ABSTRACT
This chapter will cover the areas of classification, causality and children's physics. Once again Piaget and his collaborators were among the first to investigate these areas. The main results of more recent work have been to alter some Piagetian conclusions about the descriptions he offered of children's thinking and to throw considerable doubt on his views about learning. Both these issues have been dealt with in a general fashion in the Introduction and the conclusions outlined there can be read off fairly directly to deal with science teaching. More specifically, recent work has indicated that Piaget's ideas about classification in the preschool child tended to underplay the very young child's abilities. However, when we reach the school-age child, Piagetian descriptive conclusions are still valid for most practical purposes. Piaget also tended to underestimate the causal reasoning abilities of children up to 7 or 8 years of age.
