11 A bit of Piaget

Some time between the ages of about 12 and 18, many people’s thinking goes through a qualitative change, something like shifting up a gear. Using Piaget’s labels (without implying a hook, line and sinker adherence to Piagetian psychology), whereas in the early teens the pupil is still using concrete operational thinking, later adolescents are more likely to be able to use formal operational thinking. To relate Thinking Science to this qualitative development of thinking, we must first say a little more about the nature of concrete and formal operations.

Concrete operational thinking is sometimes mistakenly linked directly to concrete ‘hands-on’ experiences. Concrete operations are thought processes, which a child performs on his or her perceptions. The perceptions may arise from some practical activity, but may also arise from something read, or something someone says. Important characteristics of concrete operations are that children can cope with only a limited number of variables, often describing situations, but not to explaining them. By contrast, formal operational type thinking can handle multi-variable problems, and allows people to provide explanations for events. In describing an ecosystem, for instance, a child using concrete operations can describe simple food chains, and see that the population of one species (ladybirds) is related to the population of another (aphids). This understanding is accessible whether or not some practical activity is performed. But the ability to comprehend the dynamic equilibrium of multiple variables in that ecosystem, and appreciate in principle how a small shift in one factor may have far reaching effects, or alternatively may be compensated by a shift in the equilibrium position, requires a higher level of thinking.

During adolescence, many people develop the ability to think in formal operational terms. The mechanism by which this development occurs is by no means certain. Piaget described it in terms of interaction between the individual and the environment, with new stimuli being assimilated into existing cognitive structures and the cognitive structure accommodating to fit the new stimuli. Accommodation and assimilation are continuous and simultaneous processes.

Whether or not one accepts such a theory, the development of cognition is surely influenced by a person’s genetic make-up, by maturation, and by physical and social environmental factors from the moment of conception onwards. Included in the environmental factors must be the influence of schools and of teaching. While it would be foolhardy to try to quantify the relative effect of these different factors on an individual’s cognitive development, it seems reasonable to assume that the influence of secondary school teaching is significant. The optimism of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) project lies in that assumption.

Thinking Science (the published materials from the CASE project) is all about accelerating the development of thinking from concrete to formal operations. Why this should be of special concern to science teachers becomes clear if one looks at a list of some of the types of reasoning that are characteristic of formal operations. Inhelder and Piaget called them schemata, we call them reasoning patterns.