What Were the Major Works of Jean Piaget
Piaget, Jean
1896–1980
SWISS GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGIST, PSYCHOLOGIST
UNIVERSITE DE NEUCHATEL, B.A., 1915, Ph.D., 1918; POSTDOCTORAL STUDY AT UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH, UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, AND THE SORBONNE
BRIEF OVERVIEW
The Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) developed his theory of genetic epistemology throughout a nearly 60-year career as a professor and experimental researcher. He first began his scientific investigations as a young biologist immersed in the study of mollusks. Before he was 30 years of age, he was world renowned for his explorations of the cognitive development of children. Piaget is credited with foundational contributions to the emerging disciplines of child psychology, educational psychology, and cognitive development theory. Piaget's empirical studies of infants, children, and adolescents provided insight into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. He took children's thinking seriously and respected them as the architects of their own intellectual development.
Jean Piaget was the only son of Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval studies at the University of Neuchatel, and Rebecca Jackson. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Switzerland in the region near Lake Neuchatel. He was trained as a zoologist, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Neuchatel in 1918. His early fascination with and competence in the biological sciences, particularly the study of mollusks, continued throughout his lifetime. Piaget moved to Paris in 1919 for postdoctoral studies.
The turning point in his academic life came through his work with French school children, in which he administered and standardized British intelligence tests as a research associate at the Simon-Binet experimental psychology laboratory. During the course of his work with intelligence testing, Piaget decided that the important issue to explore was not whether children gave the right answers to the IQ test, but rather, how they gave the wrong answers and what the patterns of the children's responses revealed about their developing capacities for reasoning.
In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland, where he made his home until his death. He was appointed Research Director of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva in 1921 and that same year published his first article on the psychology of intelligence. Piaget was known as le patron (the boss) by his graduate students and research associates. His early work studying the reasoning of elementary school children became the basis of his first five books on child psychology and marked the beginning of his international fame as a revolutionary thinker in the area of childhood cognitive development.
Piaget used the term genetic epistemology to define his disciplined investigation into how knowledge develops within the human being and the means by which the developing mind moves through distinct stages toward maturation. At the heart of Piaget's biological theories of development is his emphasis on the human being's ability to adapt to the world through the dual processes of assimilation and accommodation, modifying one's mental schemes to allow room for new information.
Piaget's child-centered research and respectful observations of infants and children led him to the discovery that children think in qualitatively different ways than adults as they progress through four distinct and universal stages of development.
- Sensorimotor stage (birth to about two years): Infants rely on their senses to understand the world around them.
- Preoperational stage (about two to seven years): Pre-school children develop an increased capacity for symbolic thinking and the use of language and images.
- Concrete-operational stage (about seven to 11 years): Children think logically and begin to see the world from others' perspective.
- Formal operational stage (age 11 to adult): Hypothetical and abstract reasoning with systematic problem solving and abstract thinking.
Piaget's consuming interest was in the discovery of the universal mechanisms that underlie how knowledge is acquired. He understood this as a process governed by genetic factors and environmental experiences, with the environment playing an increasingly more important role as the individual matures. Piaget respected the developing child as an active agent in the construction of knowledge through trial and error experimentation. Even the fundamental ideas of space, time, relation and causality, he observed, are subject to this process. The child's earliest years, he believed, laid the foundation for the rational and moral adult personality, with increasingly complex intellectual processes building on the successful passage through earlier, more primitive stages of development. Piaget did not consider the fourth stage of formal operations as a final one. He believed there was no fixed limit to the possibilities of human development.
Throughout a brilliant research career that spanned more than 60 years, Piaget refined his structural and holistic methodology for observing, describing, and evaluating the stages of human cognitive development from the point of view of the child. His pioneering research and prolific publications on the nature of thought and the development of intelligence assured Piaget's place as a major influence in the scientific thinking of the twentieth century. The ingenuity of his approach to the study of children's ways of thinking continues to inform and influence the fields of epistemology, education, and developmental and child psychology.
Piaget continually changed his thinking as new possibilities occurred to him. His impressive list of publications include over 60 books, professional papers, book chapters, and articles in scientific journals. He received over 30 honorary degrees and awards from universities throughout the world. In 1955 Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology and served as its director for the remainder of his life. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 16, 1980. His genuine respect for and appreciation of the mind of the child and his prodigious research accomplishments continue to inspire and challenge scholars and researchers worldwide.
BIOGRAPHY
Child prodigy
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, August 9, 1896, the first of three children of Arthur Piaget and Rebecca Jackson. The Piaget family lived in a quiet French-speaking region near Lake Neuchatel, in the cradle of the Swiss Alps in an area of Switzerland noted for its vineyards and watch making.
Jean was a child prodigy. His father, a professor of medieval literature at Neuchatel University, nurtured his son's innovative and inquisitive mind and encouraged young Jean in the systematic pursuit of answers to his many queries about the natural world.
Jean's mother was a strict Calvinist, adhering to a system of biblical interpretation focused on the supreme sovereignty of God and the fallen nature of humans. She was politically active and concerned with the social causes of the day. By some accounts Rebecca Piaget was a troubled woman, seriously challenged with mental illness. She encouraged her son to attend religious instruction, but young Piaget soon lost interest in what he considered "childish" religious arguments. Piaget began his study of various philosophies in an effort to find his way through the inconsistencies he perceived between the religious instruction he received at church and his own observations of the natural world. At the suggestion of his godfather, the Swiss scholar Samuel Cornut, Piaget began his study of philosophy. He was especially touched by the French writer Henri Bergson's 1907 book, Creative Evolution. Piaget said the book "stirred him almost to ecstasy."
He told interviewer Elizabeth Hall much later in his professional life:
Suddenly the problem of knowledge appeared to me in a new light. I became convinced, very quickly, that most of the problems in philosophy were problems of knowledge, and that most problems of knowledge were problems of biology. You see, the problem of knowledge is the problem of the relation between the subject and the object, how the subject knows the object. If you translate this into biological terms, it is a problem of the organism's adapting to its environment. I decided to consecrate my life to this biological explanation of knowledge.
Jean grew into a serious young man, disciplined and determined in his pursuit of knowledge. He chafed within the strictures and routines of his early schooling and became bored and restless in the classroom. His early interest in the scientific study of nature led him to membership in a local biology club while a student at Neuchatel Latin high school. When he was only a boy of 10, Jean published a paper in the club's Journal of Natural History of Neuchatel describing his observations of an albino sparrow. Jean took his work quite seriously. He sought and gained access to the university library where he could explore more books and journals to further his studies.
In later years, Piaget described his youthful home life as being not particularly happy. As a young student he spent most of his time away from the difficulties at home, immersing himself in study and seeking to solve the mysteries of nature. He was intrigued with the study of fossils, bird life, and even with the invention of a steam engine car. He read constantly in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and natural sciences, a habit he sustained throughout his life.
During high school, Jean's remarkable scholastic accomplishments continued to bring him to the notice of his teachers and others in the field of natural sciences. He became a leader in the Friends of Nature Club, sponsored by professors at the University of Neuchatel, and he prepared and read papers on natural science at the club meetings. He became an assistant to Paul Godet, the director of the Neuchatel Museum of Natural History. He worked there for four years as an apprentice, helping to classify the museum's considerable collection of mollusks. As compensation Piaget received numerous rare mollusk specimens to add to his personal collection. He began to publish a series of scientific papers on the mollusks, particularly the Limnaea species, a Swiss lake snail.
When he was 16, Piaget's scholarly work drew the attention of the board of directors of the Museum of Natural History in Geneva. He was offered the prestigious post of curator of a mollusk exhibit at the museum. The admirers of his scholarship were unaware that Jean was still a high school student when they honored his work with an offer of employment. By the time of his high school graduation, Jean Piaget had become a well-known malacologist throughout Europe with 20 scientific papers published in professional journals. Such early success with his study of clams and snails gave young Piaget a firm basis for the continued development of his scientific approach to the study of nature. He sustained his interest in mollusks throughout his life.
In 1918, at the age of 21, Jean Piaget graduated with a doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Neuchatel. That same year he published his first book, Recherche, meaning "the search" or "searching," an autobiographical novel dealing with the conflict between science and religion. In this book Piaget first explored the idea of equilibrium, a concept that he understood as an ideal balance between parts and the whole, both within an individual and within society.
Piaget published his doctoral thesis on the classification of mollusks. During the intense periods of academic exploration and focus throughout his university years, Piaget's physical health suffered. He was forced to take a year off from his studies and retreated to the mountains to recuperate. This rest period in the Swiss Alps became a yearly habit throughout his life, providing him with critical time for reflection and rest. Piaget valued his relationship with the natural world as a necessary ingredient in a balanced life.
PRINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS
- Le Langue et la pensee chez l'enfant. Paris: Delachaux and Niestle, 1923. Published in English as The Language and Thought of the Child. Trans. by Marjorie Worden. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926, 3rd revised edition, Humanities 1959, reprinted, 1971.
- Le Jugement et le raisonnement chez l'enfant. Paris: Delachaux & Niestle, 1924, 5th edition, 1963. Published in English as The Judgement and Reasoning in the Child. Trans. by Marjorie Worden. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928, published as The Judgment and Reason in the Child. 1929, reprinted, Littlefield, 1976.
- Le Representation du monde chez l'enfant. Paris: Delachaux and Niestle, 1926. Published in English as The Child's Conception of the World. Trans. by Jean Tomlinson and Andrew Tomlinson. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929, reprinted, Littlefield, 1976.
- La Causalite physique chez l'enfant. Paris: Delachaux & Niestle, 1927. Published in English as The Child's Conception of Physical Causality Trans. by Marjorie Worden Gabain. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.
- La Naissance de l'intelligence chez l'enfant. Paris: Delachaux and Niestle, 1936, 5th edition, 1966. Published in English as The Origins of Intelligence in Children. Trans. by Margaret Cook. New York: International Universities Press, 1952. Published in English as The Origin of Intelligence in the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, Norton, 1963.
