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Chapter II: Literature Review
Piaget's previous phase to the formal-operational stage of cognitive development
involves concrete operational thought.' In this stage, usually occurring around age 7 to 11,
children have intuitive thought as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete
examples, and there is cooperation of rules. However those children give contradictory accounts
when questioned separately (Broughton, 1979; Chapman, 1988; Santrock, 1998). At the concrete
operational stage, the child can perform mentally what was done before physically (Santrock,
1998).
According to Piaget, knowledge is a biological structuring process or equilibration where
each individual experiences the different stages of development that correspond to their ages
only as temporary resting points (Broughton, 1979). Each equilibration is partial. For every
achieved equilibration, there is a higher, more complex form of equilibrium toward which the
individual strives to evolve (Chapman, 1988) to maintain equilibrium with the environment.
Chapman (1988), in his discussion of Piaget's work (Piaget, 1959), maintains that the individual
"while thinking that he has knowledge of the people and things as they are in reality attributes to
them not only their objective characteristics but also qualities which come from the particular
aspects of things of which he is aware at the time" (Chapman, 1988; Piaget, 1959, pp. 162-163).
Piaget's (1896-1980) life work involved asking children what they thought of things and
how they defined things from a constructivist point of view. In essence, Piaget was trying to find
out what is knowledge and how we acquire it, a cognition that must be considered a process of
subjective construction (Glasersfeld, 1978). Piaget postulates that rather than a static hierarchy of
structural processes, the stress is on continuity between stages, where the stages are only
temporary resting points (Broughton, 1979; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). Cited in Chapman (1988),
Piaget believed that thought precedes action and that the logic of action exists prior to and in
addition to the logic of thought. The cognitive operations within each level of development
(stage) are organized in a structure (Fodor, 1988; Keating, 1990). The structures bring about
constructions that raise new possibilities and lead to the next stage and the new structures (Fodor,
1988). In other words, changing stages involves shifts in the underlying structure, brought about
5 P iaget' s first stage includes sensorimotor intelligence (before age 3; e.g., children manipulate their
marbles according to their own individual desires and motor habits). The second stage incorporates symbolic,
intuitive, pre-logical thinking (approximate age 3-7; e.g., children become aware of codified rules but play to his or
her own rules (Broughton, 1979; Chapman, 1988).
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