Human Growth and Development / Unit 7 HGD 0915 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Concrete Operations
The idea
Concrete operational children master a set of operations. Conservation: an amount stays the same despite changes in appearance, with liquid, number or clay. Decentration: attending to more than one feature, such as height and width at once. Reversibility: mentally undoing a sequence back to its start. Class inclusion, solved between about seven and ten: there are more fruit than apples. Seriation: ordering items along one dimension, such as sticks from shortest to longest. Transitive inference: if A is taller than B and B taller than C, then C is shortest.
In practice
A ten-year-old watching juice poured into a tall glass and saying, "It's the same; you can pour it back."
Where people slip
Seriation is ordering along a dimension; sorting by several attributes at once is a different skill, multiple classification. Egocentrism also declines: the three-mountains task, failed by preschoolers, is now solved. The type of conservation mastered first can differ with culture and experience.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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