Compare and contrast the ways in which formal operational thinking differs from concrete operational thinking.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should include:
1. Formal operational thinking involves cognitive operations, such as judging whether the relationship between two statements is valid. This is exemplified in people's thinking about syllogisms. Concrete operations involve cognitive operations at a single level, such as judging whether a single statement is valid or not.
2. Concrete operational thinkers can solve syllogisms when the premises are true. Formal operational thinkers can solve syllogisms even when one or more premises are counterfactual statements, such as "the mouse is larger than the elephant."
3. The contents of concrete operations are concrete (real, tangible, or measurable quantities). The contents of formal operations are abstract or hypothetical.
4. Younger children consider observations and draw conclusions. Adolescents consider hypotheses and collect evidence to test them. This is seen in the differing responses of younger children and adolescents to challenges like the pendulum problem and the combination of liquids task. For example, younger students combine a few liquids and give up quickly or draw a conclusion as soon as they accidentally produce the yellow liquid. Adolescents try all possible combinations until they find the combination that produces the yellow liquid. They will also try all remaining combinations to see if any of them also produce the color.