- La Formation du symbole chez l'enfant: Imitation jeu et reve, image et rpresentation. Paris: Delachaux and Niestle, 1945, 2nd edition, 1959. Published in English as Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. Trans. by Gattegno and Hodgson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1951, reprinted, Peter Smith, 1988.
- With Barbel Inhelder. La Psychologie de l'enfant Presses universitaires de France, 1966, 6th edition, 1975. Published in English as The Psychology of the Child. Trans. by Helen Weaver. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
- L'Epistemologie genetique. Presses universitaires de France, 1970. Published in English as The Principles of Genetic Epistemology. Trans. by Wolfe Mays. New York: Basic Books, 1972.
- L'Equilibration des structures cognitives: probleme central du developpement. Presses universitaires de France, 1975. Published in English as The Development of Thought: Equilibration of Cognitive Structures. Trans by Arnold Rosin. New York: Viking, 1977.
Early career
Piaget enrolled for a semester of postdoctoral study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. While in Zurich he also worked in Eugen Bleuler's psychiatric clinic. His curiosity about psychological issues, due in part to his mother's poor mental health, led him to the study of the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and the analytical psychology of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. Piaget attended many of Jung's lectures, and he was particularly interested in Jung's emphasis on the human psyche's drive toward balance and wholeness, and on the individual's significance as the agent of his or her own maturation and individuation. During these years Piaget was reading psychology only in French and was not exposed to the contemporary writings of Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler, the Gestalt psychologists. He later told an interviewer that had he come across the Gestalt writings when he was 18 he might himself have become a Gestalt psychologist.
In 1919 Piaget moved to Paris, where he studied logic and abnormal psychology and lectured in psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He found work as a research associate in the Simon-Binet experimental psychology laboratory. There Piaget worked with Theophile Simon in administering intelligence tests to French children at the École de la rue de la Grange-aux Belles a school for boys. Piaget's task was to standardize the French version of British psychologist Cyril Burt's intelligence test, noting what kind of errors children made as they answered a series of questions. Though he was not particularly challenged by the work of test administration and never completed the task of standardizing the test, in the process of his work he began to realize the qualitative differences in how children and adults think.
Piaget's work with these young children (ages five to eight years), was a turning point in his career, leading to his lifelong study of the origins, nature, and development of intelligence. Piaget believed this research into how children think was an essential source of information about the nature of knowledge itself. He was intrigued with the answers the children gave, even if those answers were considered wrong by the standards of the intelligence test he administered. It was the patterns of their responses that caught his attention. Children of the same age, he found, invariably came up with the same wrong answer to the test questions. Piaget began to explore the thinking processes of the children, making use of a technique of clinical interviewing he had learned during his work at Eugen Bleuler's psychiatric clinic in Paris. He was fascinated with the processes of children's reasoning and the unique psychological mechanisms at work as they construct, apply, and adapt their own theories of the world in a trial and error process leading to the acquisition of practical intelligence.
Piaget came to believe that children of all ages are interactive agents in their personal intellectual development. His experience with testing these French children led him to develop his own experimental working philosophy of how knowledge grows, which later evolved into his systematic theories of cognitive development known as genetic epistemology.
In 1921 Piaget published a paper in the Archives de Psychologie. In the paper, he claimed that logic is not an innate characteristic but is developed over time through interactive processes of self-regulation. Piaget believed that this adaptive process is common to all living things. He discounted the prevailing doctrines of innate ideas and environmental determinism. His published work drew the attention of other researchers and scholars, and at the age of 25, Jean Piaget was offered the position of research psychologist at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva (now Institut des Sciences de l'Education at the University of Geneva). The Institute was highly regarded for its programs of educational research. There Piaget studied children's language and reasoning processes, and began writing in earnest. He later became co-director of the Institute and produced five more books during his five-year tenure there.
Marriage and family life
Piaget married psychologist Valentine Chatenay in 1923. Piaget's young wife had been one of his first graduate students at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva where Piaget worked. She soon became his research associate in the observation and detailed study and analysis of the behavior of their three children: Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent. The young couple documented the intellectual development of their children from infancy throughout their childhood years. They listened to their children, watched them at play, and played with them, respecting how their cognitive processes differed from an adult's. They attempted to describe and evaluate the point of view of their developing children and to gain insight into how knowledge is acquired. They recorded the children's words and actions, without criticism, as they observed the unique thought processes and underlying logic that the children revealed.
The painstaking observation of Piaget's own three children prior to their acquisition of language led to his development of the theories of sensorimotor intelligence and publication of three books detailing his observations. Piaget respected children as active agents in their personal intellectual development. His early publications provided a coherent account of human development in the first year of life.
In photographs taken throughout his adult life, Piaget is often shown wearing his characteristic beret, with an engaging smile and horn-rimmed glasses framing his twinkling eyes. He was a tall man who always seemed to have a pipe in hand. In later years, his snow-white hair added to his distinctive appearance. Piaget was a somewhat eccentric and tireless worker fully absorbed in his academic pursuits. He was kind and possessed of enormous charisma, but by some accounts was remote and obsessed with his work.
"Fundamentally I am a worrier whom only work can relieve," Piaget said. He was an early riser, customarily beginning his day at 4 AM. His desk was said to be piled high with stacks of books and papers organized in a way only he could decipher. He spent four hours each day composing new material writing with pen and paper. In addition, he supervised the work of graduate students, taught classes, attended meetings, continued with his empirical research, and fulfilled the multiple obligations of his employment at the university. Even his leisure time was spent in productive ways. He combined exercise with transportation and often rode his bicycle to work. In the afternoons he took long walks as he puzzled out the complex theories that consumed his intellectual life. But Piaget the naturalist was never completely consumed with his intellectual pursuits.
It is true I am sociable and like to teach or to take part in meetings of all kinds, but I feel a compelling need for solitude and contact with nature. . . .As soon as vacation time comes, I withdraw to the mountains in the wild regions of the Valais and write for weeks on end. . . .It is this dissociation between myself as a social being and as a "man of nature" which has enabled me to surmount a permanent fund of anxiety and transform it into a need for working.
Return to Switzerland and international acclaim
Piaget returned to his home in Switzerland in 1925 to work at his alma mater, Neuchatel University, where he was to occupy academic chairs as professor of psychology, sociology, and the history of sciences during a five-year tenure. In 1928, Piaget had the good chance to meet Albert Einstein who, Piaget said, "impressed me profoundly, because he took an interest in everything." Einstein recognized the genius in Piaget's insights and work. He suggested to Piaget that he should study the notions of time in children, and in particular the notions of simultaneity. Piaget, before the age of 30, had become the most well-known psychologist in the French-speaking world.
In 1929 Piaget taught the history of scientific thought at the University of Geneva. He remained there until 1939. During this time Piaget and his associates studied children from four to 12 years of age researching the development of logical thinking in childhood and adolescence, particularly with regard to concepts of speed, quantity, number, geometry, space, time, and movement. It was also during this period that Piaget began major collaborative research with other psychologists. He collaborated with Professor Barbel Inhelder, an experimental child psychologist at the University of Geneva. Together they wrote The Child's Construction of Physical Quantities. Conservation and Atomism, published in 1942, and The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, published in 1955, and began a collaborative relationship that lasted 40 years. Piaget also worked with Alina Szeminsa on several books. Piaget was influential in bringing the work of women psychologists into more prominence in the field of experimental psychology, which was dominated by male theoreticians.
During the years of World War II, Piaget's work was not easily available outside of Switzerland. His ideas, though well accepted in Europe, were not often heard in American universities, where the behaviorist theories of human development dominated. None of his books was translated into English for the nearly 20 years between 1932 and 1950. In 1942 he lectured at the College of France during the time of the Nazi occupation. These lectures were compiled into his book, The Psychology of Intelligence, published in 1963.
Piaget served for 35 years (1929–67) as director of the International Bureau of Education in Geneva, working in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and in 1932 he became director of the Institute of Educational Sciences at the University of Geneva. He continued in that capacity until 1971, when he was named Emeritus Professor at the University of Geneva, a position he held until his death in 1980.
Throughout his long career Piaget won numerous awards and gained international acclaim. He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1969. He was the first European to receive the award that honored him for his "revolutionary perspective on the nature of human knowledge and biological intelligence." In 1972 Piaget was awarded the Praemium Erasmianum (known in English as the Erasmus Prize), from The Netherlands. This prestigious award was established to "honour persons or institutions that have made an exceptionally important contribution to European culture, society or social science."
Piaget edited numerous scientific journals; received honorary degrees from over 30 universities, including Cambridge and Harvard; and held memberships in more than 20 academic societies. In 1955 he founded the International Center for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva, and in 1956 he persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to provide financial assistance for his interdisciplinary work there. He continued his active association with UNESCO as a member of its Executive Board, as director of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), and for a short time as Assistant Director-General for Education.
Jean Piaget has been called a foundational thinker. He remained intellectually active, continuing with his research and publishing, until his death in Geneva at the age of 84 on September 17, 1980. More than 3,000 people gathered at his funeral in Geneva to honor his life and work, according to obituary reports of the day. Piaget was buried with his wife, Valentine, in a gravesite marked with a cairn of simple stones. They rest together in the Cimetiere des Plainpalais, on the Rue de Rois, a cemetery reserved for Geneva's most distinguished departed.
Piaget's theories of cognitive development have had a major impact in the fields of education, sociology, and developmental and child psychology. He is a founder of the scientific discipline he called genetic epistemology, the term he used to describe his academic pursuit of the origin and nature of knowledge. His pioneering theories and the enormous respect he held for the thinking processes of children have distinguished Jean Piaget as one of the most significant psychologists of the twentieth century.
