Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

Culture-biased Tests 313
of specific sensory input or motoric activity of the child; it includes
conditioning, stimulus-response learning, reward learning, perceptual
recognition, and associative or rote learning and memory.
(2) The pre-operational stage (onset ages 1 to 2 years) is a transitional
period between the sensori-motor stage and the next stage
and is mainly characterized by symbolic play and cognitive
egocentrism, i.e., the child in this stage can view objects and
relationships only in terms of his own relation to them. (3)
Concrete operations (onset 6 to 7 years) is the first stage of what
Piaget calls operational thinking, which characterizes his view of
intelligence. It involves the capacity for performing mental
operations on concrete objects, such as numeration, seriation, and
classification or other forms of grouping, and the ability to conceive
the invariant structure of classes, relations, and numbers.
(4) Formal operations (onset 11 to 13 years) is the final level of
operational thinking, manifested in logical reasoning (not dependent
upon the manipulation of concrete objects), propositional
thinking, combinatorial and inferential thinking which involve
using hypothetical possibilities, abstractions, and imaginary
conditions as well as the mental manipulations of symbols for real
or experiential knowledge.
Piaget has devised a large number of ingenious ‘test’ or clinicaltype
procedures for assessing the child’s mental development as
he moves through these stages, each of which has finer gradations
or substages marking the course of cognitive development. Most
of the techniques have concentrated on the assessment of concrete
operations, for this is the first stage of operational logical thinking
which, in Piaget’s view, is the beginning of mature intelligence
and most characterizes human intelligence. The child’s capacity
to grasp and utilize the concepts of conservation of number, weight,
and volume, in that order, marks the development of operational
thinking. The 7- or 8-year-old child who is well along in concrete
operations, for example, tacitly accepts the notion that volume
is conserved, that is, the quantity or volume of a ball of clay or a
jar of liquid is conceived as invariant regardless of its changing
shape (a round ball of clay or the same ball of clay flattened out
like a pancake) or the variety of differently shaped flasks into
which the liquid can be poured (low, flat bowl or tall, thin cylinder).
The pre-operational child does not assume this invariance; to
him, when a round ball of clay is flattened out and made to look