Piaget's Stages Of Intellectual Development

The adolescent I will be addressing in this paper is now 18 years old. He is an African American. He was born in Nigeria, but moved to America when he was 10. He is the last born of the family. His name is Victor Awoyele and he is my younger brother. I’ve watched him grow up over the years. In our family, we speak mostly English, but we also speak Yoruba, our native language. My mother’s English is not that great so we mainly speak our native language when she’s around. I will be introducing the third and fourth state in the Piaget’s stages of Intellectual Development. The Concreate operational stage which extends from ages 7 – 11 and the Formal Operational which extends from ages 11 and beyond (Cobb, 2007).
Piaget’s concrete operational …show more content…
Seriation is the ability and capability kids have to mentally arrange items along a quantifiable dimension; for example, by the weight and height of the object. Lastly, Spatial reasoning gives kids the ability to understand and form conclusions based on the information that is in their environment (OSWALT, 2010) According to Alleydog.com, Kids adolescents develop a logical process called decentering. Children who are capable of decentration recognize that a change in one aspect is compensated for by a change in another aspect. Rathus suggests that one of the key characteristics of the concrete-operational stage is the ability to focus on many parts of a problem (Rathus, 2008). While kids in the preoperational stage of development tend to focus on just one aspect of a situation or problem, those in the concrete operational stage are able to engage is what is known as "decentration." They are able to concentrate on many different aspects of a situation at the same time, which is plays a critical role in the understanding of conservation. They also demonstrate reversibility or the capacity to think …show more content…
Reversibility is a very important step when it comes to moving towards more advanced thinking, although at this stage it only pertains to concrete situations. Whereas kids at earlier stages of development are egoistical, those in the concrete operational stage become more sociocentric. In other words, they are able to apprehend that other individuals have their own thoughts. At this point, kids will be aware that other people have their own distinctive perspectives, although they might not be able to guess exactly what or how that other person is experiencing different situations. The growing ability to mentally manipulate information and think about the thoughts of others plays a significant role when it comes time for the formal operational stage, when logic and abstract thought become critical. I witness this in victor’s behavior as he aged. I witnessed him go from a person that could barely distinguish between white and brown rice to a person that formulate his own ideas and the repercussions of them ideas.
Piaget (1970) formulated several tests to analyze the concrete operational and formal operational thought. One of the ways he decided to do this was to introduce the 'third eye problem'. Children were asked if they were to have an extra eye, where would they put it and why that location. Schaffer (1988) reported that