THEORIES
Genetic epistemology
Piaget developed his theory of genetic epistemology throughout 60 years of focused work as an experimental psychologist and interdisciplinary theoretician. He was concerned with the fundamental question of the nature and origin of knowledge. His own thinking on the subject was constantly changing. Sometimes in the course of writing a book, one scholar has observed, "Piaget had different ideas when it came time to write the conclusion than he had when he wrote the introduction." He wrote in French about abstract ideas using technical terminology, and this has made his books challenging to read and interpret. Fortunately there are many good translations of his works available, and scholarly writing help students navigate the complexities of Piaget's comprehensive theories of cognitive development.
Piaget was prolific. He authored, collaborated with others, or edited more than 60 books, or book chapters. He published frequently in professional journals and produced a large quantity of lecture notes and research papers. The Jean Piaget Archives Foundation in Geneva is a repository for his collected works. Piaget's writings have been translated in 24 languages, extending his influence and thinking throughout the world. Piaget's research career extended from the 1920s to the 1980s. He published his first article on the psychology of intelligence in 1921, and was still at work developing new theoretical ideas at the time of his death in 1980.
First principle: To take psychology seriously
Main points The first principle of genetic epistemology is "to take psychology seriously," Piaget said in the 1968 Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. By this he meant "when a question of psychological fact arises, psychological research should be consulted instead of trying to invent a solution through private speculation." Piaget considered his work that of an empirical scientist. The fundamental hypothesis that he investigated throughout the course of his career is what he called "the parallelism between the progress made in the logical and rational organization of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes." Piaget's empirical studies of infants, children, and adolescents were the best way he found to study the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and the nature of knowledge itself.
Piaget attempted to understand the evolution of knowledge in all human beings through the study of the individual. As a biologist, Piaget's approach follows directly from a neo-Darwinian emphasis on evolution via small, gradually accumulated changes, an idea which is now a subject of some debate within the discipline of developmental biology. Piaget sought to demonstrate the continuity between biological intelligence, manifesting in plants and lower animals, and human knowledge developing throughout the lifetime of the individual. Intelligence develops through a slow process of self regulation informed by environmental interactions that lead to internal reconstruction. This ability to adapt, he believed, is the common link between all living things, and it forms the basis of the biological theory of knowledge that he called genetic epistemology.
Piaget was interested in general mechanisms, intelligence, and cognitive functions, not in what makes one individual different from another. He believed that his theory of genetic epistemology was the legitimate psychological study of species behavior as opposed to the study of the individual as in more conventional understandings of psychology.
Robert L. Campbell, of the Department of Psychology at Clemson University, has identified four main points in Piaget's theory:
- Knowledge has a biological function, and arises out of action.
- Knowledge is basically "operative." It is about change and transformation.
- Knowledge consists of cognitive structures.
- Development proceeds by the assimilation of the environment to these structures, and the accommodation of these structures to the environment.
Piaget asserts that it is organization and adaptation, two processes he considers to be basic invariants of functioning, that provide the continuity between biology in general and intelligence in particular. Through the process of adaptation, the organism evolves and adjusts to its environment. For every adaptive act there is an underlying organized system of relationships or totalities. Any act of biological intelligence, from the exploratory movements of early infancy to the complex and abstract judgment of an adult, is always in relationship to an organized structure of the whole of which a single action is only a part.
Piaget defined intelligence as an adaptation. Mental life, he said is an accommodation to the environment. Adaptation involves the process of fitting new information into one's existing knowledge base through a dual process of assimilation and accommodation, altering the ideas (or what Piaget called schemes) one has constructed to make room for new information. Piaget asserted that learning is not passive; it is a process of dynamic discovery.
Piaget wrote about this cognitive evolution in his book The Construction of Reality in the Child.
These global transformations of the objects of perception, and of the very intelligence which makes them, gradually denote the existence of a sort of law of evolution which can be phrased as follows: assimilation and accommodation proceed from a state of chaotic undifferentiation to a state of differentiation with correlative coordination.
Schemes are the "cognitive mental maps" that are the building blocks of intelligence. Development, then, involves a predictable and sequential series of assimilation and accommodation. Knowledge develops continually, with the invention and construction of reality emerging from active participation in the world. In Piaget's view, the basis of all human knowledge is experience, activity, and practice.
Another important concept in Piaget's theory is equilibrium, a balance between a person's internal ideas and their perceptions of the outside world. It is a state in which allows all information a place in the cognitive structure. Piaget defined it "a harmony between internal organization and external experience."
According to Piaget, the dual concepts of assimilation and accommodation are "the two poles of an interaction between the organism and the environment, which is the condition for all biological and intellectual operation." An individual takes in new ideas through assimilation, then makes room among his or her schemes for the new idea through accommodation. The result is a new level of awareness or understanding that is qualitatively different from the one preceding assimilation.
Equilibration is the unification of ideas that creates cognitive growth. Equilibration can be understood as a kind of thermostat acting to restore equilibrium between the dual processes of assimilation and accommodation. It is the means whereby the individual regains balance by acting, physically or mentally, on an environmental stimulus in order to understand it within the framework of one's existing mental schemes. With equilibration the individual is returned to a state of balance, though now she has spiraled to a higher level of understanding.
For the genetic epistemologist, Piaget wrote,
knowledge results from continuous construction, since in each act of understanding, some degree of invention is involved; in development, the passage from one stage to the next is always characterized by the formation of new structures which did not exist before, either in the external world on in the subject's mind.
Piaget outlined four conditions that determine cognitive growth.
- maturation of the nervous system
- social interactions
- experiences based on interactions with the physical environment
- equilibration
Cognitive development is a dynamic adaptation to the environment that incorporates both nature and nurture. It follows a gradual and predictable sequence for all individuals throughout all stages. Piaget believed that each individual "is the product of interaction between heredity and environment. It is virtually impossible to draw a clear line between innate and acquired behavior patterns."
Cognitive structures are the central concept in Piaget's theory. The development of intelligence is a flexible and mobile process. Each developmental stage contains many detailed structural forms or schemes that mark developmental progress. Increasingly complex intellectual processes are built on the foundations of these earlier stages of development. Progression through the stages takes place in a continuous sequence, with each new level of understanding arising out of the preceding one. Much as a spiral, each level encompasses and integrates in a higher form the achievements of the prior stage. Each stage involves a qualitative advance.
The patterns of physical or mental action correspond to distinct and universal stages of development. Children think with logic that is consistent with the developmental stage to which they have progressed, and this development occurs at a different pace for each individual. A child cannot undertake certain tasks until he or she is psychologically mature enough to do so. Piaget demonstrated that children's thinking does not develop smoothly. At some junctures it seems to speed up, taking off into completely new areas. Such transitional points mark the movement from one stage of development to the next. The ages of transition from one stage to the next will vary, and none can be skipped. Once a developmental stage has been reached, the individual cannot go backwards (excepting instances of mental or physical trauma). No stage is lost once the skills have been achieved.
| Age | Milestone |
| (Courtesy Thomson Gale.) | |
| 0–12 months |
|
| 12–24 months |
|
| 24–36 months |
|
| 36–48 months |
|
| 48–60 months |
|
Scholars of Piaget disagree on the number of distinct stages of cognitive development. Some view the stage of concrete operations as one stage subdivided into the preoperational and concrete operational phases. Each of Piaget's stages has many levels and subdivisions that mark a child's progress. The important point is not if there are three or four distinct stages, but rather, an understanding of the sequence of skills acquired in the process of intellectual development.
Piaget's stages of cognitive development
Sensorimotor stage (birth to two years) It is in this very first stage of development, according to Piaget, that "the most fundamental and the most rapid changes take place." The newborn infant is primarily a bundle of reflex actions interacting with the environment in an active and practical manner. Sucking and grasping are the first of these primary instinctive tendencies. Sucking is a most practical behavior needed for obtaining nourishment. With practice, the infant's sucking skills will improve. The newborn is thinking with her body and experimenting with her own stimulus. She is the center of her own universe. At this early stage the infant does not connect sensations and stimulus to anything outside of herself. Her world is one that is first to be sucked, then looked at and listened to, and then, as coordination develops, something to be manipulated.
The infant experiments with what Piaget called repetitive circular reactions She performs an action, is interested in the result, and repeats the same action again. Gradually, at about the age of four months, the infant begins to explore the immediate environment beyond her own body with secondary circular reactions. These reactions incorporate an item or stimulus from the environment, such as a squeeze toy that squeaks, a rattle, or other baby toy. As the infant handles and manipulates objects and acquires more complex motor skills, she begins to recognize herself as the agent of the action. Then, through trial and error, the infant will begin to add purpose to her movements. She comes to understand that squeezing a certain toy will result in a squeaky sound, or batting a hanging mobile over a crib may cause it to move, or pulling mother's hair will cause a grimace on the mother's face.
Piaget considered the addition of purpose to the infant's physical actions as the beginning of intelligence. Each progressive skill the developing infant acquires is known as a scheme. Schemes are "sensory motor intelligence in action," Piaget said. A scheme is above all an instrument of assimilation that ties actions together. But still, at this early stage, an object that is out of sight remains out of mind. It has simply ceased to exist in the infant's world.
One of the central development tasks of these first two years of life is the acquisition of an understanding of the concept Piaget called object permanence. This involves the ability to form a mental representation of an object that will enable the child to realize that the object still exists, even if it is out of view. It is generally not before nine months of age that the baby can understand the concept of object permanence. One clue indicating acquisition of this skill is the characteristic high-chair game where the child delights in dropping objects from the tray to the floor and then repeating the action, over and over, after the item is returned by the caregiver. "Peek-a-boo" is also a favorite game at this stage of development. The child now understands that a face can disappear and will reappear. It is not lost forever. She may also begin to display the distressing emotions of separation anxiety. The child now realizes that the person that is out of sight still exists, and she may become quite distressed and cry continuously in an effort to bring back the missing caregiver. She has learned that crying sometimes brings a desired result. The little scientist has by trial and error learned a key developmental task for this first stage in a lifetime of learning.
