Jean Piaget

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These lectures became The Psychology of Intelligence. Also during this period, he received a number of honorary degrees. And, in and , he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology. In , he became a professor at the Sorbonne. In , he created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology, of which he served as director the rest of his life.

And, in , he created the School of Sciences at the University of Geneva. He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more years.

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By the end of his career, he had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16, , one of the most significant psychologists of the twentieth century. Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist!

But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams. As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking. Finding relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label. He called it genetic epistemology , meaning the study of the development of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills. These skills he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. This Piaget called assimilation , specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema. When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and thrust. This of course works poorly with the new object. So the schema will adapt to the new object: This is called accommodation , specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about.

He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain. Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it. According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good or at least good-enough model of the universe. This ideal state he calls equilibrium. As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing.

And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology. The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage. It lasts from birth to about two years old. As the name implies, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills.

Between one and four months, the child works on primary circular reactions -- just an action of his own which serves as a stimulus to which it responds with the same action, and around and around we go. For example, the baby may suck her thumb. That feels good, so she sucks some more Or she may blow a bubble. Between four and 12 months, the infant turns to secondary circular reactions , which involve an act that extends out to the environment: She may squeeze a rubber duckie. At this point, other things begin to show up as well. And they begin to develop object permanence.

Older infants remember, and may even try to find things they can no longer see. Between 12 months and 24 months, the child works on tertiary circular reactions. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as "birds", "fish", and so on.

This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird — for example, that it will lay eggs. At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the "rules" that govern in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child's growing awareness of notions such as "right", "valid", "necessary", "proper", and so on.

In other words, it is through the process of objectification , reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also justified. One of Piaget's most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old.

He began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of sweets, one with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of sweets in a line placed more closely together. He found that, "Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly" Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children , p.

Initially younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child could not conserve quantity , then a younger child presumably could not either. The results show however that children that are younger than three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this quality, and do not recover it until four and a half years old.

Assimilation and Accommodation

This attribute may be lost due to a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies, which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four-year-old to reverse situations. By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than acknowledged.

This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count the sweets to decide which has more.

Finally the study found that overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of humans' native inheritance. According to Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology attempts to "explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based". Piaget believed he could test epistemological questions by studying the development of thought and action in children. As a result, Piaget created a field known as genetic epistemology with its own methods and problems.

He defined this field as the study of child development as a means of answering epistemological questions. A Schema is a structured cluster of concepts, it can be used to represent objects, scenarios or sequences of events or relations. The original idea was proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant as innate structures used to help us perceive the world. According to Piaget, these children are operating based on a simple cognitive schema that things that move are alive. At any age, children rely on their current cognitive structures to understand the world around them.

Moreover, younger and older children may often interpret and respond to the same objects and events in very different ways because cognitive structures take different forms at different ages. Piaget described three kinds of intellectual structures: As a result, the early concepts of young children tend to be more global or general in nature. Similarly, Gallagher and Reid maintained that adults view children's concepts as highly generalized and even inaccurate.

With added experience, interactions, and maturity, these concepts become refined and more detailed. Overall, making sense of the world from a child's perspective is a very complex and time-consuming process.

Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

These schemata are constantly being revised and elaborated upon each time the child encounters new experiences. In doing this children create their own unique understanding of the world, interpret their own experiences and knowledge, and subsequently use this knowledge to solve more complex problems.

At the time, there was much talk and research about RNA as such an agent of learning, and Piaget considered some of the evidence. However, he did not offer any firm conclusions, and confessed that this was beyond his area of expertise. Piaget wanted to revolutionize the way research was conducted. Although he started researching with his colleagues using a traditional method of data collection, he was not fully satisfied with the results and wanted to keep trying to find new ways of researching using a combination of data, which included naturalistic observation , psychometrics , and the psychiatric clinical examination, in order to have a less guided form of research that would produce more empirically valid results.

As Piaget developed new research methods, he wrote a book called The Language and Thought of the Child , which aimed to synthesize the methods he was using in order to study the conclusion children drew from situations and how they arrived to such conclusion. The main idea was to observe how children responded and articulated certain situations with their own reasoning, in order to examine their thought processes Mayer, Piaget administered a test in 15 boys with ages ranging from 10 to 14 years in which he asked participants to describe the relationship between a mixed bouquet of flowers and a bouquet with flowers of the same color.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the thinking process the boys had and to draw conclusions about the logic processes they had used, which was a psychometric technique of research. Piaget also used the psychoanalytic method initially developed by Sigmund Freud. The purpose of using such method was to examine the unconscious mind, as well as to continue parallel studies using different research methods.

