Developmental Trends: Thinking and Reasoning Skills at Different Age Levels

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Infancy (Birth–2)

What You Might Observe:

• Physical exploration of the environment becoming increasingly complex, flexible, and intentional
• Growing awareness of simple cause-effect relationships
• Emergence of ability to represent the world mentally (e.g., as reflected in make-believe play)

Diversity:

• Temperamental differences (e.g., the extent to which infants are adventuresome vs. more timid and anxious) influence exploratory behavior.
• Infants and toddlers who are emotionally attached to their caregivers are more willing to venture out and explore their environment (see Chapter 11).
• In some cultures adults encourage infants to focus more on people than on the physical environment. When people rather than objects are the priority, children may be less inclined to touch and explore their physical surroundings.

Implications:

• Set up a safe, age-appropriate environment for exploration.
• Provide objects that stimulate different senses—for instance, things that babies can look at, listen to, feel, and smell.
• Suggest age-appropriate toys and activities that parents can provide at home.

Early Childhood (2–6)

What You Might Observe:

• Rapidly developing language skills
• Reasoning that is, by adult standards, illogical
• Limited perspective-taking ability
• Frequent self-talk
• Sociodramatic play
• Little understanding of how adults typically interpret events

Diversity:

• Shyness may reduce children’s willingness to talk with adults and peers and to engage in cooperative sociodramatic play.
• Adultlike logic is more common when children have accurate information about the world (e.g., about cause-effect relationships).
• Children learn to interpret events in culture-specific ways.

Implications:

• Provide numerous opportunities for children to interact with one another during play and other cooperative activities.
• Introduce children to a variety of real-world environments and situations through field trips and picture books.
• Talk with children about their experiences and possible interpretations.

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.