An Initial Analysis of Concrete Operations Task Performances and Memory Variables for Children Aged 5 to 13 Years. Technical Report No. 371.

This report is the initial overall summary of a comprehensive analysis of children's logical concept attainments and memoric abilities and deals exclusively with the initial and second year's assessment data. The focal point for this normative investigation is the concrete operations period spanning the years of middle childhood. The measurement battery consisted of logical concept tasks assessing classificatory abilities (groupements, I to IV, dichotomous sorting, some-all understanding, class inclusion, and combinatorial reasoning); relational abilities (groupements V to VIII, transitive inference--length and weight task formats, seriation--serial ordering, additive seriation, and serial correspondence); number concepts (cardinality, conservation and weight (identity and equivalence task formats); and three memory ability measures (forward word and digit series, and visual orientation memory). All the tasks were individually administered. It was concluded that the best characterization of the concrete operations period is a complex interrelationship pattern which is multidimensional in nature. The transition from preoperational forms of logical reasoning to a full mastery of the concepts derived from the logical groupements appears not to be a punctuate, discontinuous phenomenon with uniform progress for the various task settings. (RC)