From the Concrete to the Abstract: Examining Student Development

Piaget the clinical psychologist in his theory of cognitive development came up with three stages which basically define the learning stages (Piaget) a human goes through from birth to adulthood. These stages begin with the Sensorimotor stage which is the stage we are born into till about age 2. During this stage the child learns about their senses, and movements and basically begins exploring the world around them. The next stage according to Piaget is the Preoperational Stage. During this stage the child develops language and begins to use symbols to represent things in the real world. This article will be concerned mainly with the next stage which is the Concrete Stage and the one after it, the Formal Operations.

The Concrete Stage, (from year 1 till adolescence) is characterized by the child’s brain being able to accommodate more knowledge. The child is able to make judgments about the world around him/her, and using concrete objects to stimulate their abstract thinking, when previously they would have changed the input to suit their already formed schema. It is generally accepted though that by the beginning of high school at age fifteen in USA and age 13 in Queensland, Australia that the student will have already started developing out of the Concrete Stage into Formal Operations. Certainly in the USA one would expect that a fifteen year old is able to process abstractly without the aid of concrete objects. How does one develop the ability to think abstractly? Clearly the answer is to practice visualizing people, scenes, actions, and sequences that are represented abstractly. In effect the ability to think abstractly is enhanced by thinking abstractly.

In the pre video era children would get together on weekends and holidays and even if they didn’t read they had to devise scenarios for their make-believe games. I remember that a group of ten to thirteen year olds would gather at someone’s house and before we started we would devise a game plan. The dialogue went something like this with one child starting with, “Ok ok, just say, that bob’s a crook ok, and he’s robbing a bank.”

“Yeah ok, and Jack and I will be tellers.”

“And I’ll be a customer, and I try to stop you.”

“I’m the local sheriff and we come chasing you all into the desert where we have a shootout at the old mine?” and so on. Children took the printed word or stories told on radio or television and adapted them to their own games and situations. Reading is an essential tool in exercising this ability to convert abstract notions into concrete representations. Increasingly these abilities are decreasing in the youth of today. There will always be students who love to write and compose stories from their imagination, but sadly there is a growing number of students who refuse to write or compose original work and will often turn in stories that are fully cut and pasted from the internet. Some are so blasé about this practice that they will just print the story straight off the browser thus leaving the URL printed at the edge of the page. This shows a lack of imagination on their part due chiefly to the fact that the availability of computer games and interactive video scenarios remove the need to create structure. The story is provided and users just fill in the details.