Formal Operations in First-Year College Students

Abstract

Sixty first-year college student in a state university were administered three problems to ascertain their level of logical thinking. Successful solution of the problems required the elaboration of hypotheses and methods of proof. Seventeen percent of the randomly selected Ss scored at the concrete level, 63% at the lower formal level, and 20% at the upper formal level. Logical thinking was found to have almost no relationship to college selection criteria (high school rank and SAT scores) for men and a low relationship for women in this sample whose range of scores on these criteria was restricted. Differences between the sexes were found to be substantial and significant, favoring the men.

Bringing Child Psychology to Religious Curricula: the cautionary tale of Goldman and Piaget

“…Brown & Desforges (1977) argue that stages by definition involve a 'coherent integration of operations' and that, when this can be shown not to be the case, the utility of the concept breaks down. If low correlations are observed between tasks intended to demonstrate the same sort of intellectual functioning, the concept of a stage is seriously at risk (Pascual-Leone, 1970;Blasi & Hoeffel, 1974;Hamel, 1974;Neimark, 1975;Schwebel, 1975). More radically, if children between 5 and 7 years of age show an ability to make inferences that belong to the formal operational stage, there are serious consequences for major Piagetian claims (Harris, 1975).…”

Cognitive Differences Between Procedural Programming and Object Oriented Programming

“…These two tests covered procedural concepts. Since cognitive development is fixed in adulthood (Kuhn et al, 1977) and not all adults develop to Formal Operations [4,23,47], it is suspected that the OOP of Java did nothing to enhance cognitive development as measured by the Propositional Logic Test (PLT).…”

The cognitive effects of a mathematics in-service workshop on elementary school teachers

“…This stage of formal operations marked by the concepts of proportionality, probability and correlation is attained by only approximately 30% of the adolescents and adults in the U.S.A. (e.g., McKinnon and Renner, 1971;Schwebel, 1975). Perhaps there are biologically-imposed limits as to what percentage of adults can become formal reasoners across a variety of advanced concepts regardless of the intervention techniques that are employed -e.g., direct instruction of cognitive rules.…”