After the child's first birthday, she will begin to employ tertiary circular reactions. The child is now experimenting with constantly varying her interactions with items in the external environment. First she may use an object to hit another object and observe the reaction. Then with the same tool, may strike a different surface to get a different sound or reaction. She may learn, after some trial and error, to manipulate an object a certain way to fit it through an opening. This is an exciting period of active experimentation and interactive play that is critical to developing an understanding of how things behave outside oneself in the external environment.
Another concept particular to this first stage of cognitive development is object constancy. This is acquired at about one and one half years of age, when the baby comes to understand that an object will continue to be itself no matter what its position or the perspective from which the infant is viewing it. As the child approaches the transition from this first developmental stage to the next, she will also acquire the ability to imitate another person's action. This imitation grows increasingly sophisticated. As the child grows she learns to more quickly copy sounds, gestures, and expressions without as much trial and error. Then, close to the end of her second year, she reaches the stage of symbolic imitation and is able to incorporate a pretend object into her imitative play.
Preoperational stage (two to seven years) Operations is Piaget's term for thought. By this Piaget means the actions that take place in the mind rather than in the physical environment. Children in the preoperations stage of development have the advantage of their emergent language skills. Piaget noted that preoperational children have the ability to reconstruct past actions in the form of narration and to anticipate future actions through verbal representations. They can name or label objects and understand that these objects can be classified and grouped. Such grouping at this stage is by a single feature only. For instance, the child will place all the green blocks together regardless of their shape, or will group all the square blocks together regardless of their color.
Piaget delineated the preoperational years into the preconceptual period (ages two to four years) when the child first begins to use language and employ mental images, and the perceptual or intuitive period (ages four to seven years), where the child's level of reasoning is still symbolic and based on subjective intuition and appearances, rather than on objective logic or reasoning. At this stage the child believes that events happening simultaneously also have a cause-effect relationship. Everything is connected in the child's view of how the world works.
Thinking and perception in children younger than age seven is limited in many ways. They have not yet developed a full understanding of cause and effect relationships, but they have developed a high level of curiosity. This is when the child seems to always be asking "why?" They are beginning to seek logical explanations for the events that occur in the world around them.
The notion of animism, that inanimate objects are alive with attributes of consciousness and will, is evident in the child's thinking in this preoperational stage, as is the notion of artificialism, that human beings have made the natural world of mountains, lakes, trees, the moon and the sun.
Preoperational children understand the world in egocentric ways. They form their ideas of the world from their own direct experience, and from their own limited point of view. The child simply cannot understand how someone else's point of view might be different from his own, and is unable to coordinate how he sees the world with another person's perspective. Piaget considered the egocentrism of the preoperational child "as the main obstacle to the coordination of viewpoints and to cooperation." He stressed the importance of peer interaction as a means of freeing the child from the constraints of egocentrism.
A delightful aspect of the behavior of a preoperational child is the ability to engage in creative play. With this new skill of mental imagery, the progression to higher levels of thought can be seen in the child's increasing ability to represent reality through pretend play activity. The child can now pretend that a box is a table, a line of chairs is a train, and a leaf is a plate, for instance. Such imaginative play reaches a new level of abstractness when the child begins to encode experience as words. There is consistent correlation between pretend play and cognitive development and between pretend play and language development at the ages of two or three years.
With the egocentric thinking typical at this stage, children's play remains their own, even when they are playing together. This is known as parallel play. The child is aware, and even welcomes the company, of other children, but those children are not a necessary part of his particular game. A child's imagination and creativity is enhanced through play, which is a valuable component of cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Preoperational children have a clear understanding of the past and the future. They can remember a past experience and the emotions that accompanied that experience and are also able to anticipate a future event, and to anticipate possible outcomes.
Concrete operations stage (seven to 11 years) Children at this stage have developed the ability to perform mental operations, what Piaget called "interiorized action." Operations cause the child to decenter; that is, the child can now consider several attributes of an object or person at once rather than limiting concentration to a single attribute.
Mental operations such as the concepts of conservation of number, length, area, weight, and volume have been accomplished through the child's own manipulation and observation of concrete objects. Conservation means that the child has come to realize that certain attributes of an object or set of objects will remain constant even when they are made to look different. The various aspects of conservation develop sequentially throughout this stage in response to the child's continued observations and interactions with the world around her. Conservation of liquid volume, where the child can recognize a liquid is of the same quantity regardless of the shape of the glass it may be poured into, may not develop until as late as the age of twelve.
During this concrete operations stage, the child acquires the ability to think back, a concept known as reversibility. A child who has developed reversibility can literally retrace their mental and physical steps, for instance, to find an object that has been left behind. Children in the concrete operations stage can also successfully complete arithmetic operations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and other forms of abstract thinking. Other concrete operational skills developed during this period include the classification of objects, telling time, and aligning objects systematically according to size.
However, at this stage children will continue to take life literally, so the use of satire or language metaphor is lost on them. A child at the stage of concrete operations can logically organize her experiences and understand the world from another person's perspective, but continues to live in the moment.
Formal operations (11 years to adult) Individuals who reach this stage of development now have the capacity for logical and abstract thinking and hypothetical, theoretical reasoning. They are capable of using logic to solve complex problems and can investigate a problem in a careful and systematic fashion, considering all factors that could affect an outcome. Not all children who grow into adulthood reach this stage of formal operations. Research has shown that this level of abstract thinking and theoretical reasoning may be reached by as few as 35% of adults. And not all persons who have acquired these skills of abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning will operate from that level at all times.
The formal operations stage is characterized by an orderliness of thinking and a mastery of logical thought that allows for a more flexible kind of mental experimentation. The adolescent or young adult at this stage has learned to see the implications of his own thinking and that of others. He has constructed a value system and possesses a sense of moral judgment. In Piaget's view there are no additional mental strucures that will emerge in the individual. Development at this stage is a deepening of understanding.
Methodology
Piaget's empirical research took many forms throughout his career, depending on what aspect of cognitive development he was studying at the time. He employed techniques of careful, naturalistic observation of the child's spontaneous behavior. Sometimes this observation was without intervention; other times he introduced some form of verbal or motor stimulus to elicit a response. He attempted to follow the child's thought as he observed. Piaget and his coworkers then added experimental tasks for the child to complete. These tasks were designed in response to an idea or intuition that occurred to the observer as they followed the child's line of thought and observed behaviors. The tasks were intended to elicit pertinent and interpretable behavior that would further describe and explain the variety of intellectual structures children possess at distinct levels of development.
Piaget's earliest research began with French school boys, ages five to eight years, at the École de la rue de la Grange-aux Belles in Paris. He attempted through careful and respectful questioning to elicit information that would further reveal the workings of the curious minds of these children who first intrigued him with their patterns of wrong answers to the IQ tests he was hired to administer to them. He made systematic and detailed records of his findings as he watched and interacted with the children at play.
Piaget asked questions of the children in order to decipher the type of thinking they might be using. He called his experimental technique "the clinical method," which became his method of choice in working with children. Piaget's clinical method was similar to the diagnostic and therapeutic interviews and informal exploration he learned while working in Bleuler's psychiatric clinic in France.
The willingness Piaget showed to engage his young research subjects at their own level often brought him to his knees where he observed and engaged with them in play. With children in the preoperational stage he explored how they think about the system of rules that pass from older children to younger ones, informing their play. He played marbles with the young boys, asking questions such as, "What do you mean by rules?" and "Where do the rules come from?" and "Who makes them up?" He sought to understand the emerging sense of morality inherent in the rules by which the children played the simple game.
When Piaget returned to Switzerland to become a research psychologist at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva in 1921, he continued to observe school children and began to articulate his ideas about how children develop reasoning, language, and morality in his first series of books, including The Language and Thought of the Child, published in 1923, and The Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, published in 1924. The books brought his preliminary and revolutionary research to the attention of the world's scientific community. At this point in his career, Piaget's investigations focused on how children develop reasoning skills and the mechanisms they employ as they satisfy their curiosity and gain new knowledge.
In 1925, Piaget, together with his wife, Valentine, also a research psychologist, began the painstaking observations and detailed recording of the cognitive development of their three children, a son and two daughters, from infancy through their teenage years. The couple documented the results of their careful observations of the children. Piaget published five new books about child psychology from these studies, including the 1936 publication The Origins of Intelligence in Children.
Piaget developed research methods to serve his intent to get "to the heart of the child's cognitive structure and describe it as it really is," according to John Flavell, writing about Piaget's rationale in his book, The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget.
"One simply must adopt a technique, whatever its hazards and difficulties, which permits the child to move on his own intellectually, to display the cognitive orientation which is natural to him at that period in his development," Flavell wrote, explaining the rationale of Piaget's early methodology. Piaget also understood some of the dangers and difficulties in his clinical method, as he is quoted in Flavell's book:
The good experimenter must, in fact, unite two often incompatible qualities; he must know how to observe, that is to say, to let the child talk freely, without ever checking or side-tracking his utterance, and at the same time he must constantly be alert for something definitive; at every moment he must have some working hypothesis, some theory, true or false, which he is seeking to check.
As his studies in genetic epistemology continued, Piaget tried to adapt his methodology to the special problems involved in using children as subjects in perceptual experiments. Piaget employed what he and his coworkers called the clinical concentric method. In this method, according to Flavell, the experimenter presents a series of stimuli of different values and requires the subject to judge each of these stimuli with respect to some standard stimulus (greater than, less than, or equal to the standard). Piaget developed techniques to discover and demonstrate the cognitive abilities and developmental markers at each stage of the child's intellectual growth.
Examples
Three mountains task To explore the egocentric way of thinking so typical in the preoperational stage, Piaget used what he called the three mountains task. He positioned children in front of a three dimensional model of a mountain range, then seated himself to the side. He then presented the child with a set of four photographs of the mountains as displayed in the papier-mâché model and asked them to pick out the view of the mountains that they believed the professor could see from his seat. Consistently, children in the preoperations stage will choose the picture depicting the view from their own perspective and not that of Piaget. Children who have progressed into the concrete operations stage will consistently choose the photograph taken from the experimenter's point of view.
