Human Growth and Development / Unit 9 HGD 1237 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Formal Operations
Captions available
The idea
Formal operations, Piaget's final stage from about eleven or twelve, bring reasoning with logic and symbols about possibilities, including situations that do not exist.
In practice
A fourteen-year-old reasoning about how history would differ had a war gone the other way.
Where people slip
Formal thinkers reason from imagined premises, propositional logic, rather than only from what they observe.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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