The girl is in the concrete operational stage. She was able to engage in two-way thinking and understand what both of the cards were saying. She probably knew that a feather would not break a glass in real life; however, she put aside this knowledge and went along with what the first card told her, which was a rule that said a feather can break a glass. She can connect the first card to the second card, indicating that she is performing two-way thinking.
Teachers can help students in the preoperational stage to learn by repeating information multiple times by revisiting it and by creating connections with things that children already know. This can help students work on reducing the idea of centration, which is the tendency to focus on one part of a problem and ignoring other important parts. By analyzing something in more than one way, a student can gain a better perspective and eventually understand the idea a little better.
Teachers can teach students in the operational stage by employing reason into activities and ideas. In this stage, students are able to think in two-ways and can reason certain things. It is important to teach students in the preoperational stage differently than students in the concrete stage because the level of development that has occurred in their reasoning is different. Higher-order thinking can occur in the concrete stage, so using tactics from the preoperational stage would be useless. Using logical reasoning and giving logical answers to a student in the preoperational stage would not work either because the students have no concept of logic or reasing. Therefore, the learner’s background must be taken into account before teaching something.
I think your explanation for the little boy is great! That's similar to how I'd analyze it. I think there's some evidence he may be in concrete operations if we saw some more of his behavior, since he's able to represent the concepts of hammer and feather in the imaginary scenario despite them not being in front of him. He definitely can't think hypothetically (a mark of formal operations).
ReplyDeleteBecause the girl displayed hypothetical thinking, do you think she could be in formal operations? (I think an argument can be made for either)
Be careful in discussing how teachers can help students "work on the idea of centration", or saying that teachers can push a student out of centration in some way.... Piaget would totally disagree with this. He didn't believe teachers could push development further in any way. You'd have to teach to the child's stage, but not give them something past their current capacity. This may not be intuitive to you, but that's part of Piaget's theory. Vygotsky thought very differently, and believed you COULD push a student by giving them challenges just past their current capacity (this is one big difference between Piaget and Vygotsky).