EDP 3326 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Heredity, Heritability, Pragmatics

• School: Baylor University
• Department: Educational Psychology
• Course: EDP 3326
• Professor: Janet Bagby

Document Summary

Describe the major characteristics of concrete operational thought, including limitations of cognition during this stage. In the concrete operational stage, children" thought becomes more logical, flexible, and organized. Mastery of conservation requires decentration and reversibility in thinking. School-age children are also better at hierarchical classification and seriation, including transitive inference, the ability to seriate mentally. Their spatial reasoning improves, as indicated bu their understanding of cognitive maps. Discuss follow-up research on concrete operational thought, noting the implications of findings for the accuracy of piaget"s concrete operational stage. Concrete operational children think logically only when dealing with concrete, tangible information, and mastery of concrete operational tasks occurs gradually. Specific cultural practices, especially those associated with schooling, promote mastery of piagetian tasks. Some researchers attribute the gradual development of operational thought to gains in information-processing speed. Piagetian theory proposes that with practice, freeing up space in working memory for combining old schemes and generating new ones.