Jean Piaget (9 August 1896-16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development, particularly his theory of cognitive development.
Biography[]
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland in 1896, and he was brilliant as a youth. He graduated from the University of Neuchatel in 1918, and he first developed as a psychologist in the 1920s, taking up an interest in child development.
Theory of Cognitive Development[]
Piaget's "Theory of Cognitive Development" studied how thinking develops over time (cognitive development). He believed that the factors influencing changes in thinking were bilological maturation, action/activity, social experiences, and equilibriation (a state of cognitive balance). He believed in both biological (organization and adaptation) and environmental factors regarding development, as well as the role of oaction in intelligence. Intelligence at every period involves some form of action on the world. At each stage of his theory, there was an action scheme for infants/children to understand the world.
Piaget was a stage theorist, with his stages being:
- Sensorimotor (ages 0-2), develops schemes through senses and motor activity. Infants understand the world through overt actions performed on it; schemes progressively become more complex and interrelated.
- A major part of the stage is object permanence, the knowledge that objects have a permanent existence that is independent of our perceptual contact with them. A major achievement in the sensorimotor period; "out of sight, out of mind".
- Preoperational (ages 2-6), difficulty mentally reversing actions, decentering, egocentric. There are more thought-based schemes and language, and they start to communicate in particular ways.
- Symbols and mental actions begin to replace objects and overt behaviors. Major accomplishment - ability to form and use symbol (words, gestures, signs, images). Enlarge vocabulary from 200 to 2,000 words.
- Develop many new schemes and one-way logic, can't think "backwards"; therefore, can't conserve (does tall and thin glass or wide and more spacious glass have more water issue)
- Irreversibility - the inability of a young preoperational child to mentally reverse physical or mental processes
- Perceptual centration - The young child's tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time; the preoperational child can't focus on more than one aspect at a time.
- Childhood egocentrism - The assumption that others see things the same way, can't see things from annother's perspective; not the same as selfish.
- Concrete operational (ages 6-12), operations through concrete experiences only. Can now decenter. More logical thinking than preoperational children; conservation, decentration, mentally reversing actions, hands-on logical thinking. Logical thinking is limited to only those things they have experienced concretely and directly.
- Seriation - The ability to arrange items in a particular order
- Classification skills - Ability to categorize
- Class inclusion - Construction of hierarchical relationships among related classes of items. Knowledge that a subclass cannot be larger than the superordinate class that includes it.
- Formal operational (ages 12-adult), abstractions, hypothesis generation, systematic problem solving, mental manipulation.
- Able to generalize
- Mental trial and error
- Formulate hypotheses
- Mentally sort out solutions/consider alternatives
- Systematically testing
- Abstract thinking
- Situations don't have to be experienced to be imagined
- Can examine possibilities, imagine
Later life[]
Piaget would later go on to serve as Director of the International Bureau of Education, and he founded the Center for Genetic Epistemology in 1955, directing the center until his death in 1980. His views became widely popularized in the 1960s, and his views helped to shape the study of development as a major sub-discipline of psychology.