Levels Of Transition From Action To Operation

By: Wanjohi. P. Mugambi 

Worth Noting:

• First we must consider the fact that a successful adaptive action is not automatically accompanied by an accurate mental representation of the situation or of the action performed.
• Second, achieving this systematic mental representation involves constructive processes analogous to those which take place during infancy on the sensorimotor level; namely, the transition from an initial state in which everything is centered on the child’s own body and actions to a “decentered” state in which his body and actions assume their objective relationships with reference to all the other objects and events registered in the universe.
• Third, as soon as language and the semiotic function permit not only evocation but also communication with other people (verbal or gestural language, symbolic play involving more than one participant, reciprocal imitation, etc.)

Actually, the existence of this delay proves that there are three levels between action and thought rather than two as some authorities’ believed.

First there is a sensorimotor level of direct action upon reality. After seven or eight there is the level of the operations, which concern transformations of reality by means of internalized actions that are grouped into coherent, reversible systems (joining and separating, etc.). Between these two, that is, between the ages of two or three and six or seven, there is another level, which is not merely transitional. Although it obviously represents an advance over direct action, in that actions are internalized by means of the semiotic function, it is also characterized by new and serious obstacles. What are these obstacles?

First we must consider the fact that a successful adaptive action is not automatically accompanied by an accurate mental representation of the situation or of the action performed. From one and a half to two, the child is in possession of a practical group of displacements which enables him to find his way about his room or his garden. He can both make detours and return to his starting point. Children of four and five often go by themselves from home to school and back every day even though the walk may be ten minutes or so in length.

Yet if you ask them to represent their path by means of little three-dimensional cardboard objects (houses, church, streets, river, squares, etc.) or to indicate the plan of the school as it is seen from the main entrance or from the side facing the river, they are unable to reconstruct the topographical relationship, even though they constantly utilize them in action. Young children’s memories are in some sense motor-memories and cannot necessarily be represented in a simultaneous unified reconstruction. The first obstacle to operations, then, is the problem of mentally representing what has already been absorbed on the level of action.

Second, achieving this systematic mental representation involves constructive processes analogous to those which take place during infancy on the sensorimotor level; namely, the transition from an initial state in which everything is centered on the child’s own body and actions to a “decentered” state in which his body and actions assume their objective relationships with reference to all the other objects and events registered in the universe.

This decentering, laborious enough on the level of action (where it takes at least eighteen months), is even more difficult on the level of representation, because the preschool child is involved in a much larger and more complex universe than the infant.`-‘

Third, as soon as language and the semiotic function permit not only evocation but also communication with other people (verbal or gestural language, symbolic play involving more than one participant, reciprocal imitation, etc.), the universe to be represented is no longer formed exclusively of objects (or of persons as objects), as at the sensorimotor level, but contains also subjects who have their own views of the situation that must be reconciled with those of the child, with all that this situation involves in terms of separate and multiple perspectives to be differentiated and coordinated. In other words, the decentering which is a prerequisite for the formation of the operations applies not only to a physical universe (and the physical universe is already substantially more complex than the sensorimotor universe) but also necessarily to an interpersonal or social universe.

Unlike most actions, the operations always involve a possibility of exchange, of interpersonal as well as personal coordination, and this cooperative aspect constitutes an indispensable condition for the objectivity, internal coherence (that is, their “equilibrium”), and universality of these operatory structures.

The decentering of cognitive constructions necessary for the development of the operations is inseparable from the decentering of affective and social constructions. But the term “social” must not be thought of in the narrow sense of educational, cultural, or moral transmission alone; rather, it covers an interpersonal process of socialization which is at once cognitive, affective, and moral.

This process may be traced in broad outline-but we must not forget that the optimal conditions are in fact unattainable and that this evolution is subject to considerable fluctuation, teaching both its cognitive and its affective aspects.

The operations, such as the union of two classes (fathers united with mothers constitute parents) or the addition of two numbers, are actions characterized by their very great generality since the acts of uniting, arranging in order, etc., enter into all coordinations of particular actions. They are also reversible (the opposite of uniting is separating, the opposite of addition is subtraction, etc.) .

Furthermore, they are never isolated but are always capable of being coordinated into overall systems (for instance, a classification, the sequence of numbers, etc.).

Finally they are not peculiar to a given individual; they are common to all individuals on the same mental level. And they enter into both the individual’s private reasoning and his cognitive exchanges, for cognitive exchanges also bring together information and place it in relation to other information, introduce reciprocities, etc. In short, all this involves operations comparable to those which each individual uses for himself.