The Concrete Operations Stage Of Piaget’s Development

The stage of concrete operations is part of the theory of development proposed by Jean Piaget, whose discoveries have been fundamental in the evolution of positive psychology. According to it, the child’s thinking has unique characteristics that will vary depending on the maturation stage and the interaction with the environment.

In this article, we explain how the logic of a child who is starting the stage of concrete operations works, what his vision of the world is like and what problems he is capable of solving.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

If something can be said about the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, it is that he completely revolutionized the theories of child development and the concept of intelligence that was had until then. With his theory of development,  he questioned that children were less competent thinkers than adults or that they were molded at the mercy of the environment, as was thought until the 1940s.

In this way, Piaget demonstrated through ingenious experiments that infantile thought forms were not inferior to those of adults, but totally different. With his theory of development, he described infants as “little scientists” who actively operate with the environment, experimenting and modifying their thinking based on their findings.

For Piaget, children build a series of mental representations of the world according to their maturation stage. As they interact with the environment, they observe the discrepancies between this mental map that they possess and the reality they perceive. This allows them to gradually modify this conception.

The stage of concrete operations

Piaget divided his theory of development into four main stages: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operations stage, and finally the formal operations. All children go through the stages in the same order towards a thought that evolves in complexity and abstraction.

According to Piagetian theory, the stage of concrete operations is acquired between seven and eleven years of age. Although, the author acknowledges the existence of great individual and cultural variability. This third stage of the theory of development is considered fundamental when it is considered as the beginning of logical or operational thinking in the child.

In the stage of concrete operations, the child has acquired sufficient biological maturity to begin to operate through rules. That is, this stage is characterized by the development of logical thinking that no longer needs so much physical manipulation. In addition, it allows you a much more flexible reflection, not based solely on the appearance of the objects.

The stage of concrete operations: serialization, classification and conservation

According to Piaget’s theory of development, in the stage of concrete operations the child will acquire three fundamental operations that are described below:

• Seriation is the ability to compare elements and order them based on their differences. This operation is necessary for handling concepts such as numbers, time, measurements or orientation. In a practical example, a child who has not yet reached the concrete operations stage has a concept of time in which there is no difference between one minute and one hour.

• Classification is the ability to classify objects according to their characteristics and determine whether they belong to a certain set or to a hierarchy. Thus, a child who has not acquired the skills of the concrete operations stage would not understand the hierarchical relationship between human and mammal. That is, he would not come to understand that all human beings are mammals but they are not the only mammals among living beings.
• Finally, the operation that refers to conservation refers to the fact that the object can be the same despite changes in its appearance. In other words, the redistribution of an element would not affect qualities such as its mass, volume or length. A possible experiment in this regard could consist of showing a child a glass of water and pouring it, without varying the amount, into a smaller one. If we asked a child – who has not started the stage of concrete operations – if there is the same amount, he would answer us in the negative.

The stage of concrete operations: “the practical child”

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development built the foundations of current evolutionary psychology. For the first time, a vision of the particular and unique thinking of the child was proposed. In addition, the biological maturation processes and the relationship with the environment underlying the development of mental processes were described.

The stage of concrete operations is the third stage of the phases described by Piagetian theories. In this fundamental stage, the child will acquire logical notions and will enjoy more flexible thinking. The main operations acquired at this stage of concrete operations are serialization, preservation, and classification. These three skills will allow you to solve problems more systematically.

The stage of concrete operations is often described as the birth of “the practical child”, since he has passed the previous stages related to learning through activity and intuition. He becomes a practical child who stops learning by trial or error, acquiring the logic of a little scientist.