Piaget

Definition Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is renowned for constructing a highly influential model of child development and learning. Piaget's theory is based on the idea that the developing child builds cognitive structures--in other words, mental "maps," schemes, or networked concepts for understanding and responding to physical experiences within his or her environment. Piaget further attested that a child's cognitive structure increases in sophistication with development, moving from a few innate reflexes such as crying and sucking to highly complex mental activities. Discussion Piaget's theory identifies four developmental stages and the processes by which children progress through them. The four stages are: 1. Sensorimotor stage (birth - 2 years old)--The child, through physical interaction with his or her environment, builds a set of concepts about reality and how it works. This is the stage where a child does not know that physical objects remain in existence even when out of sight (object permanance). 2. Preoperational stage (ages 2-7)--The child is not yet able to conceptualize abstractly and needs concrete physical situations. 3. Concrete operations (ages 7-11)--As physical experience accumulates, the child starts to conceptualize, creating logical structures that explain his or her physical experiences. Abstract problem solving is also possible at this stage. For example, arithmetic equations can be solved with numbers, not just with objects. 4. Formal operations (beginning at ages 11-15)--By this point, the child's cognitive structures are like those of an adult and include conceptual reasoning. Piaget outlined several principles for building cognitive structures. During all development stages, the child experiences his or her environment using whatever mental maps he or she has constructed so far. If the experience is a repeated one, it fits easily--or is assimilated--into the child's cognitive structure so that he or she maintains mental "equilibrium." If the experience is different or new, the child loses equilibrium, and alters his or her cognitive structure to accommodate the new conditions. This way, the child erects more and more adequate cognitive structures. How Piaget's Theory Impacts Learning Curriculum--Educators must plan a developmentally appropriate curriculum that enhances their students' logical and conceptual growth. Instruction--Teachers must emphasize the critical role that experiences--or interactions with the surrounding environment--play in student learning. For example, instructors have to take into account the role that fundamental concepts, such as the permanence of objects, play in establishing cognitive structures.

JEAN PIAGET Piaget was born in Switzerland in 1896, his studies of human cognitivedevelopment help us to understand how children percieve the world around them. Through his interest of children, he became one of this centuries mostinfluential observers of children. He worked for over fifty years observing andstudying children and their behaviors. Piaget realized that a child's mind wasnot a miniature version of the adult. Originally, Piaget was trained as a biologist and graduated with adoctorate from Neuchatel University. Because of his mother's poor mentalhealth, Piaget became interested in psychopathology. In 1919, Piaget moved toParis and took courses in psychopathology, logic, epistemology, and thephilosophy of science. His studies led him to look for an area ofexperimentation, he was recommended to Dr. Theophile Simon, who with AlfredBinet developed the first intelligence test. Piaget became interested in whychildren repeatedly choose the same incorrect answers to the intelligence tests. This motivated him to begin his studies of cognitive development in children. Piaget's research was extremely comprehensive, in fact, Piaget coined theterm "genetic epistemology" to describe his approach to the study ofknowledge. Piaget felt that psychology would provide the missing link betweenthe philosophical problem of epistemology and biological intelligence . Piagetis the author of at least fifty books, numerous articles, and has at least 30honorary doctorates. Over the years, Piaget has taught courses in philosophy, psychology, andsociology at the universities of Geneva, Neuchatel, Lausanne, and Sorbonne. In1955 Piaget organized his own international center for genetic epistemology inGeneva. While in Geneva, Piaget became a familiar snowy haired, pipe in mouth,bike riding, intellectual figure commonly seen around the streets anduniversity. Piaget retired from teaching in 1979, but continued his researchand work at the center until his death in 1980.

Intelligence
When considering intelligence, Piaget focuses on the mental processes thatoccur, rather than on the actual measure of the intellect. He uses four areasto define intelligence. These areas are: a biological approach to looking at intelligence, the succession of the stages, knowledge, and intellectualcompetence. Piaget's biological approach, or biological adaption, focuses on thephysical and mental aspects of our bodies. This includes our reflexes whichoccur when certain stimuli trigger an instinctive response. He also discusseshow we adapt to certain situations using assimilation and accomodation. Assimilation occurs when new information is introduced to a person. The personbegins to integrate the new information into existing files, or "schema". Accomodation occurs when the person reorganizes schema to accomodatethemselves with the environment. The succession of stages involves the movement through four stages thatPiaget has set and defined. Children must move through these stages duringtheir childhood. These include Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concreteoperational, and Formal operational. Stage movement is an important factor ofPiaget's definition of intelligence, because Piaget states there are a specificset of criteria that must be met and mastered at each

stage. In order to movefrom the first stage to the next, the child must master that specific set ofcriteria. To define Intellectual Competence, Piaget focuses on the highest level offunctioning that can occur at a specific stage. Although Piaget has approximateages assigned to stages, a child's competence is only measured by what stagethey are in, not by age. If the child can only perform tasks that are at thepreoperational stage, that is the highest level the child is at regardless ofage.

