Describe the limitations of concrete operational thought

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Concrete operational thinking suffers from one important limitation: Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world. When shown pairs of sticks of unequal length, a concrete operational child easily engages in transitive inference. But she has difficulty with a hypothetical version of this task: "Susan is taller than Sally, and Sally is taller than Mary. Who is the tallest?" Not until age 11 or 12 can children solve this problem. That logical thought is at first tied to immediate situations helps account for a special feature of concrete operational reasoning: Children master concrete operational tasks step by step. For example, they usually grasp conservation of number first, followed by conservation of length, liquid, and mass, and then weight. This continuum of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking. Rather than coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations, school-age children seem to work out the logic of each problem separately.