can any one help me to understand piaget concrete operatinal stage 2-6 years i understand other stages this seems very complexed thanks ann

CONCRETE OPERATIONS
The stage of concrete operations is observed in children of approximately the ages of seven to eleven. Children in this stage can think much more systematically and quantitatively. The child's reasoning processes become logical and they acquire operations; "systems of internal mental actions that underlie logical thinking" (Flavell, Miller & Miller, 1993). The children can now conserve and classify, they are no longer bound by egocentrism or perceptual centration and can follow the successive movements of a transformation.

The concrete operational child can conserve in all forms, number, area and liquid. Not only can the children answer the conservation question correctly, they can give sound logical reasoning as to why the amounts of liquid are the same in the beakers, such as that it is higher in one glass because that one is thin whereas the other is wide.



Multiple classification is mastered by children in the concrete operational stage. This is when children have the ability to classify objects on more than one dimension such as colour and size. Class inclusion is also another classification system that is understood by children in this stage. In the earlier example in which oranges and apples were used to illustrate the principles of class inclusion, the concrete operational child would now be able to tell you that there are more pieces of fruit than there are apples. They can deal with sub-ordinate and super-ordinate concepts.

The egocentricity of the preoperational stage is almost non-existent, the child is now able to place herself in the positions of others and can solve the Three Mountain Problem in which the child can tell the experimenter the view the doll situated on one of the mountains has. The child is able to make a mental shift to the position of the doll.

The child has developed the ability to separate herself from particular aspects of a stimulus and can study the entire field of perception. This can be seen in an everyday example such as judging the age of a person (Bjorklund, 1995). When in the pre-operational stage, the child may judge age using a certain aspect such as height, the taller you are the older you are. Height however, is only one aspect of age and an unreliable one at that. Concrete operational children understand that many features come together when age is being judged and identified. This ability is the decentration of the child's perception of the world. She no longer focuses on one aspect.

Understanding transformations is a development, which takes place in the concrete operations stage. The child can now produce replications of the transitions between initial and final states of things such as a stick falling over. They can also order objects in hierarchical structures called seriation. She can rank objects in terms of dimensions such as height. This helps them to deal with numbers and mathematical problems (Le Francois, 2000).

thanks very much for your time this has made it clear now under stand thanks agin ann