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BIOGRAPHY Piaget was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland . His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in Biology and the natural world, particularly Mollusk s, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. In fact, his long career of scientific research began when he was just ten, with the 1907 publication of a short paper on the albino Sparrow . Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles. Piaget received a Ph.D . in natural science from the University Of Neuchâtel , and also studied briefly at the University Of Zürich . During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in Psychoanalysis , a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period. He then moved from Switzerland to Grange-aux-Belles, France , where he taught at the school for boys run by Alfred Binet , the developer of the Binet Intelligence Test . It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the Child ren's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's thought or cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva . In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, one of his students; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau Of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968. Every year, he drafted his “Director’s Speeches” for the IBE Council and for the International Conference On Public Education in which he explicitly expressed his educational credo. SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT The stages of cognitive development Piaget served as professor of view influenced by philosopher Immanuel Kant ). Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is thus caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganizing. The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as # '' Sensorimotor Stage '': from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence) # '' Preoperational Stage '': from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills) # '' Concrete Operational Stage '': from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events) # '' Formal Operational Stage '': after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning). Piaget's view of the child's mind Piaget viewed children as ''little philosophers'', which he called ''tiny thought-sacks'' and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge. Some people have used his ideas to focus on what children cannot do. Piaget, however, used their problem areas to help understand their cognitive growth and development. The developmental process Piaget provided no concise (or clear) description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:
This process is not wholly gradual, however. Once a new level of organization, knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas. As a result, transitions between stages tend to be rapid and radical, and the bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this new cognitive level. When the knowledge that has been gained at one stage of study and experience leads rapidly and radically to a new higher stage of insight, a "gestalt" is said to have occurred. It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of knowledge and action that are capable of being developed. Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our own actions, Piaget’s model of development explains a number of features of human knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as ‘birds’, ‘fish’, and so on. This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs. At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the ‘rules’ that govern in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child’s growing awareness of notions such as ‘right’, ‘valid’, ‘necessary’, ‘proper’, and so on. In other words, it is through the process of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also ''justified''. One of Piaget’s most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of M & M’s, one with the M & M’s in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of M & M’s in a line placed more closely together. He found that, “Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly” (Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children, p. 141). Initially younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child couldn’t conserve quantity, how could a child that is younger? The results show however that children that are younger than three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this quality, and don’t recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute may be lost due to a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies, which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four year old to reverse situations. By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count the M & M’s to decide which has more. Finally the study found that overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of man’s native inheritance. Genetic epistemology According to Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology "attempts to explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based"in "Genetic Epistemology" by Jean Piaget (1968). Jean Piaget has become a reference for Epistemology , and particularly for Constructivist Epistemology . According to Ernst Von Glasersfeld , Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the Constructivist theory of knowing"(in ''An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical'', 1990). INFLUENCE Despite ceasing to be a fashionable Psychologist , the magnitude of Piaget’s continuing influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society , which holds annual conferences and attracts very large numbers of participants. His Theory Of Cognitive Development has proved influential in many different areas:
Developmental psychology Piaget is without doubt one of the most influential developmental psychologists, influencing not only the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg but whole generations of eminent academics. Although subjecting his ideas to massive scrutiny led to innumerable improvements and qualifications of his original model and the emergence of a plethora of neo-Piagetian and post-Piagetian variants, Piaget’s original model has proved to be remarkably robust (Lourenço and Machado 1996). Stage One - Sensorimotor (birth to 1.5 years) Stage Two - Preoperational (1.5 years to 7 years) Stage Three - Concrete Operations (7 years to 11 years) Stage Four - Formal Operations (11 years and onward) Moral judgment stages were termed Heteronomy and Autonomy and were later further delineated by development psychologists. Education During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget’s works also inspired the transformation of European and American Education , including both theory and practice, leading to a more ‘child-centred’ approach. In ''Conversations with Jean Piaget'', he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists," (Bringuier, 1980, p.132). Historical studies of thought and cognition Historical changes of thought have been modelled in Piagetian terms. Broadly speaking these models have mapped changes in morality, intellectual life and cognitive levels against historical changes (typically in the complexity of social systems). Robinson's ''History of Human Reason'' (2004) also suggests that history itself is the expression of our intelligence. Notable examples include:
Evolution of human intelligence The origins of human intelligence has also been studied in Piagetian terms. Wynn (1979, 1981) analysed Acheulian and Oldowan tools in terms of the insight into spatial relationships required to create each kind. On a more general level, Robinson’s ''Birth of Reason'' (2005) suggests a large-scale model for the emergence of a Piagetian intelligence. Moral Reasoning and Moral Judgment Piaget's theory of morality was radical in 1932, when his book, The Moral Judgment of the Child, was published, due to his use of philosophical criteria to define morality (as universalizable, generalizable, and obligatory), and his rejection of equating cultural norms and moral norms. Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of peer interaction, and that it was autonomous from authority mandates. Peers, not parents, were a key source of moral concepts, such as equality, reciprocity, and justice. The role of ''social relations of co-operation'' and ''social relations of constraint'' In his account of the development of moral judgement Piaget (1932) introduced a fundamental distinction between different types of social relationship, or more specifically he attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationship. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the other the relationship is asymmetrical, and, importantly, the knowledge which can be acquired by the dominated participant takes on a fixed and inflexible form. Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, and he refers to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group. Similarly where adults exercise a dominating influence over the growing child, it is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge. By contrast, in cooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions authentic forms of intellectual exchange become possible, since each partner has the freedom to project their own thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend their own point of view. In such circumstances, where children’s thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, the conditions exist for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, or what Piaget refers to as the reconstruction of knowledge rather than social transmission. Here the knowledge which emerges is open, flexible and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external authority. In short, cooperative relations provide the arena for the emergence of operations, which for Piaget requires the absence of any constraining influence, and is most often illustrated by the relations which form between peers (for more on the importance of this distinction see Duveen & Psaltis, in press; Psaltis & Duveen, 2006,2007; Kitchener, 1986). Primatology Piaget’s models of cognition have also been applied outside the human sphere, and there is a thriving community of primatologists assessing the development and abilities of primates in terms of Piaget’s model. Notable names include Sue Taylor Parker and Francesco Antinucci. A summary of the very extensive literature can be found in Parker and McKinney (1999). Neo-Piagetian stages have been describe by Commons and Miller (2004) Evolutionary Psychology Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various animals. For example spiders attain the circular sensory motor stage, coordinating actions and perceptions. Pigeons attain the sensory motor stage, forming concepts. Philosophy Some have taken account of Piaget's work. For example, the Philosopher and Social Theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated Piaget into his work, most notably in '' The Theory Of Communicative Action ''. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understand the transition between modes of thought which characterized his theory of Paradigm Shift s. Shortly before his death (October 1975), Piaget was involved in a debate about the relationships between innate and acquired features of language, at the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, where he discussed his point of view with the linguist Noam Chomsky as well as Hilary Putnam and Stephen Toulmin . AI Piaget also had a considerable effect in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence . Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo Programming Language . Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC . These discussions led to the development of the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980's and beyond. MAJOR WORKS AND ACHIEVEMENTS Major works
Other works
Appointments
PIAGETIAN AND POST-PIAGETIAN STAGE THEORIES
QUOTATIONS
SEE ALSO
NOTES REFERENCES
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