SENSORIMOTOR STAGE
The sensorimotor stage is the first of the four stages Piaget uses to definecognitive development. Piaget designated the first two years of an infants lifeas the sensorimotor stage. During this period, infants are busy discovering relationships betweentheir bodies and the environment. Researchers have discovered that infants haverelatively well developed sensory abilities. The child relies on seeing,touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things aboutthemselves and the environment. Piaget calls this the sensorimotor stagebecause the early manifestations of intelligence appear from sensory perceptionsand motor activities. Through countless informal experiments, infants develop the concept ofseperate selves, that is, the infant realizes that the external world is not anextension of themselves. Infants realize that an object can be moved by a hand (concept ofcausality), and develop notions of displacement and events. An importantdiscovery during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage is the concept of "objectpermanence".

Object permanence is the awareness that an object continues to existeven when it is not in view. In young infants, when a toy is covered by a pieceof paper, the infant immediately stops and appears to lose interest in the toy(see figure above).This child has not yet mastered the concept of objectpermanence. In older infants, when a toy is covered the child will activelysearch for the object, realizing that the object continues to exist. After a child has mastered the concept of object permanence, the emergenceof "directed groping" begins to take place. With directedgroping, the child begins to perform motor experiments in order to see what willhappen. During directed groping, a child will vary his movements to observe howthe results will differ. The child learns to use new means

to achieve an end. The child discovers he can pull objects toward himself with the aid of a stickor string, or tilt objects to get them through the bars of his playpen.

Concrete Operational Stage

The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget's theory. Thisstage typically occurs between the ages of 7 and 12. During this stage, the child begins to reason logically, and organizethoughts coherently. However, they can only think about acutal physicalobjects, they cannot handle abstract reasoning. This stage is also characterized by a loss of egocentric thinking. During this stage, the child has the ability to master most types of conservationexperiments, and begins to understand reversibility. The concreteoperational stage is also characterized by the child's ability to coordinatetwo dimensions of an object simultaneously, arrange structures in sequence, andtranspose differences between items in a series

THE FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

The formal operational stage is the fourth and final stage in Piaget'stheory. It begins at approximately 11 to 12 years of age, and continuesthroughout adulthood, although Piaget does point out that some people may neverreach this stage of cognitive development. The formal operational stage is characterized by the ability to formulatehypotheses and systematically test them to arrive at an answer to a problem. The individual in the formal stage is also able to think abstractly and tounderstand the form or structure of a mathematical problem. Another characteristic of the individual is their ability to reason contraryto fact. That is, if they are given a statement and asked to use it as thebasis of an argument they are capable of accomplishing the task. For example,they can deal with the statement "what would happen if snow were black".

Stage Movement
According to Piaget, there are four interrelated factors that allow movementfrom stage to stage. These factors include maturation, experience, socialinteraction, and equilibration. Maturation is the physical andpsychological growth that occurs in the child at a specific stage. Experienceis when the child thinks and interacts with real or concrete objects in theexternal environment. Social interaction involves the child socializingwith others, especially chilren. The last factor of stage movement is equilibration,this occurs when the child brings together maturation, experience, and socialinteraction in order to build mental schema. Equilibration is considered to bethe tendency for children to seek cognitive coherence and stability. They aremotivated in this drive for equilibration by disequilibrium or aperceived discrepancy between an existing scheme and something new.

Piagets Conservation Experiments

Conservation is the realization that quantity or amount does not changewhen nothing has been added or taken away from an object or a collection ofobjects, despite changes in form or spatial arrangement (Pulaski, 1980). Jean Piaget used the idea of conservation in a set of experimentsgeared at studying children's ability to think and reason. Piaget realized thatmaturing children progressively master different types of conservation as theyreason about their world. The cow figure below represents conservation of area.When a child realizes that cows eat the same amount of grass regardless of thespatial location of the grass , they can conserve area.

According to piaget, a student's ability to solve conservation problemsdepends on an understanding of three basic aspects of reasoning: identity,compensation, and reversability. With mastery of identity: The student realizes that materialremains the same if nothing is added to or subtracted from the material. With mastery of compensation: The student realizes that changesin one dimension can be offset by changes in another. With mastery of reversibility: The student realizes that achange may be canceled out by mentally reversing the steps and returning to theorigin.

