Jean William Fritz Piaget (9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called genetic epistemology.Jean Piaget's Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development, by Saul McLeod, Simply Psychology, updated 2018
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual". His theory of child development has been studied in pre-service education programs. Nowadays, educators and theorists working in the area of early childhood education persist in incorporating constructivist-based strategies.
Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, and directed the center until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding made possible, and their impact, ultimately led to the Center being referred to in the scholarly literature as "Piaget's factory".
According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing". (p. 22). His ideas were widely popularized in the 1960s. This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology.Pickren, W. E. (2012). Joseph McVicker Hunt: Golden age psychologist. In W. E. Pickren, D. A. Dewsbury, & M. Wertheimer (Eds.), Portraits of Pioneers in Developmental Psychology (pp. 185–203). New York: Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis. By the end of the 20th century, he was second only to B. F. Skinner as the most-cited psychologist.
Biography Early life and education Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland. He was the oldest son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss), a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel, and Rebecca Jackson (French). Rebecca Jackson came from a prominent family of French steel foundry owners. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world. His early interest in zoology earned him a reputation among those in the field after he had published several articles on mollusks by the age of 15."Jean Piaget", Biography. Accessed 28 February 2012
When he was 15, his former nanny wrote to his parents to apologize for having once lied to them about fighting off a would-be kidnapper from baby Jean's pram. There never was a kidnapper. Piaget became fascinated that he had somehow formed a memory of this kidnapping incident, a memory that endured even after he understood it to be false.
He developed an interest in epistemology due to his godfather's urgings to study the fields of philosophy and logic. He was educated at the University of Neuchâtel, and studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers that showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent thought.A Brief Biography of Jean Piaget , Jean Piaget Society (Society for the study of knowledge and development) His interest in psychoanalysis, at the time a burgeoning strain of psychology, can also be dated to this period. Career Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris after his graduation and he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys. The school was run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet-Simon test (later revised by Lewis Terman to become the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales). Piaget assisted in the marking of Binet's intelligence tests. It was while he was helping to mark some of these tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children consistently made types of mistakes that older children and adults managed to avoid. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of cognitive developmental stages in which individuals exhibit certain common patterns of cognition in each period of development.
In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. At this time, the institute was directed by Édouard Claparède. Piaget was familiar with many of Claparède's ideas, including that of the psychological concept of groping which was closely associated with "trials and errors" observed in human mental patterns.
In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay (7 January 1899 – 3 July 1983);Fondation Jean Piaget – Biographie. Fondationjeanpiaget.ch. Retrieved on 26 February 2018. the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. From 1925 to 1929, Piaget worked as a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchatel. In 1929, 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 addressed his educational credo.
Having taught at the University of Geneva, and at the University of Paris in 1964, Piaget was invited to serve as chief consultant at two conferences at Cornell University (11–13 March) and the University of California, Berkeley (16–18 March). The conferences addressed the relationship of cognitive studies and curriculum development, and strived to conceive implications of recent investigations of children's cognitive development for curricula.Rockcastle, Verne N. (1964, p. xi), the conference director, wrote in the conference report of the Jean Piaget conferences about Piaget: Although few of us had any personal contact with Piaget prior to the conference, those who attended came to have the deepest and warmest regard for him both as a scientist and as a person. His sense of humor throughout the conference was a sort of international glue that flavored his lectures and punctuated his informal conversation. To sit at the table with him during a meal was not only an intellectual pleasure but a pure social delight. Piaget was completely unsophisticated in spite of his international stature. We could hardly believe it when he came prepared for two weeks' stay with only his 'serviette' and a small Swissair bag. An American would have had at least two large suitcases. When Piaget left Berkeley, he had his serviette, the small Swissair bag, and a third, larger bag crammed with botanical specimens. 'Where did you get that bag?' we asked. 'I had it in one of the others,' he replied. Death
Piaget died on 16 September 1980, and, as he had requested, was buried with his family in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois (Cemetery of Kings) in Plainpalais district of Geneva. A photograph of his grave is available here.
Psychology
Harry Beilin described Piaget's theoretical research program as consisting of four phases: the sociological model of development, the biological model of intellectual development, the elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development, the study of figurative thought. The resulting theoretical frameworks are sufficiently different from each other that they have been characterized as representing different "Piagets". More recently, Jeremy Burman responded to Beilin and called for the addition of a phase before his turn to psychology: "the zeroth Piaget".
Sociological model of development Piaget first developed as a psychologist in the 1920s. He investigated the hidden side of children's minds. Piaget proposed that children moved from a position of egocentrism to sociocentrism. For this explanation he combined the use of psychological and clinical methods to create what he called a semiclinical interview. He began the interview by asking children standardized questions and depending on how they answered, he would ask them a series of standard questions. Piaget was looking for what he called "spontaneous conviction" so he often asked questions the children neither expected nor anticipated. In his studies, he noticed there was a gradual progression from intuitive to scientific and socially acceptable responses. Piaget theorized children did this because of the social interaction and the challenge to younger children's ideas by the ideas of those children who were more advanced.
This work was used by Elton Mayo as the basis for the famous Hawthorne Experiments. For Piaget, it also led to an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.
Biological model of intellectual development In this stage, Piaget believed that the process of thinking and intellectual development could be regarded as an extension of the biological process of the (adaptation) of the species, which has also two ongoing processes: assimilation and accommodation. There is assimilation when a child responds to a new event in a way that is consistent with an existing schema. There is accommodation when a child either modifies an existing schema or forms an entirely new schema to deal with a new object or event.Ormrod, J.E. (2012). Essentials of Educational Psychology: Big Ideas to Guide Effective Teaching. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.
He argued infants were engaging in the act of assimilation when they sucked on everything in their reach. He claimed infants transform all objects into an object to be sucked. The children were assimilating the objects to conform to their own mental structures. Piaget then made the assumption that whenever one transforms the world to meet individual needs or conceptions, one is, in a way, assimilating it. Piaget also observed his children not only assimilating objects to fit their needs, but also modifying some of their mental structures to meet the demands of the environment. This is the second division of adaptation known as accommodation. To start, the infants only engaged in primarily reflex actions such as sucking, but not long after, they would pick up objects and put them in their mouths. When they do this, they modify their reflex response to accommodate the external objects into reflex actions. Because the two are often in conflict, they provide the impetus for intellectual developmentthe constant need to balance the two triggers intellectual growth.
To test his theory, Piaget observed the habits in his own children.
Elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development In the model Piaget developed in stage three, he argued that intelligence develops in a series of stages that are related to age and are progressive because one stage must be accomplished before the next can occur. For each stage of development the child forms a view of reality for that age period. At the next stage, the child must keep up with earlier level of mental abilities to reconstruct concepts. Piaget conceived intellectual development as an upward expanding spiral in which children must constantly reconstruct the ideas formed at earlier levels with new, higher order concepts acquired at the next level.
It is primarily the "Third Piaget" (the logical model of intellectual development) that was debated by American psychologists when Piaget's ideas were "rediscovered" in the 1960s.Hsueh, Y. (2005). The lost and found experience: Piaget rediscovered. The Constructivist, 16(1).
Study of figurative thought