The youngest children to demonstrate concrete operational thinking are typically in which age group?

• A. High school
• B. Elementary school
• C. Preschool
• D. Infancy

Answer: (B)

This item tests when children first show concrete operational thinking, meaning they begin to use logic and organized thought about concrete objects and events. In Piaget’s stages, this shift typically appears around ages 7 to 11, during the elementary school years, with skills like conservation, reversibility, classification, and seriation becoming possible. Before this period, younger children mainly rely on intuitive, perceptual reasoning (preschool) or are still in sensorimotor and early symbolic thinking (infancy). After this period, during adolescence, thinking tends to become more abstract and hypothetical (formal operational), which goes beyond concrete operations. Since elementary school children are at the age when these logical, concrete-thinking abilities emerge for the first time, that is why this is the best fit.