Cognitive Operational Thought  

As children continue into elementary school, they develop the ability to represent ideas and events with more logic and flexibility. Piaget called this period the concrete operational stage because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events.

The concrete operational stage is defined as the third in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. This stage takes place around 7 years old to 11 years of age and is characterized by the development of organized and rational thinking. Piaget (1954a, as cited in Paris et al., 2021) considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child’s cognitive development, because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. The child is now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic to physical objects (hence concrete operational). Children gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation) and reversibility (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019).

 These skills allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.”

Let’s look at the following cognitive skills that children typically master during Piaget’s concrete operational stage 6: 

Seriation: Arranging items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, in a methodical way is now demonstrated by the concrete operational child. For example, they can methodically arrange a series of different-sized sticks in order by length, while younger children approach a similar task in a haphazard way (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019).  

Classification:  As children gain more experiences and their vocabularies expand, they build schema and can recognize and perhaps describe attributes and organize objects in many different ways. They also understand classification hierarchies and can arrange objects into a variety of classes and subclasses. 

Memory Strategies: Bjorklund (2005, as cited in Paris et al., 2021) describes a developmental progression in the acquisition and use of memory strategies as children progress through elementary school. Examples of memory strategies include rehearsing information you wish to recall, visualizing and organizing information, creating rhymes, such as “i” before “e” except after “c”, or inventing acronyms, or pneumonic device such as “roygbiv” to remember the colors of the rainbow. In a longitudinal study Schneider, Kron-Sperl, and Hünnerkopf (2009, as cited in Paris et al., 2021) reported a steady increase in the use of memory strategies from ages six to ten. Moreover, by age ten many children were using two or more memory strategies to help them recall information. Schneider and colleagues found that there were considerable individual differences at each age in the use of strategies and that children who utilized more strategies had better memory performance than their same-aged peers.

Cognitive processes

According to the Ontario Mathematics Curriculum (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020) critical thinking can be described as: “the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to understand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making.”

Many tools to measure and standardize intelligence testing have been created since the early 20th century. These include tools such as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test (thought of as the first intelligence test developed by French and American psychologists) and the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (developed in the late 30s and includes versions for individuals with a variety of verbal and nonverbal skills from preschool all the way to adulthood.

Intelligence tests and psychological definitions of intelligence have been heavily criticized since the 1970s for being biased in favour of Anglo-American, middle-class respondents and for being inadequate tools for measuring non-academic types of intelligence or talent.

Intelligence changes with experience, and intelligence quotients or scores do not reflect that ability to change. What is considered smart varies culturally as well, and most intelligence tests do not take this variation into account. For example, in the West, being smart is associated with being quick. A person who answers a question the fastest is seen as the smartest, but in some cultures being smart is associated with considering an idea thoroughly before giving an answer. In these cultures, a well-thought out, contemplative answer is the best answer (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019).  This view is also seen in Indigenous cultures were children are taught to be mindful about the words being used before answering a question.  

An alternative view of intelligence is presented by Sternberg (1997; 1999, as cited in Paris et al., 2021). Sternberg offers three types of intelligences, such as analytical (or academic), creative (experiential), and practical (contextual).

Another champion of the idea of specific types of intelligences rather than one overall intelligence is the psychologist Howard Gardner (1983, 1999, as cited in Paris et al., 2021) who argued that it would be evolutionarily functional for different people to have different talents and skills, and proposed that there are nine intelligences that can be differentiated from each other, and these are also forms of intelligence. A high IQ does not always ensure success in life or necessarily indicate that a person has common sense, good interpersonal skills, or other abilities important for success.

Gardner investigated intelligences by focusing on children who were talented in one or more areas. In Gardner’s original work, and over the years, he identified different intelligences based on other criteria including a set developmental history and psychometric findings, including linguistic, musical, spatial, kinesthetic, naturalistic, and existential intelligence.