Conservation studies Piaget tested for the concept of conservation of liquid volume with differently shaped glasses. He poured equal amounts of liquid into glasses of a different height and width. The child in the preoperational stage, who still relies on perceptual information rather than logic to form their opinions, will consistently insist that the liquid in a thin, tall glass holds more than an equal amount of liquid poured into a wide, shallow bowl. A child demonstrates a grasp of the concept of conservation of liquid when they can recognize that both vessels, regardless of shape, hold the same amount of liquid. This skill is developed in the concrete operations stage.
Piaget tested for the concept of conservation of number with coins. He placed two sets of coins on a table in parallel lines. Each line contained the same number of coins, but in one line Piaget spread the coins farther apart than in the other. When asked which line contained the most coins, children younger than seven years old consistently choose the line in which the coins are spread farther apart. They will persist in this belief, despite being shown, by stacking the coins, that each set contains an equal number. A child demonstrates a grasp of the concept of conservation of number when they can recognize that each line of coins contains an equal number, no matter how they are arranged.
Piaget used clay to demonstrate two concepts, that of conservation of substance and reversibility, two developmental tasks of the concrete operational stage. In this experiment he first obtains the child's agreement that two balls of soft clay are of equal size. Then he rolled one ball of clay into a long cylinder or sausage-like shape. Placing the two masses of clay side by side, the ball shape alongside the cylinder shape, he asks the child again if they are of equal quantity. If the child has acquired the skill of conservation of substance, she can now answer correctly what she could not grasp earlier. She now comprehends that the substance is conserved regardless of the changes in shape it may undergo. This recognition also is evidence of the child's grasp of the concept of reversibility. She has acquired the skill to follow in her mind the changing form and shape of the clay and can then think back to that same clay when it was a round ball and recognize it has having the same quantity.
Questions and answers Piaget posed simple questions in his clinical interview style to determine if a child had passed beyond the stage of seeing all objects as animate, or alive, a concept called animism. He questioned children in the preoperational stage to determine their perceptions of the aliveness of objects. He wanted to determine the types of objects the child would our would not classify as alive.
"Does the sun know it gives light?" he asked, or "When I pull off this button will it feel it?" The children's answers varied throughout the developmental stage. The number and type of objects they endowed with consciousness declined with the age of the child and the increased experience with the outside world.
Piaget questioned adolescents to determine if they had made the transition from the concrete operational stage to the stage of formal operations with its capacity for hypothetical deductive reasoning. He asked why a pendulum swings faster or slower. Individuals who have achieved the formal operations stage will test the pendulum by systematic variations of one factor at a time, holding the others as a constant, to determine each factor's effect on the pendulum's motion. Adolescents who have not yet reached the formal operations stage will vary more than one factor as they struggle to find a solution to the question, making an accurate conclusion unlikely.
Through his interactive observations and empirical research, Piaget demonstrated that the developing intellect of the child is self-motivated and energized by the need to satisfy curiosity. To Piaget, thought is a process in continual transformation and reorganization. Children construct their own knowledge, Piaget said, through their action in, and on, the world. Like Maria Montessori, whom Piaget studied, Piaget believed that when children are allowed to act on the environment, performing the tasks themselves rather than merely being told how things work, they are better able to construct a more comprehensive scheme as their thinking evolves from the concrete to the abstract.
Philosophy: The constructivist's vision
"I am a constructivist." Piaget wrote. "I think that knowledge is a matter of constant, new construction, by its interaction with reality and that it is not preformed. There is a continuous creativity." As a constructivist, part of the philosophical school of structuralism, Piaget understood learning as an active process in which new ideas or concepts are constructed based on current or past knowledge. The individual selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure that provides meaning and organization to the experiences. For Piaget, constructivism means that an individual always and only learns through constructing. He maintained that biological maturation provides the range of potential for cognitive growth, but developing the ability to perform operations requires an active, supportive environment and social interactions that encourage children to construct their own knowledge. Piaget also understood that there is no beginning and no end to the construction of knowledge. The individual is continuously acquiring and modifying skills.
Michael J. Mahoney, writing on the Constructivism site on the World Wide Web has outlined five basic themes that are found throughout the diversity of theories that express constructivism. These are active agency, order, self, social-symbolic relatedness, and lifespan development.
"Jean Piaget developed a model of cognitive development in which balance was central. Piaget described knowing as a quest for a dynamic balance between what is familiar and what is novel," Mahoney writes, "We organize our worlds by organizing ourselves. This theme of developmental self organization pervades constructive views of human experience."
The methods of constructivism that Piaget advanced in his theories of genetic epistemology continue to inform and challenge educational technology today. Though Piaget did not see himself as an educator, he did have some advice for teachers. He told interviewer Richard Evans that he hoped his work would influence teachers to begin "educating for an experimental frame of mind." It is important, he said, that teachers present children with materials and situations and occasions that allow them to move forward. "It is not a matter of just allowing children to do anything. It is a matter of presenting to the child situations which offer new problems, problems that follow on from one another. You need a mixture of direction and freedom."
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Twentieth-century psychological theories
Piaget's professional life spanned a tumultuous six decades of the mid twentieth century, during a time of rapid growth and development in the scientific disciplines. Piaget read widely in the fields of philosophy and psychology. He was influenced in his reading by the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whose concept of categories was a precedent for later psychological theories using terms such as "constructs" and "schemes." He was also influenced by Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose book Creative Evolution changed Piaget's thinking about the nature of life. Other philosophers and thinkers in the nineteenth century also influenced Piaget's thinking, including Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Emil Durkheim, and James Mark Baldwin, from whom Piaget borrowed the phrase genetic epistemology to describe his theory of the acquisition of knowledge.
Piaget was fortunate to meet many of the influential European psychologists of his day. He studied with Carl Jung, shared the podium with Sigmund Freud at the 1922 Congress of Psychoanalysis in Berlin, had conversations with Albert Einstein, worked as a research associate at the Simon-Binet laboratory in Paris, knew Maria Montessori, and met Robert Oppenheimer and the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler.
Much of the seminal writing of the era, particularly that of the early Gestalt thinkers and the constructivist theories of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, was unavailable to Piaget early in his career because of language barriers. His own later work was not made available in translation in the United States until well after World War II. Not one of his books was translated into English between 1932 and 1950. This was due, in part, to the prevailing influences of the behavioral psychologists in the United States, whose stimulus-response views Piaget did not embrace. France was under German occupation during parts of World War II, and this further restricted the free flow of ideas within the global scientific community. During the occupation of France in 1942, Piaget lectured at the College of France. He later remarked that his invitation to lecture during the German occupation enabled him to bring to his French colleagues, "testimony of the unshakable affection of their friends from the outside."
Piaget shared the point of view of the constructivists, and, with some differences in approach, engaged in the study of cognitive development in ways similar to John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Maria Montessori, and others. These psychologists believed that children actively construct knowledge and that this construction happens within a social context. Piaget also felt a kinship in his work with the theories of Edward Tolman (1886–1959), whose work attempted a synthesis of Gestalt psychology and behaviorism, and with other Gestalt psychologists and their ideas regarding the "totalities" of cognitive structure.
The dramatic shift in psychology from behaviorism to cognitivism that began in the early part of the twentieth century was greatly influenced by the work of one of Piaget's American contemporaries, Jerome Bruner. Bruner was instrumental in bringing Piaget to the United States at a time when psychologists and educators were losing confidence in the field of behaviorism, which had dominated American educational psychology for decades. Behaviorism was starting to be viewed as far too limited with its reduction of learning to a reactive stimulus-response relationship. Piaget had a different view of learning than behaviorist B.F. Skinner. To Piaget, learning is first of all an active process, one that is linked to specific stages of development and includes both external and internal, self-regulating reinforcements.
Piaget traveled to the United States on numerous occasions to lecture on his theories and to accept honorary degrees from prestigious universities. After World War II his books were finally translated and available to American scholars, further encouraging the growth of the emerging science of cognitive development that increasingly attracted students and psychologists to his Geneva research laboratories. Piaget was a man whose time had come.
CRITICAL RESPONSE
Contributions and shortcomings
Extensive criticisms of Piaget's work have been voiced in the scientific community throughout the 60 years that he labored to develop and articulate his theory of genetic epistemology and in the decades since his death in 1980. Despite the shortcomings that many critics point out in Piaget's work, few have disputed the considerable contributions of his theory to scientific thought, or his role as one of the most influential research psychologists of the twentieth century. Piaget is respected, even by his critics, for transforming how we think about children. His foundational work continues to influence educational theory throughout the world. Piaget's work has been characterized as the starting point for many different strands of theoretical investigation in the area of education and developmental psychology.
General criticisms of Piaget's theory include:
- complexity of his writing style
- flawed methodology
- qualitative rather than quantitative interpretation of findings
- rigidity of developmental stages
- failure to consider variables of culture, race, gender, etc.
- lack of longitudinal or life-span studies
- underestimation of the intelligence of young children
- the fact that not everyone in every culture reaches the formal operations stage
- possibility of development beyond formal operations
Piaget's theoretical writings total as many as 120,000 pages, according to Jacques Voneche, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychology at The University of Geneva and Director of Jean Piaget Archives. Piaget wrote in an abstract way, according to Professor John Flavell, who provided the first English language summary of Piaget's theory in his definitive book The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. Most of Piaget's publications were from largely unedited materials, delivered to the printer in handwritten drafts. This extensive body of writing is difficult to assimilate, in part because of the complexities of his writing style. He uses complicated sentence structures and introduces new terms and concepts, while redefining the meaning of other familiar terms. According to N. R. Carlson and W. Buskist, writing in the 1997 edition of Psychology: the Science of Behavior, "One criticism leveled at Piaget is that he did not always define his terms operationally. Consequently, it is difficult for others to interpret the significance of his generalizations."