Psychoanalysis was later rejected by Piaget, as he thought it was insufficiently empirical Mayer, Piaget argued that children and adults used speech for different purposes. In order to confirm his argument, he experimented analyzing a child's interpretation of a story. The purpose of this study was to examine how children verbalize and understand each other without adult intervention. Piaget wanted to examine the limits of naturalistic observation, in order to understand a child's reasoning. He realized the difficulty of studying children's thoughts, as it is hard to know if a child is pretending to believe their thoughts or not.

Piaget was the pioneer researcher to examine children's conversations in a social context — starting from examining their speech and actions — where children were comfortable and spontaneous Kose, After conducting many studies, Piaget was able to find significant differences in the way adults and children reason; however, he was still unable to find the path of logic reasoning and the unspoken thoughts children had, which could allow him to study a child's intellectual development over time Mayer, In his third book, The Child's Conception of the World , Piaget recognized the difficulties of his prior techniques and the importance of psychiatric clinical examination.

The researcher believed that the way clinical examinations were conducted influenced how a child's inner realities surfaced. Children would likely respond according to the way the research is conducted, the questions asked, or the familiarity they have with the environment. The clinical examination conducted for his third book provides a thorough investigation into a child's thinking process.

An example of a question used to research such process was: Piaget recognized that psychometric tests had its limitations, as children were not able to provide the researcher with their deepest thoughts and inner intellect. It was also difficult to know if the results of child examination reflected what children believed or if it is just a pretend situation. For example, it is very difficult to know with certainty if a child who has a conversation with a toy believes the toy is alive or if the child is just pretending.

Soon after drawing conclusions about psychometric studies, Piaget started developing the clinical method of examination. The clinical method included questioning a child and carefully examining their responses — in order to observe how the child reasoned according to the questions asked — and then examining the child's perception of the world through their responses. Piaget recognized the difficulties of interviewing a child and the importance of recognizing the difference between "liberated" versus "spontaneous" responses Mayer, , p.

As Piaget believed development was a universal process, his initial sample sizes were inadequate, particularly in the formulation of his theory of infant development. While this clearly presents problems with the sample size, Piaget also probably introduced confounding variables and social desirability into his observations and his conclusions based on his observations. It is entirely possible Piaget conditioned his children to respond in a desirable manner, so, rather than having an understanding of object permanence, his children might have learned to behave in a manner that indicated they understood object permanence.

The sample was also very homogenous, as all three children had a similar genetic heritage and environment. Piaget did, however, have larger sample sizes during his later years.

Piaget wanted to research in environments that would allow children to connect with some existing aspects of the world. The idea was to change the approach described in his book The Child's Conception of the World and move away from the vague questioning interviews. This new approach was described in his book The Child's Conception of Physical Causality , where children were presented with dilemmas and had to think of possible solutions on their own.

Later, after carefully analyzing previous methods, Piaget developed a combination of naturalistic observation with clinical interviewing in his book Judgment and Reasoning in the Child , where a child's intellect was tested with questions and close monitoring.

Piaget was convinced he had found a way to analyze and access a child's thoughts about the world in a very effective way Mayer, Piaget's research provided a combination of theoretical and practical research methods and it has offered a crucial contribution to the field of developmental psychology Beilin, He observes a child's surroundings and behavior. He then comes up with a hypothesis testing it and focusing on both the surroundings and behavior after changing a little of the surrounding. Despite his ceasing to be a fashionable psychologist , the magnitude of Piaget's continuing influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society , which holds annual conferences and attracts around participants.

Piaget is the most influential developmental psychologist to date, [55] influencing not only the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg but whole generations of eminent academics. By using Piaget's theory, educators focus on their students as learners. As a result of this focus, education is learner-center and constructivist-based to an extent.

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Piaget's theory allows teachers to view students as individual learners who add new concepts to prior knowledge to construct, or build, understanding for themselves. There are two differences between the preoperational and concrete operational stages that apply to education. These differences are reversibility and decentration. At times, reversibility and decentration occur at the same time. An example of a student using reversibility is when learning new vocabulary. The student creates a list of unfamiliar words from a literary text. Then, he researches the definition of those words before asking classmate to test him.

His teacher has given a set of particular instructions that he must follow in a particular order: The teacher refers him back to his text in order to notate the next word before he can define it. However, a child in the concrete operational stage understands the organization, and he can recall the steps in any order while being able to follow the order given.

Jean Piaget And Child Development

A sample of decentration is a preschooler may use a toy banana as a pretend telephone. The child knows the difference between the fruit and a phone. However, in this form of play, he is operating on two levels at once. The student simultaneously does both. Regarding the giving of praise by teachers, praise is a reinforcer for students. Adolescents undergo social-emotional development such that they seek rapport with peers. Thus, teacher praise is not as powerful for students who see teachers as authority figures.

