Interesting thread and articles. Without being an expert or assigning any special significance to it (because I see so much evidence that precociousness does not always or perhaps even generally equate to maximum potential), I would say that my five-year-old has been in the Formal Operational stage, to the extent that these classifications are valid, since at least age four and a half and perhaps significantly earlier. Then again, I have exposed him to a wide range of material not, shall we say, in the mode of "Blue's Clues" and "The Wiggles". Thus in our case "training effects", whatever those are, may have confounded the results as mentioned in passing in the article.
The thing that was actually the most interesting to me from the articles I read was the idea that the Formal Operational stage may not be reached by some children. I think that all children of at least fairly normal physical development could be fairly easily taught Formal Operational thinking, and at a younger age than 11 or even 7. I suspect that the difference between Concrete and Formal Operational stages has much more to do with training than the differences between the earlier stages do.
Last edited by Iucounu; 10/04/10 05:17 AM.
