Let's explore concrete operational thought
and concrete operations refers to Piaget's third stage
of his cognitive developmental Theory.
So in middle childhood the thought process becomes more
logical and organized specifically
with concrete information and I'll talk about that
in just a moment children are beginning to understand things
like the past present and future which leads them
to have the ability to plan and work towards their goals.
So that image I chose for this slide was a young man
with a piggy bank, right?
So he is saving up his money because he really wants
to purchase something that you know is more
than he would have Any one time if he didn't save
and what is also a characteristic
of this stage is the ability to process more complex ideas.
So this stage happens for about 7 to 11 years of age
and really it's characterized by the ability to represent ideas
and events more flexibly and logically if you compare it
to adult thinking it's rather basic, but they have rules
that allow them to problem solve in a really systematic way
that logic that they that they're really expressing
at this age can be applied to physical objects.
So it needs to be something that even if it's not physically
in front of them that they can picture in their mind
that it's tied to a physical object.
So it's concrete so it's you know,
very practical at this age.
There are some skills
that children Master during this stage
of their cognitive development one is see reiation.
And that's the ability to arrange items
by a qualitative Dimension.
So as you can see here, the rectangles are arranged by size.
So smallest is on the left.
The largest is on the left on the right and the middle one is
in the middle and so children now can understand how
to use different dimensions to care to organize things
and that ties closely to Classification really being able
to organize objects into classes and subclasses.
And so they would be able to sort those items in that bowl
by color but maybe also by size so they could be able
to recognize
that characteristics objects have more
than one characteristic.
They also understand reversibility
and that's the fact that some things
that are changed can be returned to their original state.
So water for example when you freeze water, it turns into ice.
But if you allow that ice to melt it turns back into water.
And so that's a pretty remarkable Discovery for them.
We also notice now that they can understand conservation.
So in the pre-operational stage, they struggled with this
but if you change and conservation is to Simply
that if you change one quality that Can be compensated
By changes in another quality.
So water in a white container is going to have a lower level
than it will in a thinner container because you know,
you have to think about the width and the height
of the container when you're thinking
about what volume will look like and they're able to do
that because they now can candy center-right.
They can focus on more than one dimension of an object at a time
so they can recognize the width and the height of the water
in the containers when they're Trying to look at
and understand how an object changes or as represented
that also allows them
to understand the identity of objects.
And that that means that there are qualities
that don't change even if the object is altered.
So if you break chalk, it's still chalk.
Right? And so they understand that, you know,
there there are core components of an object
that don't change even when the object is changed.
And the last one is transitivity and that's an ability
to see how objects are related.
So for instance if they know that boxers are dogs
and that dogs are mammals.
They can understand that that means
that boxers must also be mammals.
And so they're beginning to understand the relationship
between objects and kind of categories of information
in their minds and that's it
for Piaget's concrete operational stage.
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