Discussion of Piagetian Conservation Experiments

As suggested by Albert Einstein, Piaget studied a child's conception of time, space, and motion. Piaget published his results in two volumes: TheChild's Conception of Time and The Childs Conception of Movement and Speed.Itshould be recognized that Piaget went beyond a child's conception ofconservation and studied the child's conception of dimension and number. Before a child can develop a true conception of numbers the useage ofone-to-one correspondence must be recognized by the child. Piaget's conservationof number experiment displayed two rows of counters placed in one-to-onecorrespondence . Subjects admit their equality. One of the rows is thenelongated or contracted. The subjects are asked whether each row has the samenumber of counters. Numbers can be reversed (by subtraction) or combined (byaddition) and express characteristics of combinativity, association, identity,and reversibility. The ability of a subject to solve this conservation problemdepends upon subjects mastery of identity. The average age that a child canconserve number is approximately 6-7 years of age.

Conservation of substance demonstrates the principle that alteration ofan object (malleable clay) doesn't change the quantity or mass of an object.Before a child can conserve substance, which is achieved at the age of 7-8, thechild experiences "perception dominance" in which the appearance ofsomething dominates over logical thought progression. Conservation of length isa classic example of "perception dominance", a length of rope is notchanged by an alteration in configuration of the rope. Piaget used a geometrical experiment called "cows on a farm"to test for conservation of area. To illustrate this, Piaget used greencardboard to represent farmland. Two identical green farms were established,each had a little wooden cow placed upon it, subjects were asked whether thecows had the same amount of grass to feed upon. Piaget would proceed to equallyadd little cubic farmhouses to the models. In one farmyard the houses where allarranged in a tidy row, on the other farmland the houses were all scatteredabout. Until the ages of 8-9, children are irresistibly inclined to think thereis less grazing land on the farmland which contains the scattered houses. Conservation of volume is usually tested using a cylinder and a flatdish (see figure below). Children are inclined to think that a tall, erect,narrow dish contains more liquid than an equal amount in a flat dish. Mastery ofconservation of volume requires reverse thinking and is the last of thePiagetian conservation tests children grasp.

A Biological Theory of Knowledge

Piaget never left biology, he had a lifelong interest in the plantsedum, varieties of which are common in many rock gardens. Similarily, Piagetstudied the snail Limnaea Stagnalis for years. Piaget transplanted sedum plantsinto the Savoy Alps in order to see how the plant reacted to coldertemperatures. The plants reacted by yeilding smaller, thicker leaves in orderto increase photosynthesis. He also transplanted the snails from tranquil watersto turbulent rocky shores, the snails reacted by changing their shells from anelongated shape to a globular shape. Piaget felt that living organisms are self-regulating in their choicesof ways to adapt. This differs from Darwin who saw organisms as passive anddependent on mutation and millions of years of evolution for survival. Piagetfelt that adaptation was a continuous process in which the hereditary structureof the organism interacts with the environment in such a way as to reconstituteitself for better survival (Pulaski, 1980). Piaget saw a link between biologicalintelligence and human being intelligence. Piagetian theory explains how human intelligence develops through anintellectual regulatory process geared by adaptation to the environment. Duringthis on-going relationship with the environment the child exhibits certainorganizations based upon assimilation- the taking in process of experience, accepting new encounters and fitting them into existing schemes, andaccommodation- the reaction of the individual who encounters newexperiences that are not consistent with existing schemes and so the personmust change their scheme to accept or accommodate the new information. Piaget felt that a baby is an active and curious organism, thatreaches out and seeks to regulate a balance between assimilation andaccomodation. This balance is what Piaget describes as equilibrium.

Piaget considered the process of equilibrium an important factor in thecognitive growth and development of a child. It was for this reason Piagetinsisted that children must be allowed to do their own learning. Piaget realizedthat humans progressively develop or mature to higher states of cognitivedevelopment andrealized that children acquire knowledge transmitted by parents, teachers,and books, he called this "social transmission." Piaget believed thatwhen a child hears contradictory statements that challenge establishedschemes, equilibrium is disturbed. Piaget called such a disruption inequilibrium "cognitive conflict or disequilibrium." When children experience cognitiveconflict they set out in search of an answer that will enable them to acheivestates of equilibrium. Piaget felt that all children go through certainstages of intellectual development in the same order, even though thechronological ages may vary between bright and dull students.

REFERENCES
Evans, R. I., & Piaget, J. (1973) . The Man and His Ideas. NY: E. P. Dutton & Co, Inc. Feldman, R. S. (1989). Understanding Psychology. NY: McGraw-HillBook Co. Ginsburg, H. P., & Opper, S. (1988). Piaget's Theory ofIntellectual Development. 3rd Ed. N.J.: Prentice Hall. Piaget, J. (1960). The Child's Conception of The World. N.J.:Littlefield, Adams & CO. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intellegence in Children. N.Y.:The Norton Library, WW Norton & Co, Inc. Pulaski, M. A. S. (1980). Understanding Piaget. N.Y.: Harper &Row, Publishers.