They give no value to praise provided by adults, or they have no respect for the individual who is giving praise. In Conversations with Jean Piaget , he says: You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists" Bringuier, , p. His theory of cognitive development can be used as a tool in the early childhood classroom. According to Piaget, children developed best in a classroom with interaction. Piaget defined knowledge as the ability to modify, transform, and "operate on" an object or idea, such that it is understood by the operator through the process of transformation.

Thus, knowledge must be assimilated in an active process by a learner with matured mental capacity, so that knowledge can build in complexity by scaffolded understanding. Understanding is scaffolded by the learner through the process of equilibration, whereby the learner balances new knowledge with previous understanding, thereby compensating for "transformation" of knowledge. Learning, then, can also be supported by instructors in an educational setting. Piaget specified that knowledge cannot truly be formed until the learner has matured the mental structures to which that learning is specific, and thereby development constrains learning.

Nevertheless, knowledge can also be "built" by building on simpler operations and structures that have already been formed. Basing operations of an advanced structure on those of simpler structures thus scaffolds learning to build on operational abilities as they develop. Good teaching, then, is built around the operational abilities of the students such that they can excel in their operational stage and build on preexisting structures and abilities and thereby "build" learning.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Evidence of the effectiveness of a contemporary curricular design building on Piaget's theories of developmental progression and the support of maturing mental structures can be seen in Griffin and Case's "Number Worlds" curriculum. By outlining the developmental sequence of number sense, a conceptual structure is built and aligned to individual children as they develop. Piaget believed in two basic principles relating to moral education: According to Piaget, "the child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary" Gallagher, , p.

Piaget believed that children made moral judgments based on their own observations of the world. Piaget's theory of morality was radical when his book The Moral Judgment of the Child was published in for two reasons: Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of peer interaction and that it was autonomous from authority mandates. Peers, not parents, were a key source of moral concepts such as equality, reciprocity, and justice.

Piaget attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationships , introducing a fundamental distinction between different types of said relationships. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the other the relationship is asymmetrical , and, importantly, the knowledge that can be acquired by the dominated participant takes on a fixed and inflexible form.

Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, illustrating it through reference to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group. Similarly, where adults exercise a dominating influence over the growing child, it is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge.

By contrast, in cooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions, authentic forms of intellectual exchange become possible; each partner has the freedom to project his or her own thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend his or her own point of view. In such circumstances, where children's thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, Piaget believed "the reconstruction of knowledge", or favorable conditions for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, exists. Here the knowledge that emerges is open, flexible and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external authority.

This is thus how, according to Piaget, children learn moral judgement as opposed to cultural norms or maybe ideological norms. Historical changes of thought have been modeled in Piagetian terms. Broadly speaking these models have mapped changes in morality, intellectual life and cognitive levels against historical changes typically in the complexity of social systems.

Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various animals. For example, spiders attain the circular sensory motor stage, coordinating actions and perceptions. Thus began his experimental research into children's thinking. At this point Piaget formed his plan: They had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent, whose development he studied from infancy. Over the next six decades he succeeded in accomplishing his plan. Piaget's research was focused on the goal of discovering how knowledge develops.

He viewed children as little philosophers and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge based on logical structures that develop over time and through experience. Thus, children of different ages view the world in entirely different ways from adults. Piaget is best known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages—the levels of development corresponding to infancy, early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence.

These four stages are called the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age two children experience through their senses , the Preoperational stage, which occurs from ages two to seven motor skills are acquired , the Concrete Operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven children think logically about concrete events , and the Formal Operational stage, which occurs after age eleven abstract reasoning is developed here. Advancement through these levels occurs through the interaction of biological factors and experience; through a mechanism he called "equilibration. During his long academic career, which spanned over seven decades, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.

In , he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, an annual award given by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science. His theory of cognitive development has proved influential throughout developmental psychology , notably on the work of Lev Vygotsky , Jerome Bruner, Lawrence Kohlberg , and James Fowler. His influence spread from psychology to philosophy and beyond.

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understanding the transition between modes of thought that characterized his theory of paradigm shifts. Piaget had a considerable impact in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language and his theories influenced the creation of graphical user interfaces. Piaget has also had a substantial impact on approaches to education. His discovery of stages in children's thinking changed our view of education from simply imparting knowledge to guiding children in age-appropriate ways as they learn about their world.

In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: But for me, education means making creators…. You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists" Bringuier, p. Critics of Piaget's work have noted that the final stage of intellectual development, that of Formal Operations, although beginning around the age of 11, involves abstract inferential thought that is beyond the comprehension of many adults.

Piaget agreed that people may not reach the level of formal operations in all aspects of their thinking, while maintaining that they do so in their particular area of expertise Evans, p. This final stage of cognitive development is devoid of the emotional and spiritual content that is found in people's thinking.

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