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Jean Piaget

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10 views

Jean Piaget

Uploaded by

Joseph Gatt
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget’s view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously
influential, particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of
maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their
world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature
enough to do so. His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has
undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigators, his
importance comes from his overall vision.

He proposed that children's thinking does not develop entirely smoothly: instead,
there are certain points at which it "takes off" and moves into completely new areas
and capabilities. He saw these transitions as taking place at about 18 months, 7
years and 11 or 12 years. This has been taken to mean that before these ages
children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain
ways, and has been used as the basis for scheduling the school curriculum. Whether
or not should be the case is a different matter.

Piaget's Key Ideas

Adaptation What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and


accommodation
Assimilation The process by which a person takes material into their mind
from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of
their senses to make it fit.
Accommodation The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of
assimilation. Note that assimilation and accommodation go
together: you can't have one without the other.
Classification The ability to group objects together on the basis of common
features.
Class Inclusion The understanding which is more advanced than simple
classification that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-
sets of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs.
There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also
animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)
Conservation The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even
when they are changed about or made to look different.
Decentration The ability to move away from one system of classification to
another one as appropriate.
Egocentrism The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything
revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world
as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness",
just an early stage of psychological development.
Operation The process of working something out in your head. Young
children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to
act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like
count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their
heads.
Schema The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas,
and/or actions, which go together.
Stage A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of
understanding some things but not others

Stages of Cognitive Development

Stage Characterised by
Sensorimotor Differentiates self from objects
(Birth-2 yrs)
Recognises self as agent of action and begins to act
intentionally: e.g. pulls a string to set mobile in motion or
shakes a rattle to make a noise

Achieves object permanence: realises that things continue to


exist even when no longer present to the sense (pace
Bishop Berkeley)
Pre-operational Learns to use language and to represent objects by images
(2-7 years) and words

Thinking is still egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint


of others

Classifies objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together


all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square
blocks regardless of colour
Concrete Can think logically about objects and events
operational
(7-11 years) Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass (age 7), and
weight (age 9)

Classifies objects according to several features and can


order them in series along a single dimension such as size.
Formal operational Can think logically about abstract propositions and test
(11 years and up) hypotheses systematically

Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and


ideological problems

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