Piaget's original work is in French and not all translations interpret his concepts consistently. Professor Flavell used the term "opaqueness" with regard to Piaget's writing. The lack of clarity, or "communicative inadequacy," as Flavell called it, has created a barrier to the understanding of this important body of work. Flavell believes that this is a most unfortunate handicap in a cognitive theory that contributed so significantly to a revolution of thought in twentieth century psychology.
Much of the early research with regard to Piaget's theories reported in Flavell's 1963 book was concerned with replication and validation of his theories. Piaget left a lot of room for concern with what Flavell called a "habitual failure to give a clear and full account of precisely what he did in the experiment." Still another criticism is with regard to Piaget's analysis of his data. He did not provide a sufficient quantitative evaluation of his findings. Without statistical analysis of the results, the findings are difficult to interpret or compare with other studies. Subsequent researchers, uncertain about the empirical basis for his experimental conclusions, focused on replication and validation, rather than on elaboration of the work that Piaget began. Piaget "simply did not conduct and report his research in such a way as to make a very convincing case," Flavell explained. Nonetheless, these early researchers, for the most part, were able to validate most of the essentials of Piaget's conclusions.
Flavell's criticism, and that of others, extends to Piaget's theoretical conclusions, particularly with regard to the stages of cognitive development. Flavell contends that Piaget has "attributed too much system and structure to the child's thought." He proposes theoretical changes that reflect a "somewhat looser clustering of operations." Flavell believed such an adjustment to Piaget's stage structure might free it from what he called its "rigidity and maladaptability."
Annette Karmiloff-Smith, professor of neurocognitive development at the Institute of Child Health in London began her career as a member of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology run by Jean Piaget. From 1972 to 1980 she worked on normal cognitive development across various areas of cognition, publishing several research papers with Barbel Inhelder. Professor Karmiloff-Smith has recently criticized Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development, which she considers "almost obsolete." Speaking on a BBC radio interview in 2003, she commented, "there are more structures to the brain than Piaget ever imagined."
Another major criticism of Piaget concerns the empirical aspects of his work. Many believe that his research methodology was flawed. Piaget relied on observation, the clinical interview, and the administration of certain tasks at each developmental stage to formulate his theory. In this way he hoped to discover and delineate the characteristic behaviors and perceptions that determine cognitive growth. The unstructured clinical interview style that Piaget favored, using a question and answer format to elicit information about the child's thinking, has been criticized by many who study his work. British researcher J. G. Wallace believed that the "ambiguity of verbal response" may have been used by Piaget "to derive support for his preconception."
Other critics have expressed concern with the limited samples Piaget used to develop his broad assertions about the progress of all children. Critics also point to Piaget's lack of cross-cultural subjects in his investigations, and the fact that he did not consider other variables of social factor, such as personality, race, gender, and nationality, nor did his investigations follow individuals throughout their lifespan. Piaget's first five books were largely based on detailed observations of his own three children from infancy through their teen years. Though Piaget considered these books as only preliminary, they were widely read and brought him early fame. Young researchers from throughout the world came to work with him in his Geneva laboratory.
Lev Vygotsky
One of the earliest and by some accounts best of Piaget's critics was the Russian scientist Lev Vygotsky. He was born in 1896, the same year as Piaget, and like Piaget became prominent while still a young man. Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky died early, of tuberculosis at the age of 34. Vygotsky was a linguist and educator interested in the origins and mechanisms of knowledge. In the 10 years prior to his death, Vygotsky set down a comprehensive theory of cognitive development, providing many alternatives to Piaget's work. Though Vygotsky had access to Piaget's writings, the language barrier kept Piaget from reading Vygotsky's criticisms until decades after the Soviet researcher died.
There are many similarities in the two men's views. Piaget pointed to biological development as the process that impels movement from one stage to the next. Vygotsky agreed that individuals pass through distinct stages of development, but stressed the importance of historical and cultural forces on the individuals' ability to reach or move through each developmental stage. This cultural context of learning is an important element in Vygotsky's theory. Like Piaget, he understood that experience with physical objects is a necessary element in cognitive growth, but Vygotsky also noted the important part played by the use of tools. Both theorists recognized the child as an active agent who constructs his own reality, but Vygotsky was an educator who understood learning as a cooperative venture of both teacher and child. Learning, to Vygotsky, is coconstructed. He put forth the concept of a "zone of proximal development," the gap existing between the limit of what a child can learn acting alone and the extent to which a child can learn with the help of an adult or other more capable peers.
As a linguist Vygotsky considered language as the basis for cognitive development. He paid particular attention to the role of gestures in language acquisition. Like Piaget, Vygotsky rejected the mechanistic theories of behaviorism. He believed that it was language that helps human beings break the stimulus-response cycle and gain control over their environment. The child's earliest attempts at speech, often indecipherable to adults, nonetheless assists the developing child with memory, problem solving, and even in making plans for the future. Piaget viewed the child's self-talk as primarily an indication of the cognitive limitation he called "egocentric." Vygotsky, on the other hand, believed that such child's talk reflects the formation of a plan that would modify the child's subsequent behaviors.
Discovery learning at any stage
Jerome Bruner, a Harvard professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, developed a stage theory of cognitive growth that differs from Piaget with regard to the impact of environmental and experiential factors on the developing child. Bruner's theories were influenced by Vygotsky, particularly with regard to his emphasis on the importance of the social and political environment. Bruner understood that the process of constructing knowledge of the world is not accomplished in isolation. He emphasizes the importance of the social context within which learning takes place. Bruner helped to define the concept of discovery learning, defined by J. Ormrod as "an approach to instruction thorough which students interact with their environment by exploring and manipulating objects, wrestling with questions and controversies, or performing experiments."
Bruner's sociocognitive stage theory of learning is based on the child's reciprocal interaction with the teacher. He has departed from Piaget's idea of developmental readiness for learning with the hypothesis "that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development."
Making "human sense"
Margaret Donaldson of Edinburgh University put forth yet another criticism of Piaget's method, claiming the he used unfamiliar concepts and objects to test the cognitive development of the children he worked with, and that this led to the misinterpretation of their cognitive skill levels. The tasks proposed to the child and the language used to describe them need to make "human sense," she said. Donaldson, a child development psychologist, visited Piaget's research center in Geneva where she attended seminars and observed actual testing. She has criticized what she described as "contrived experimental work," that provides the experimenter with only one view of the child. Donaldson and others tested Piaget's theories on preschool children and concluded that the reason these children were unable to perform Piaget's tasks successfully was primarily due to their difficulties understanding the questions being asked of them, rather than a lack of logical skills or the cognitive limitations of what Piaget called "egocentric" behavior. Donaldson took issue with Piaget's findings, particularly with regard to his three mountains task, in her 1978 book Children's Minds. When the researcher uses more familiar items and language, children may perform beyond Piaget's stages. Young children are capable of much more than Piaget ever gave them credit, she contends. There is now a significant theoretical work that suggests children perform beyond Piaget's levels when using more familiar testing tools.
Out of sight, not out of mind
Renee Baillargeon, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has tested Piaget's concept of object permanence, the out of sight, out of mind perception that Piaget considered a cognitive limitation of the early sensorimotor stage. In a 1997 study Baillargeon and others demonstrated that infants as young as three and one half months of age can remember a toy (a Mr. Potato Head) after it has been hidden from sight.
In two later experiments published in 2003, Baillargeon and others tested four-month-old infants in what she termed "violation of expectation," or VOE tasks.
The infants still gave evidence that they could represent and reason about hidden objects: they were surprised, as indicated by greater attention, when a wide object became fully hidden behind a narrow occluder (Experiment 1) or inside a narrow container (Experiment 2).
Unlike previous tests, in these experiments the infants were not first given "habituation or familiarization trials," but only a single test trial. Baillargeon's research provides additional support for the conclusion in her previous studies that "young infants possess expectations about hidden objects." Her experiments have shown that very young infants already are learning concepts of object permanence relative to visible and hidden objects before Piaget believed they were developmentally able to do so.
Spatial learning
Janellen Huttenlocher, a professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and the 2002 recipient of the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology, is a leading researcher on spatial learning. Her studies have shown that children acquire an understanding of spatial information much earlier than Piaget proposed. Infants as young as six months, she said, are able to use the inborn ability of dead reckoning skills to understand the location of objects around them. By the time they reach their first birthday, children can comprehend distance enough to locate hidden objects. Huttenlocher suggests that growth in spatial understanding develops through a combination of the child's innate abilities, a process of trial and error interaction with the environment, and the child's cultural environment. She suggests an "interactionist" approach to spatial development that will incorporate and integrate the insights of Piaget, who believed infants develop knowledge of space through trial and error experience; the nativists' approach that holds that the basic intelligence of spatial understanding is innate; and Vygotsky's emphasis on the cultural transmission of spatial skills.
Huttenlocher is investigating how teachers can influence the development of the intellectual skill of spatial understanding, and with other researchers is using computer games to investigate students' navigational skills and their ability to perform "mental rotation" tasks. She is also developing computer software to help students sketch maps as a way of further developing a spatially mature intellect.
A higher law
Children define morality individually, according to Piaget, and this occurs in the process of their struggles to arrive at fair solutions. He theorized that the way children learn respect for rules is by playing rule-bound games. Mary Elizabeth Murray, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowledged that "Jean Piaget is among the first psychologists whose work remains directly relevant to contemporary theories of moral development."
Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) studied with Jean Piaget. He did most of his later research at Harvard University, where he worked to modify and elaborate on Piaget's work, particularly with regard to the issues of moral development. Kohlberg extended the development of moral judgment beyond the ages studied by Piaget, according to psychologist Mary Murray, "and laid the groundwork for the current debate within psychology on moral development." He determined that the process of attaining moral maturity was a longer and more gradual one than Piaget first theorized.
