Jean Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage

Childhood theorist Jean Piaget, made no fun about children’s perspective of the world. He began advocating that grade school children see things differently than adults do, and that there is a logical explanation for this. Children at the grade school level are at what he calls the Concrete Operational Stage (7 years – 11 years old) where they “form ideas based on their reasoning; limit thinking to objects and familiar events” (Mooney, 2013 p. 81).
Professor David Elkind conducted an experiment to demonstrate to us exactly what Piaget means. From the DVD-Video, he gave different objects in the form of sticks, coins, and play dough to children between the ages of 4 years and 9 years old to see how they perceived things and how their perceptions differed from that of adults. One major difference that was brought out was that of transitivity and reversibility, where Jeffrey, Meredith and Ethan (all 4 years old) could not hold two relationships in mind at the same time. They had not achieved transitive thinking, even when presented

This explained why the 4 year olds’ reasoning differed from that of the 7 year old and also that of adults. Both Renee and Numaca functioned well with reversibility and were able to achieve unit concept due to compensation “the recognition that one operation can be annulled by another” (Elkind, 1993) and reciprocity “the recognition that, when a fixed quantity is altered, what it gains in one dimension, it loses another” (Elkind, 1993) when given the task to differ between space and volume. Piaget says this achievement at Concrete Operational is called conservation where “the general recognition that a quantity remains the same despite a difference in its appearance” (Elkind, 1993). This is why he strongly advocated keeping children curious, make them wonder, and offer them real problem-solving challenges, rather than giving them