period of development, children begin to think differently. Not only can they begin to perform mental operations, they also begin to make logical deductions about the world around them.
One example of this is the task of classification, which involves understanding that one set of items can include another set of items. Remember Marty? He loves to sort things. One of the ways to sort things is through classification.
Marty's friend Beth has a new poodle. Marty knows that a poodle is a dog and a dog is a mammal and a mammal is an animal. When he was younger, he didn't understand how these classifications worked, but now that he's older, he understands that each set of things nests inside of the others. He knows that poodles are dogs and dogs are mammals, and therefore, he knows that poodles are mammals.
Seriation
Remember how Marty likes to arrange the pencils on his desk or the socks in his sock drawer? This might seem a little odd to many people, but to Piaget, it was just part of development. Marty is demonstrating seriation, which is the ability to order items with respect to a common feature.
When it comes to socks, Marty puts them in order based on their color. With pencils, he focuses on length. Either way, he's choosing a single feature and ordering the objects based on it. Seriation is part of the concrete operational stage of development and is closely related to classification. In both instances, the person is using an organizational schema, or system, to make sense of the world around him.
Transitivity
Classification and seriation aren't the only type of organization that kids begin to use in the concrete operational stage. Transitivity involves ordering things by comparing them to a benchmark piece.
For example, the other day Marty was picking up his playroom. He had several books that needed to be put on the shelf, and he decided to put them in order from largest to smallest. There were three books that were really similar in size, and he didn't have a ruler to measure them. So, he compared book A to book B and then book A to book C. He realized that book A was larger than book B but smaller than book C, so he drew the conclusion that book C was larger than book B.
Essentially, Marty was comparing the books to each other, but instead of putting all the books next to all the other books, he used the shortcut of comparing books B and C to book A. From there, he could figure out the relationship between all of them. This is transitivity at work.
Lesson Summary
Psychologist Jean Piaget named middle childhood the concrete operational stage of development. It involves the ability to perform mental operations, as well as to think logically, including utilizing classification, seriation, and transitivity.
Learning Outcomes
After you have finished with this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Describe the concrete operational stage of development
- Explain the concepts of utilizing classification, seriation, and transitivity during this stage
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