Categories: Site glossary
The fourth of the four main levels of development in Piaget's very influential stage theory of cognitive development
"In Piaget's model, the fourth stage was called formal operations. This implied that a person was capable of highly abstract thinking and able to undertake mental operations on internal mental representations. This was very relevant to learning science as many science topics taught in school involve theoretical abstractions that students are expected to engage with, and indeed apply, in the absence of the natural phenomena from which those ideas were initially abstracted." (Taber, 2020)
