The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal Operational Structures

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 1958 - Medical - 356 pages
This book has two aims: to set forth a description of changes in logical operations between childhood and adolescence and to describe the formal structures that mark the completion of the operational development of intelligence. To tie these together the authors have tried to present the material in a way that would stress the close relationship between the two. Each of the first fifteen chapters (Parts I and II) includes an experimental part by the first author and a brief final analysis by the second author. This analysis aims to isolate the formal or propositional structures found in each case. Chapters 16 and 17 (beginning of Part III) are the work of the second author, whereas Chapter 18 is a joint production. In addition, the specific problems of experimental induction analyzed from a functional standpoint (as distinguished from the present structural analysis) will be the subject of a special work by the first author. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).
 

Contents

PART I
1
The Law of Floating Bodies and the Elimination
20
Flexibility and the Operations Mediating
46
The Oscillation of a Pendulum and the Operations
67
Falling Bodies on an Inclined Plane and Opera
80
The Role of Invisible Magnetization and the Six
93
PART II
105
The Conservation of Motion in a Horizontal Plane
123
The Projection of Shadows
199
Play Dreams and Imitation in Childhood
200
Centrifugal Force and Compensations
210
Probable Dispersions and Correlations
224
PART III
243
Formal Thought from the Equilibrium Standpoint
245
The Principles of Teaching
269
Concrete and Formal Structures
272

Communicating Vessels
133
Equilibrium in the Hydraulic Press
148
Equilibrium in the Balance
164
Hauling Weight on an Inclined Plane
182
Adolescent Thinking
334
Index
351
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About the author (1958)

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, whose original training was in the natural sciences, spent much of his career studying the psychological development of children, largely at the Institut J.J. Rousseau at the University of Geneva, but also at home, with his own children as subjects. The impact of this research on child psychology has been enormous, and Piaget is the starting point for those seeking to learn how children view numbers, how they think of cause-and-effect relationships, or how they make moral judgments. Piaget found that cognitive development from infancy to adolescence invariably proceeds in four major stages from infancy to adolescence: sensory-motor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Each of these stages is marked by the development of cognitive structures, making possible the solution of problems that were impossible earlier and laying the foundation for the cognitive advances of the next stage. He showed that rational adult thinking is the culmination of an extensive process that begins with elementary sensory experiences and unfolds gradually until the individual is capable of dealing with imagined concepts, that is, abstract thought. By learning how children comprehend the world and how their intellectual processes mature, Piaget contributed much to the theory of knowledge as an active process in which the mind transforms reality. Put simply, Piaget described children from a perspective that no one before had seen.