Who is jean piaget

His interest for mollusks was developed during his late adolescence to the point that he became a well-known malacologist by finishing school. He published many papers in the field that remained of interest for him all along his life. In , he became director of studies at the J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva at the request of Sir Ed. The couple had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent whose intellectual development from infancy to language was studied by Piaget.

He was, reportedly, the only Swiss to be invited at the Sorbonne from to In , he created and directed until his death the International Center for Genetic Epistemology. His researches in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology had one unique goal: how does knowledge grow?

His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood. He was awarded numerous prizes and honorary degrees all over the world. Jean Piaget. Sheehy, A. Conroy eds. Also during this period, he received a number of honorary degrees. He received one from the Sorbonne in , the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in , on top of an earlier one from Harvard in And, in and , he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology.

In , he became a professor at the Sorbonne. In , he created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology, of which he served as director the rest of his life. And, in , he created the School of Sciences at the University of Geneva.

He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more years. By the end of his career, he had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16, , one of the most significant psychologists of the twentieth century. Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist! But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams.

As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking.

Finding relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label. He called it genetic epistemology , meaning the study of the development of knowledge. He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills.

These skills he called schemas. For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. This Piaget called assimilation , specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema. When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and thrust.

This of course works poorly with the new object. This is called accommodation , specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about.

He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain. Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it.

According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good or at least good-enough model of the universe. This ideal state he calls equilibrium. As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing.

And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology. The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage.

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Concrete operational stage : 7 to 11 years. Formal operational stage : ages 12 and up. The sequence of the stages is universal across cultures and follow the same invariant unchanging order. All children go through the same stages in the same order but not all at the same rate. Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests.

He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number , time, quantity, causality , justice and so on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation of his own three babies and sometimes controlled observation too. From these he wrote diary descriptions charting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children's thought. Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment. Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age - although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage. During this stage the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory therefore it does not have a sense of object permanence.

If it cannot see something then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy from an infant, while it watches, but it will not search for the object once it has gone out of sight. The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation i. Towards the end of this stage the general symbolic function begins to appear where children show in their play that they can use one object to stand for another.

Language starts to appear because they realise that words can be used to represent objects and feelings. The child begins to be able to store information that it knows about the world, recall it and label it. By 2 years, children have made some progress towards detaching their thought from physical world. However have not yet developed logical or 'operational' thought characteristic of later stages.

Thinking is still intuitive based on subjective judgements about situations and egocentric centred on the child's own view of the world. The stage is called concrete because children can think logically much more successfully if they can manipulate real concrete materials or pictures of them.

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. This means the child can work things out internally in their head rather than physically try things out in the real world. Children can conserve number age 6 , mass age 7 , and weight age 9.

Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. But operational thought only effective here if child asked to reason about materials that are physically present. Children at this stage will tend to make mistakes or be overwhelmed when asked to reason about abstract or hypothetical problems.

From about 12 years children can follow the form of a logical argument without reference to its content. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses. This stage sees emergence of scientific thinking, formulating abstract theories and hypotheses when faced with a problem.

Piaget's , theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses. To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

Piaget claimed that knowledge cannot simply emerge from sensory experience; some initial structure is necessary to make sense of the world. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure genetically inherited and evolved on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based. Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world. Piaget , p.