Levels of Availability of a Formal Operational Strategy.

STONE, C. ADDISON, and DAY, MARY CAROL. Levels of Availability of a Formal Operational Strategy. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 1054-1065. A modified version of Inhelder's and Piaget's bending-rods task was used to isolate subjects with three different levels of access to the formal operational control-of-variables strategy. By administering the task twice in succession with minimal intervention between the two administrations, 28 subjects at each of ages 9, 11, and 13 years were categorized as spontaneous, latent, or nonusers of the strategy according to whether they used the strategy on the first, second, or neither administration, respectively. Through the use of additional rods measures and other related tasks, an attempt was made to characterize subjects at each level of strategy availability in terms of lower-level processes. The results supported the hypothesis that there is a large number of latent strategy users who would have been misclassified as nonformal operational by traditional procedures. In addition, an analysis of the secondary tasks indicated several important distinctions between non-strategy users and latent or spontaneous users in terms of both task-specific behaviors and theoretically related abilities. No differences in performance on the secondary tasks were found between the latent and spontaneous subjects. The results are used to argue for the potential utility of the notion of levels of availability in clarifying the nature of individual and developmental differences in the use of formal operational strategies.