The transition from concrete to formal thinking

Abstract

The thesis consists of a developmental study designed to investigate the transition from Concrete to Formal Operational Thought. A total of 236 subjects - 48, 48, 44, 48, and 48 in five age groups (10, 11, 12 , 13 and 14 year-olds, respectively) -is tested (a) on one of Inhelder and Piaget's (1958) tasks (the Pendulum Problem) and (b) on a Four Group Task adapted from Dienes and jeeves (1965). It is argued that there are distinguishable concrete and formal operational approaches to the latter task. The samples of subjects for individual testing are chosen to be typical of the relevant school grades in terms of two variables:- raw score on the Standard Progressive Matrices and Mathematics Mark in a school examination. An introduction to the transition from Concrete to Formal Operational thinking is given and then Chapters 1, 2 and 3 provide the theoretical and empirical background to the study. The format and the learning and questioning procedures for the Pour Group Task are described in Chapter 4 (with details in Appendices I and II) and the descriptions of other measures and the experimental design given in Chapter 5 (with details in Appendix III). Scoring procedures developed for performance on the Pendulum Problem are outlined in Chapter 6 and for performance on the Four Group Task in Chapter 7 (with some transcripts from interviews on the latter task presented in Appendix IV; Appendix II also gives indications of the different types of response to questioning and the associated ratings made). Chapter 8 discusses the results purely in terms of performance categories and the frequencies of subjects in them (associated tables are in Appendix V), Chapter 9 describes the derivation of quantitative scores on the two tasks, and investigates the interrelationships of a number of variables (associated tables are in Appendix VI), Tables of raw data are presented in Appendix VII. Concrete and Formal levels of understanding of the Four Group Task are described, using detailed material from interviews, in Chapter 10, and the relationship of performance on this task to other variables discussed, together with theoretical and methodological implications in Chapter 11. Show more