Developmental Trends: Thinking and Reasoning Skills at Different Age Levels

Middle Childhood (6–10)

What You Might Observe:

• Conservation, class inclusion, and other forms of adultlike logic
• Limited ability to reason about abstract or hypothetical ideas
• Emergence of group games and team sports that involve coordinating multiple perspectives
• Ability to participate to some degree in many adult activities

Diversity:

• Development of logical thinking skills is affected by the importance of those skills in a child’s culture.
• Formal operational reasoning may occasionally appear for simple tasks and familiar contexts, especially in 9- and 10-year-olds.
• Physical maturation and psychomotor skills affect willingness to play some games and team sports.

Implications:

• Use concrete manipulatives and experiences to illustrate concepts and ideas.
• Supplement verbal explanations with concrete examples, pictures, and hands-on activities.
• Allow time for organized play activities.
• Introduce children to various adult professions, and provide opportunities to practice authentic adult tasks.

Early Adolescence (10–14)

What You Might Observe:

• Emerging ability to reason about abstract ideas
• Increasing scientific reasoning abilities (e.g., formulating and testing hypotheses, separating and controlling variables)
• Emerging ability to reason about mathematical proportions
• Emerging idealism about political and social issues, but often without taking real-world constraints into consideration
• Increasing ability to engage in adult tasks

Diversity:

• Adolescents can think more abstractly when they have considerable knowledge about a topic.
• Adolescents are more likely to separate and control variables for situations with which they are familiar.
• Development of formal operational reasoning skills is affected by the importance of those skills in one’s culture.
• The idealistic notions that young people espouse may reflect their religious, cultural, or socioeconomic backgrounds.

Implications:

• Present abstract concepts and principles central to various academic disciplines, but tie them to concrete examples.
• Have students engage in scientific investigations, focusing on familiar objects and phenomena.
• Assign mathematics problems that require use of simple fractions, ratios, or decimals.
• While demonstrating how to do a new task, also talk about how to effectively think about the task.

Late Adolescence (14–18)

What You Might Observe:

• Abstract thought and scientific reasoning skills more prevalent, especially for topics about which adolescents have considerable knowledge
• Idealistic notions tempered by more realistic considerations
• Ability to perform many tasks in an adultlike manner

Diversity:

• Abstract thinking tends to be more common in some content areas (e.g., mathematics, science) than in others (e.g., history, geography).
• Formal operational reasoning skills are less likely to appear in cultures that don’t require those skills.
• Teenagers’ proficiency in particular adult tasks varies considerably from individual to individual and from task to task.

Implications:

• Study particular academic disciplines in depth; introduce complex and abstract explanations and theories.
• Encourage discussions about social, political, and ethical issues; elicit multiple perspectives regarding these issues.
• Involve adolescents in activities that are similar or identical to the things they will eventually do as adults.
• Explain how experts in a field think about the tasks they perform.