The Gang Age and Piaget

As I think back to last week when The Gang Age was presenting a few things kept sticking in my mind. The main thing is the differences between Concrete and formal operation stages.

I searched for Piaget's stages and this is what Wikipedia says about these two stages,

"Concrete operational stage

The Concrete operational stage is the third of four stages of cognitive development in Piaget's theory. This stage, which follows the Preoperational stage, occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years and is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are:

Seriation—the ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristic. For example, if given different-shaded objects they may make a color gradient.

Classification—the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic, including the idea that one set of objects can include another.

Decentering—where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it. For example, the child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup.

Reversibility—where the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state. For this reason, a child will be able to rapidly determine that if 4+4 equals 8, 8−4 will equal 4, the original quantity.

Conservation—understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items.

Elimination of Egocentrism—the ability to view things from another's perspective (even if they think incorrectly). For instance, show a child a comic in which Jane puts a doll under a box, leaves the room, and then Melissa moves the doll to a drawer, and Jane comes back. A child in the concrete operations stage will say that Jane will still think it's under the box even though the child knows it is in the drawer. (See also False-belief task).

Children in this stage can, however, only solve problems that apply to actual (concrete) objects or events, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks.

Formal operational stage

The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget's theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, "shades of gray", logical proofs, and values. Lucidly, biological factors may be traced to this stage as it occurs during puberty (the time at which another period of neural pruning occurs), marking the entry to adulthood in Physiology, cognition, moral judgement (Kohlberg), Psychosexual development (Freud), and psychosocial development (Erikson)."

Basically during this stage the child is developing how they see the world and how they find ways to create their world around them using various means such as art, music, entertainment and computer generating aspects to show their perspective of life. Because the way technology has improved over the past several years people are relying on computers more and more everyday and thus creating their social networks throughout the internet.

Because a child is still developing their concrete operational stage they are constantly exploring new ways to solve the problems they face on a daily basis. I remember when I was little I was constantly trying to teach my youngest brother that it does not matter how much juice is in a cup that when it was dumped into a bowl it was the same amount. Now I realize that he was below the development level I was on and I had already mastered that information and there he was 4 years old trying to learn it.

I always wondered why young children have hard times trying to understand things as simple as a 1/2 cup of juice in a small glass is the same amount as 1/2 cup juice in a large glass. I always thought it was because they thought there was more in the small glass because it looked as if it had more in it. But after learning about the gang age and about Piaget's theories that it is not the child's fault that they are lacking in certain areas of understand but it is their developmental progress that determines when they learn the information.