Kohlberg investigated 84 schoolboys in a longitudinal study that followed the boys development over a period of 20 years. Kohlberg concluded that an even more advanced stage of cognitive development, beyond Piaget's formal operations stage, may be reached by some adolescents. In this advanced stage, the individual will perceive the rule of law as valid only if it serves a purpose greater than oneself or those in one's circle of care. For a law to be obeyed it must also serve universal moral or religious values. Kohlberg found that only 5% of the student population he studied had attained this stage of moral understanding.
Kohlberg's six stages of moral development include:
- Stage one: The punishment and obedience orientation. The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences.
- Stage two: The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action consists of what instrumentally satisfies one's own needs and occasionally the needs of others.
- Stage three: The interpersonal concordance or "good boy-nice girl" orientation. Good behavior is what pleases or helps others and is approved by them.
- Stage four: The "law and order" orientation. The individual is oriented toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order.
- Stage five: The social-contract legalistic orientation (generally with utilitarian overtones). Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.
- Stage six: The universal ethical-principle orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.
Carol Gilligan, writing in her 1982 book In A Different Voice, criticizes both Piaget and Kohlberg's work in the area of moral development as being biased against girls and women. She is concerned with Piaget's "bias that leads him to equate male development with child development," particularly in his studies of childhood games, and with Kohlberg's bias in studying only boys in his longitudinal investigations of moral development leading to his six-stage theory.
Piaget observed that young girls play differently from boys. Boys are more concerned with rules, and girls with relationships, Gilligan says. If the study of moral development would begin from the lives of women, Gilligan writes, the moral problems would be characterized as those "arising from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights." Such moral questions would require for solution "a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract."
In contrast to Gilligan's views, Mary Elizabeth Murray contends that "the preponderance of evidence is that both males and females reason based on justice and care."
Many thousands of studies
One of the marks of a good theory is in the amount of research it stimulates, and within this criteria, Piaget's theory is truly great. Many thousands of research studies throughout the world have been published in scientific journals regarding Jean Piaget's theories of genetic epistemology. In 1974 an eight-volume set of compilation and commentary referenced over 3,500 studies. In the 30 years since those volumes appeared, Piagetian research has continued, particularly in the area of the application and utility of genetic epistemology to the fields of early childhood education, including the acquisition of morality. A vast body of research has arisen to test Piaget's theories and confirm or refute his claims.
The beginning student of Piaget has a daunting task in assimilating the complex theory of genetic epistemology. It is an additional challenge to distinguish the most relevant studies from among the thousands that have been done, and to find those investigators whose critical work will either validate, refute, or extend Piaget's findings in a way that will further the understanding of the origin and nature of knowledge, and not confound the search.
THEORIES IN ACTION
In a 1970 interview with Elizabeth Hall in Psychology Today, Jean Piaget addressed the question of the practical applications of his theory of genetic epistemology.
The danger to psychologists lies in practical applications. Too often psychologists make practical applications before they know what they are applying. We must always keep a place for fundamental research and beware of practical applications when we do not know the foundation of our theories.
Piaget's caution is well taken. Since the late 1950s, when his writings were translated for readers in the United States, his influential ideas have been applied widely and survived extensive criticism. Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology changed the educational philosophy of the mid-twentieth century by providing a scientific basis for understanding how learning happens. His comprehensive theory remains vital today.
Decades after his death, Piaget's revolutionary insights and innovative theories continue to stimulate volumes of research and academic discussion published in scientific journals throughout the world. His interdisciplinary approach to the discovery of the nature and origin of knowledge informs numerous fields of scientific thought today, from educational psychology and learning theory to computer technology and artificial intelligence. Parents, educators, child-care workers, pediatricians, child psychologists, and software designers all benefit from the work of Piaget and his many collaborators.
In the classroom
Piaget's influence has been extensive in the field of education, particularly in the areas of teaching practice and curriculum design. Piaget never considered himself to be an educator and had little to say regarding the practice of education. Nonetheless, this Swiss innovator's many insights into how children learn have been studied and applied throughout the educational system. Piaget helped educators understand the importance of novelty and active participation in learning, as well as the value of collaborative learning in a sensory rich environment. Piaget's theory offers an understanding of students' developmental readiness and insight into ways a teacher can facilitate a child's growth to more complex cognitive levels. Both are vital components to developing a child-centered, child-directed curriculum. Piaget's findings about the distinctions between concrete and abstract thinking, and the general ages at which these skills predominate, has had tremendous influence on when and how science and mathematics are presented to children.
Teachers who understand Piaget know that the very young student learns through trial and error and needs access to a diversity of objects for manipulation. As the child becomes older and has progressed into the concrete-operational stage, a teacher influenced by Piaget's theories will know to present the child with problems of classification, ordering, location, and conservation. Teachers facilitate cognitive development by providing activities that engage learners, challenge their existing beliefs, and stimulate adaptation to new levels of understanding. Teachers applying Piaget's insights will make the learning environment interesting with support for exploratory activity and peer interactions, and keep the focus on projects that require solutions to real-life, practical problems.
Jean Piaget believed in the power of knowledge and the importance of children learning to think for themselves, as architects of their own destinies.
If we desire to form individuals capable of inventive thought and of helping the society of tomorrow to achieve progress, then it is clear that an education which is an active discovery of reality is superior to one that consists merely in providing the young with ready-made wills to will with and ready-made truths to know with.
Research Marie Anne Suizzo, writing in the journal Child Development in 2000, cited a 1996 study by researchers Robbie Case and Yukari Okamoto that explored the cross-cultural attainment of Piaget's formal operations stage of abstract reasoning. They administered Piagetian tasks to determine the developmental stage of individuals tested and concluded that "children, and even adults who live in societies where the base ten number system is not in use, or where formal schooling is not available to all, do not usually attain the level of formal operational thought normally reached by adults in industrial societies."
Teachers who understand Piaget's work are aware that direct instruction may fail if it is not appropriate to the stage of the child's cognitive capacity, and that not all persons will attain Piaget's stage of formal operations.
Cyberspace
Educators have realized that for students to be successful in the twenty-first century, they need to acquire the skills to become lifelong learners. Lifelong learning is a concept with which Piaget would have been comfortable, though he may not have anticipated the tremendous advances in technology that are bringing a revolution to how students acquire information and interact with the world.
"Twenty-first century children can access more information at greater speed than any generation in history," says Wilborn Hampton, an editor at the New York Times, writing about children, television, and the Internet. He cautions that teachers and parents must teach this "fledgling generation of the cyberspace age to look beyond the first answer they get." His caution, like Piaget's regarding the application of his theories, is worth remembering in this age of artificial intelligence and worldwide connectivity through the Internet. The Internet is a goldmine of information and resources on virtually any topic imaginable. Specialized search engines assist in computer assisted learning and retrieval of information, and the interactive multimedia encyclopedias and CD-ROM technology can provide a rich and stimulating learning experience with opportunity for both collaborative and individual learning. Tools such as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and drawing programs enable a student to publish the results of their explorations, reaching beyond the classroom to a potentially vast number of learners with whom they can share and discuss their discoveries.
Computer-supported collaborative learning and the Internet have extended Piaget's ideas of lifelong learning in ways even this creative genius many never have imagined. "ThinkQuest," is an international competition where student teams engage in collaborative, project-based learning to create educational websites. The winning entries received from students throughout the world form the ThinkQuest online library. Computer programs such as "Cybrid" CDs add the expert help of cyberspace teachers and experts who are available at the click of a mouse.
One of Piaget's collaborators, Jean Papret, now a professor of education and media technology at the MIT Media Laboratory, called Piaget a "towering figure and a major theorist of how the mind works." Speaking at a symposium on computers in education at MIT in 2002, Papert said, "the essence of Piaget was how much learning occurs without being planned or organized by teachers or schools." Papret has focused his study on how individuals learn to learn. His interest has been in the tools, media, and context of learning. Papret shares Piaget's view that the child actively constructs knowledge by interaction with her world, and he has taken his understanding of cognitive development into the realm of artificial intelligence. Papret says he started out in the field of artificial intelligence with the questions, "Can we make a machine to rival human intelligence? Can we make a machine so we can understand intelligence in general?"
Papret is a constructionist, who shares Piaget's constructivist view, but adds the insight that learning is enhanced in a context where the learner finds a way to share those ideas with the wider community. Papret believes that it is important to make ideas tangible, to shape and sharpen them by making them public in some way. He studied how knowledge is formed, transformed, processed, and expressed through different media. Papret was involved in early research into artificial intelligence. Now, he says, "I see my contribution as helping to birth a perspective on learning: not 'education' or 'school,' but a field that is bigger and essentially different from anything that has existed."
A scientific society formed in 1979, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), is "devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines." This seems to echo Piaget's genetic epistemology with a quest for what might be called mechanistic epistemology. The study of artificial intelligence seems to be asking some the same questions Piaget posed to children.
David Wood, writing in his book, How Children Think and Learn notes that "Communication between man and machine and skillful control of complex systems demands designs that do not overtax or exceed people's abilities to attend to, monitor, and react to the behavior of the system under control." He sees the necessity for application of cognitive development principles to systems design. "Any system that provides too much critical information at any one moment or which leaves the human operator with too little time to interpret and react to it makes inhuman demands and cannot be controlled."
Case study
Piaget recognized the importance of play, and the necessity for children to handle and explore objects to find out how they work. Play is the fundamental way children construct their theories about how the world works.Over the years since Piaget's innovative research with children, toys have changed. In the 1980s computer toys that dramatically altered the way children play began to appear on the market.
Sherry Turkle, a professor in the program in science, technology, and society at MIT, has studied the relationship between children and their electronic pets and computer toys over three generations. She has observed in her studies the emergence of a new consciousness among children who play with computer toys. "Cyborg consciousness," Turkle says, is "a tendency to see computer systems as 'sort of' alive, to fluidly cycle through various explanatory concepts, and to willingly transgress boundaries."
