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Jean Piaget

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Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development.
Piaget, by André Koehne
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Piaget, by André Koehne

Contents

Early life

Piaget was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. He was a precocious child and developed an interest in biology and the natural world, particularly molluscs, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. His long career of scientific research began in 1907 at the age of eleven with the publication of a short paper on the albino sparrow. Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.

Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel and studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in psychoanalysis, a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period.

He then moved from Switzerland to Grange-aux-Belles, France, where he taught at the school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same sort of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to come to believe that young children's thinking, or cognitive processes, is different from that of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy.

The stages of cognitive development

Piaget served as professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975 and is best known for reorganizing cognitive development theory into a series of stages, expanding on earlier work from James Mark Baldwin: four levels of development corresponding roughly to (1) infancy, (2) pre-school, (3) childhood, and (4) adolescence. Each stage is characterized by a general cognitive structure that affects all of the child's thinking (a structuralist view influenced by philosopher Immanuel Kant). Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is thus caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganising.

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as

  1. Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses)
  2. Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7(acquisition of motor skills)
  3. Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
  4. Formal Operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).
These chronological periods are approximate, and in light of the fact that studies have demonstrated great variation between children, cannot be seen as rigid norms. Furthermore, these stages occur at different ages, depending upon the domain of knowledge under consideration. The ages normally given for the stages, then, reflect when each stage tends to predominate, even though one might elicit examples of two, three, or even all four stages of thinking at the same time from one individual, depending upon the domain of knowledge and the means used to elicit it.

Despite this, though, the principle holds that within a domain of knowledge, the stages usually occur in the same chronological order. Thus, there is a somewhat subtler reality behind the normal characterization of the stages as described above.

The reason for the invariability of sequence derives from the idea that knowledge is not simply aquired from outside the individual, but it is constructed from within. This idea has been extremely influential in pedagogy, and is usually termed constructivism. (See "Constructivism (learning theory)") Once knowledge is constructed internally, it is then tested against reality the same way a scientist tests the validity of hypotheses. Like a scientist, the individual learner may discard, modify, or reconstruct knowledge based on its utility in the real world. Much of this construction (and later reconstruction) is in fact done subconsciously.

Therefore, Piaget's four stages actually reflect four types of thought structures. The chronological sequence is inevitable, then, because one structure may be necessary in order to construct the next level, which is simpler, more generalizable, and more powerful. It's a little like saying that you need to form metal into parts in order to build machines, and then coordinate machines in order to build a factory.

Piaget's view of the child's mind

Piaget viewed children as little philosophers, which he called tiny thought-sacks and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge. Some people have used his ideas to focus on what children cannot do. Piaget, however, used their problem areas to help understand their cognitive growth and development.

Influence

Piaget's theory of cognitive development has proved influential, notably on the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg. Among others, the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated it into his work, most notably in The Theory of Communicative Action. Piaget also 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. Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. These discussions led to the development of the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the graphical user interface (GUI), and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980's and beyond. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understand the transition between modes of thought which characterised his theory of paradigm shifts. Piaget has had a substantial impact on approaches to education. In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists," (Bringuier, 1980, p.132).

Major works and achievements

Major works

Appointments

References

External links

 

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