Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Jean William Fritz Piaget

     Jean Piaget was a Swiss development psychologist and philosopher  known for his epistemological  studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".

      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."

          Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glaserfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."

        Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchatel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medeival literature at the University of Neuchatel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world. He was educated at the University of Neuchâtel, and studied briefly at the Universiti of Zurich. 

           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. His interest in  psychoanalysis , at the time a burgeoning strain of psychology, can also be dated to this period. Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris, France 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 intelligence test, and 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 did not. 

       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.

          In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay; 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 addressed his educational credo.

        In 1964, Piaget was invited to serve as chief consultant at two conferences at Cornell University (March 11–13) and University of California, Berkeley(March 16–18). 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.

          In 1979 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences.

Piaget's Theory

Describe intellectual development according to Piaget, including a discussion of both the process and the stages of development. Note behavioral characteristics of each stage, describing how assimilation and accommodation are exemplified for each stage of development.  

Describe specific actions that teachers can take to incorporate Piaget's theory into the classroom. Compare Piaget's theory to Vygotsky's socio historical theory of cognitive development.                                                                              

                                                                                                        Developed by W. Huitt, 1999

Piaget originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy and considered himself a “genetic epistimologist.”

He was mainly interested in the biological influences on “how we come to know.”

Piaget believed that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our ability to do “abstract symbolic reasoning.”

Piaget's views are often compared with those of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), who looked more to social interaction as the primary source of cognition and behavior.

This is somewhat similar to the distinctions made between Freud and Erikson in terms of the development of personality.

While working in Binet’s test lab in Paris, Piaget became interested in how children think.

He noticed that young children's answers were qualitatively different than older children.

This suggested to him that the younger children were not less knowledgeable but, instead, answered the questions differently than their older peers because they thought differently.

This implies that human development is qualitative (changes in kind) rather than quantitative (changes in amount).

There are two major aspects to his theory:

the process of coming to know and the stages we move through as we gradually acquire this ability. 

Piaget’s training as a biologist influenced both aspects of his theory.

Process of Cognitive Development

As a biologist, Piaget was interested in how an organism adapts to its environment (Piaget described this ability as intelligence.)

Behavior is controlled through mental organizations called schemes that the individual uses to represent the world and designate action.

This adaptation is driven by a biological drive to obtain balance between schemes and the environment (equilibration).

Piaget hypothesized that infants are born with schemes operating at birth that he called "refleaxes.“

In other animals, these reflexes control behavior throughout life.

However, in human beings as the infant uses these reflexes to adapt to the environment, these reflexes are quickly replaced with constructed schemes.

Piaget described two processes used by the individual in its attempt to adapt:

• assimilation and accomodation.

Both of these processes are used throughout life as the person increasingly adapts to the environment in a more complex manner.

assimilation

The process of using or transforming the environment so that it can be placed in preexisting cognitive structures. 

Example: an infant uses a sucking schema that was developed by sucking on a small bottle when attempting to suck on a larger bottle.

accomodation

The process of changing cognitive structures in order to accept something from the environment.

Example: the infant modifies a sucking schema developed by sucking on a pacifier to one that would be successful for sucking on a bottle.

As schemes become increasingly more complex (i.e., responsible for more complex behaviors) they are termed structures.

As one's structures become more complex, they are organized in a hierarchical manner (i.e., from general to specific).