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Jean Piaget: Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development
Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long- term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget. Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become able to think logically and scientifically. Because his theory is especially popular among educators, we focus on it in this chapter.
Piaget was a psychological constructivist: in his view, learning was proceeded by the interplay of assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short- term learning, but also to long-term developmental change. The long-term developments are really the main focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory.
As you might remember, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence. By stages he meant a sequence of thinking patterns with four key features:
- They always happen in the same order.
- No stage is ever skipped.
- Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
- Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.
Basically this is the “staircase” model of development. Piaget proposed four major stages of cognitive development, and called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence, (2) preoperational thinking, (3) concrete operational thinking, and (4) formal operational thinking. Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately. Formal operational thinking appears in adolescence.[1]
During the formal operational stage, adolescents are able to understand abstract principles. They are no longer limited by what can be directly seen or heard, and are able to contemplate such constructs as beauty, love, freedom, and morality. Additionally, while younger children solve problems through trial and error, adolescents demonstrate hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which is developing hypotheses based on what might logically occur. They are able to think about all the possibilities in a situation beforehand, and then test them systematically, (Crain, 2005) because they are able to engage in true scientific thinking.
Video offers a brief introduction to Piaget’s formal operational stage.
In this video, we see responses to a Piagetian hypothetical question to assess is at the concrete or formal operational thinking stage.
Does everyone reach formal operations?
According to Piaget, most people attain some degree of formal operational thinking, but use formal operations primarily in the areas of their strongest interest (Crain, 2005). In fact, most adults do not regularly demonstrate formal operational thought. A possible explanation is that an individual’s thinking has not been suffici