Nama : Sartika Dewi Hutabarat

NIM : 4163321028
Prodi : Pendidikan Fisika
Kelas : Ekstensi A
Mata Kuliah : Strategi Belajar Mengajar Fisika

Formal Operations Period

Marvelous though they are when compared, for example, to the most advanced thinking of
any subhuman species, Concrete Operations still fall far short of the intellectual
accomplishments of an intelligent human adult. My purpose in this chapter is not to analyze
these adult accomplishments in great detail, but rather to identify the crucial characteristics
that differentiate them from earlier ones. Consequently, the chapter is relatively brief.
Another reason for the relative brevity of this chapter is that the characteristics of
adult thinking are somewhat more accessible than are the processes discussed earlier. Every
college course is an enterprise that requires a great deal of thinking; one who is looking for
the operations involved in that thinking may be able to find some of them. A better way to
focus attention on those operations would be to take a course in logic. Those who can arrange
to include such a course in their curriculum should do so, but should look at it from a
psychological viewpoint, remembering always the Piagetian dictum that logic is the mirror of
thought rather than vice versa. That is, the function of logic is to make explicit those mental
processes that occur naturally at the highest level of human development.
Before turning the reader over to a logician, however, there are a few general things
that I wish to say about the transition from Concrete to Formal Operations. I shall describe
but a single problem, so that its implications may be examined in reasonable detail.

Archimedes’ Law of Floating Bodies

An object will float if its specific gravity is less than 1.00-i.e., if its density is less than
that of water. In an experimental test, this can be reduced to a comparison of the weight of
equal volumes of the two substances. Some objects are able to derive this law while being
questioned by the investigator. But by no means are all of them competent to do so, and the
differences among them are correlated with differences in age.
Apparatus
The subject is presented with
1) a bucket of water and
2) several different object, each small enough to fit into the bucket.1
Procedure
The subject is asked to classify the objects according to whether they will float and to
explain the basis of his classifications in each case. Then he is allowed to experiment

1
Subject were also supplied with three cubes of different densities and an empty plastic cube to
facilitate accurate comparisons with the density of water.
 with the materials and is asked to summarize his observations and to look for a law
that will tie them all together.

Concrete Operations Applied to the Floating Bodies Problem

My purpose in this section and the following two sections (“Operations on
Operations” and “The Real versus the Possible”) is to analyze the behavior of school-age
children and adolescents in the situation described above. I shall first present some examples
of performances by subjects who are not yet in the Formal Operations Period.
Although the Preoperational child in this situation blithely invokes a special cause for
each event, the Concrete Operations child is troubled by inconsistencies that had not troubled
him earlier because they had not existed for fim; he had lacked “instruments of coordination
(operational classifications, etc.), which will attain equilibrium only at the point when
concrete operations are structured.”2
That equilibrium is not attained suddenly, but progress is made precisely because of
the child’s awareness that he is in difficulty. In the early part of the Concrete Operations
Period, the main contradiction is that certain large objects will float and certain small ones
sink. It is a contradiction because he begins the period with a kind of “absolute weight”
concept as his main tool for dealing with the problem. Each object, including each bucket of
water, has a “weight” that is conceived as a force that somehow opposes other forces, but in
no consistent manner. (One moment he may predict that water will push a solid object up; the
next moment, that it will push one down.) Initially, this “weight” is a quality of each separate
object, not of the substance of which the object is constituted; hence the term “absolute
weight.”

SMALL, LIGHT TO LARGE, HEAVY

Figure 4.1

Moreover, the child assigns a weight to an object by placing it on a scale something like that
shown in Figure 4.1; size and weight are not discriminated as separate dimensions. That soon
changes, however.

BAR [seven years, eleven months] first classifies the bodies into three categories:
those that float because they are light [wood, matches, paper, and the aluminium cover];
those that sink because they are heavy [large and small keys, pebbles of all sizes, ring clamps,
needles and nails, a metal cylinder, and an eraser]; and those that remain suspended at a
midway point [fish].
“The needle?”

2
Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence,
tranlated by Anne Parson and S. Milgram, New York, Basic Books, Inc., 1958, p. 28. (Original
French edition, 1955.)
“It goes down because it’s iron.”
“And the key?”
“It sink too.”
“And the small things?” [nails, ring, clamps].
“They are iron too.”
“And this little pebble?”
“It’s heavy because it’s stone.”
“And the little nail?”
“It’s just a little heavy.”
“And the cover, why does it stay up?”
“It has edges and sinks if it’s filled with water.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s iron.”3

3
Ibid., p, 29.