In her early research Turkle observed that "children described the life-like status of machines in terms of cognitive capacities (the toys could 'know' things, 'solve' puzzles)." But in her research with a later generation of computer toys, the Virtual pets and digital dolls of the 1990s, Turkle sees a blurring of boundaries with what children consider to be alive. These toys require an interaction that necessitates some form of nurturance from the child. When children play with these new computerized toys, Turkle's observations show, they seek a feeling of mutual recognition. They want to know how to make the toy happy. The furry and cuddly electronic pets, called Furbies, "add the dimensions of human-like conversation and tender companionship to the mix," Turkle says. The children consider Furbies as "sort of alive." This belief, Turkle says, "reflects their emotional attachments to the toys and their fantasies that the Furby might be emotionally attached to them."
These children of the computer age will, perhaps, construct quite a different reality than the Paris school boys who Piaget first sat down with to observe their simple game of marbles. Watching children at play led him to an understanding of how children's rules of fair play relate to the development of a moral consciousness. Researchers are just beginning to ask how these new interactive toys, embedded with artificial intelligence and feigned affection, will affect the psychological processes of twenty-first century children and the evolution of their world view.
Moral and ethical applications
Piaget's work with children led him to investigate the realm of moral reasoning. His initial work has inspired other researchers to pursue the questions of moral and ethical judgement with Piagetian theory as a starting point.
Research In a 2000 study titled "Older isn't wiser in moral reasoning," reported in Science News, psychologists Lakshmi Raman and Gerald Winder of Ohio State University tested Piaget's findings on the evolution of moral reasoning, particularly with regard to the idea of immanent, or inherent, justice, the "what goes around, comes around," notion. In their cross-cultural study the researchers presented the students with the story of a robber who contracts a mysterious deadly disease. They asked the students if they believed that the reason the robber became ill was because he was bad. They posed the question to sixth grade students and college students in both the United States and India. The results surprised them. Contrary to what Piaget's theory would suggest, it was the college students who agreed most often that the robber became ill because he was bad, an expression of the idea of immanent justice that, according to Piaget's findings, they should have long ago outgrown. The researchers concluded that even though the sixth grade children may understand the biological basis of illness, over time they will become socialized into acceptance of the "irrational idea of immanent justice."
CHRONOLOGY
1896: Jean Piaget born in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
1906: Publishes first article in local journal.
1918: Receives Ph.D. in Natural Sciences, University of Neuchatel, as Zoologist; He attends the University of Zurich for postgraduate studies. He works in Eugen Bleuler's psychiatric clinic and develops his technique of the clinical interview.
1919: Works as research associate in Simon-Binet experimental psychology laboratory administering British IQ tests to Paris school boys.
1921: Appointed research director of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva, and publishes article in the Archives de Psychologie stating that logic is not innate but develops over time through interactive processes of self-regulation.
1923: Marries psychologist and former student Valentine Chatenay and publishes The Language and Thought of the Child. Four more books follow bringing him worldwide fame before the age of 30.
1925: Returns to Neuchatel University. Daughter Jacqueline is born and the Piaget's begin the study of the intellectual development of their three children from infancy through their teenage years.
1928: Albert Einstein and Piaget meet. Einstein suggests that Piaget study the origins in children of the notions of time and simultaneity.
1929: Teaches the history of scientific thought at the University of Geneva until 1939. Begins thirty-five year tenure as director of the International Bureau of Education in Geneva.
1936: Publishes The Origins of Intelligence in Children based on his observations of his three children.
1940: Appointed Chair of Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva (until 1971).
1942: Lectures at the College of France during Nazi occupation. Lectures complied into The Psychology of Intelligence published in 1963.
1950: Publishes his three volume book, Introduction a l'Epistemologie Genetique.
1955: Jean Piaget's International Center for Genetic Epistemology opens at the University of Geneva.
1966: Piaget publishes The Psychology of the Child with Barbel Inhelder.
1969: Piaget is awarded distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association. He is the first European to receive the award.
1980: Jean Piaget dies at the age of 84 in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1988, authors Iordanis Kavathatzopoulos and Georgios Rigas published a study in the journal of Educational and Psychological Measurement in which they sought to describe how individual politicians solve moral problems. They used Piaget's theory as a frame for development of a measurement device they called the Ethical Competence Questionnaire-Political (ECQ-P), composed of real-life ethical dilemmas from the political arena.
| Stage | Approximate Ages | Characteristics and Accomplishments |
| Sensorimotor stage | Birth to two years | Reflexive, instinctive behaviors as center of own universe Repetitive circular reactions coordinated into purposeful motions Manipulation of objects and recognition of self as agent of action in world outside self Object permanence: recognition that objects exist when out of sight Object constancy: recognition that an object remains the same despite perspective or conditions |
| Preoperational stage | Four to seven years | Language skills emerge with ability to use symbols to label objects and people Memory and imagination improve with creative parellel play Non-logical reasoning, subjective intuition, and judgement by appearance Logical explanations sought; frequent "why?" questions Egocentric thinking only Consciousness and will are given to inanimate objects Single-focus thinking; only one aspect of subject seen at a time Incorrect generalizations from single experiences Literal thinking; taking words at exact meaning Ability to reconstruct past actions and anticipate future actions |
| Concrete operational stage | Seven to 11 years | Logical and systematic manipulation of symbols for problem solving Ability to consider several attributes of a subject at once Well-organized, coordinated structure of thought Conservation of number, length, mass, area, and volume Ability to group subjects into different classes Growing awareness of outside world |
| Formal operations stage | Eleven years to adult | Logical and abstract thinking Hypothetical reasoning Systematic problem solving Flexible mental experimentation Sees implications of own and others' thinking Has developed value system and moral judgement |
"The ECQ-P is an attempt to assess ethical function independent of moral, ideological, and political content," the researchers explained. The questionnaire focused solely on cognitive processes. According to the researchers, Politicians, as well as every decision maker, need a capacity to cope with moral conflicts that arise in their ordinary activities; that is, they need high ethical competence. This competence means that the individual must have:
- "high ethical awareness, the ability to anticipate ethical problems in real life and to perceive them in time
- the cognitive skill to analyze and solve them in an optimal way
- the capability to discuss and handle moral problems at group and organization levels and, together with significant others, formulate ethical principles and guidelines
- the power to argue convincingly for preferred actions or decisions made
- the strength to implement controversial decisions"
According to the authors, the results of the study demonstrated "that it is possible to construct a Piagetian paper-and-pencil questionnaire for the assessment of ethical autonomy in the domain of politics that can produce reliable results." Such research builds on Piaget's earliest work expressed in his 1932 book, The Moral Judgment of the Child, and sheds further light on the importance of moral consciousness development as an adaptive cognitive mechanism.
LeoNora M. Chen and Younghee Kim, writing in the Roeper Review in 1999, have articulated the value of Piaget's work to provide further understanding of the gifted child. Though Piaget was primarily concerned with universal child development, they note, his work is a useful foundation to the study of the gifted child. According to Chen and Kim, research in the late 1960s and middle 1980s demonstrated that gifted children move more quickly through each of Piaget's development stages. The intellectually gifted child, like the high-powered computer systems of today, is a pattern seeker. The gifted child moves toward construction of general principles that apply to all circumstances based on feedback from a few encounters. They grasp the big picture more readily than less intellectually gifted children.
Piaget concluded in The Psychology of the Child,
Child psychology enables us to follow their step-by-step evolution, not in the abstract, but in the lived and living dialectic of subjects who are faced, in each generation, with endlessly recurring problems and who sometimes arrive at solutions that are slightly better than those of previous generations.
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Wolfgang, Edelstein and Eberhard, Schroeder. "House or Pandora's Box? The Treatment of Variability in Post-Piagetian Research." Child Development 71, no. 4 (July 2000): 840.
Wood, David. How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1998.
Wozniak, Robert H. "Classics in Psychology. James Mark Baldwin: Mental Development in the Child and the Race." Thoemmes Continum. [cited March 28, 2004] http://www.thoemmes.com/psych/baldwin1.htm.
Further readings
Chapman, M. Constructive Evolution: Origins and Development of Piaget's Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
DeLisi, R. and Golbeck, S. "Implications of Piagetian theory for peer learning," (3-37). In A. O'Donnell & A. King (Eds.) Cognitive Perspectives on Peer Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
Evans, Richard L. Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas. Trans. by Eleanor Duckworth. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1973.
Flavell, John H. The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. Princeton, NJ : D. Van Nostrand Co., 1963.
Furth, Hans G. and Harry Wachs. Thinking Goes to School: Piaget's Theory in Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Gallagher, Jeanette McCarthy, and D. Kim Reid. The Learning Theory of Piaget and Inhelder. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole Pub. Co., 1981.
Gruber, H. E., and J. Vonèche. The Essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1995.
Jean Piaget Society. Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development. "Resources for Students." http://www.piaget.org/students.html.
Lee, K. Childhood Cognitive Development: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.
Meadows, S. The Child as Thinker: The Development and Acquisition of Cognition in Childhood. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.
Mooney, Carol Garhart, Theories of Childhood: an Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erickson, Piaget and Vygotsky. St. Paul, MN: Red Leaf Press, 2000.
Palmer, J. A., ed. Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. From Piaget to the Present. London; New York: Routledge, 2001.
Piaget, J. Genetic epistemology. Trans. by Eleanor Duckworth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.
Piaget, J. (1952). "Jean Piaget (Autobiography)". In A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 4 (pp. 237–256). Edit. by E.G. Boring. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; 1974.
Piaget, J., and Inhelder, B. The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books, 1969. (Original work published 1966).
Singer, Dorothy G. and Tracey A. A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks. Revenson Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1997.
Wood, D. How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Blackwells, 1998.
What Were the Major Works of Jean Piaget
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/medicine/psychology-and-psychiatry-biographies/jean-piaget