Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget (UK: /piˈæʒeɪ/,[1][2] US: /ˌpiːəˈʒeɪ, pjɑːˈʒeɪ/,[3][4][5] French: [ʒɑ̃ pjaʒɛ]; 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.[6]
Jean Piaget
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".[7] His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate 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.[8] 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".[9]
According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing".[10] His ideas were widely popularized in the 1960s.[11] This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology.[12] By the end of the 20th century, he was second only to B. F. Skinner as the most-cited psychologist.[13]
Personal life[edit]
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[14] of English descent through her Lancashire-born great-grandfather, steelmaker James Jackson.[15] 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.[16]
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.[17]
He developed an interest in epistemology due to his godfather's urgings to study the fields of philosophy and logic.[18] 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.[19] 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 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.[20] 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.[21] 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.[22]
In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay (7 January 1899 – 3 July 1983);[23] 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.[24] 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.
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.[25]
In 1972 Piaget was awarded the Erasmus Prize and in 1979 the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences. 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 Geneva.[26]
Criticisms[edit]
Criticisms of Piaget's methods[edit]
Judged by today's standards of psychological research, Piaget's research methods can be considered problematic. One modern reviewer said many of his "pioneering investigations would probably be rejected from most modern journals on methodological grounds of sample size, non-standard measurement, and lack of inter-rater reliability".[64]
Piaget's research relied on very small samples that were not randomly selected. His book The Origins of Intelligence in Children was based on the study of just his own three children.[60] This means that it is difficult to generalize his findings to the broader population. He interacted closely with his research subjects and did not follow a set script, meaning that experimental conditions may not have been exactly the same from participant to participant, introducing issues of consistency.
As Piaget worked in the era before widespread use of voice recording equipment, his data collection method was simply to make handwritten notes in the field, which he would analyse himself.[64] This differs from the modern practice of using multiple coders to ensure test validity. Critics such as Linda Siegel have argued that his experiments did not adequately control for social context and the child's understanding (or lack of understanding) of the language used in the test task, leading to mistaken conclusions about children's lack of reasoning skills.[88]
These methodological issues mean scientists trying to replicate Piaget's experiments have found that small changes to his procedures lead to different results. For example, in his tests of object-permanence and conservation of number, the ages at which children pass the tests varies greatly based on small variations in the test procedure, challenging his theoretical interpretations of his test results.[64][63]
Criticisms of Piaget's theoretical ideas[edit]
Piaget's theories have not gone without scrutiny. A figure whose ideas contradicted Piaget's ideas was the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky stressed the importance of a child's cultural background as an effect on the stages of development. Because different cultures stress different social interactions, this challenged Piaget's theory that the hierarchy of learning development had to develop in succession. Vygotsky introduced the term Zone of proximal development as an overall task a child would have to develop that would be too difficult to develop alone.
Also, the so-called neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development maintained that Piaget's theory does not do justice either to the underlying mechanisms of information processing that explain transition from stage to stage or individual differences in cognitive development. According to these theories, changes in information processing mechanisms, such as speed of processing and working memory, are responsible for ascension from stage to stage. Moreover, differences between individuals in these processes explain why some individuals develop faster than other individuals (Demetriou, 1998).
Over time, alternative theories of child development have been put forward, and empirical findings have done a lot to undermine Piaget's theories. For example, Esther Thelen and colleagues[89] found that babies would not make the A-not-B error if they had small weights added to their arms during the first phase of the experiment that were then removed before the second phase of the experiment. This minor change should not impact babies' understanding of object permanence, so the difference that this makes to babies' performance on the A-not-B task cannot be explained by Piagetian theory. Thelen and colleagues also found that various other factors also influenced performance on the A-not-B task (including strength of memory trace, salience of targets, waiting time and stance), and proposed that this could be better explained using a dynamic systems theory approach than using Piagetian theory. Alison Gopnik and Betty Repacholi[90] found that babies as young as 18 months old can understand that other people have desires, and that these desires could be very different from their own desires. This contradicts Piaget's view that children are very egocentric at this age.
Modern cognitive science had undermined Piaget's view that young children are unable to comprehend numbers as they are not able to work with abstract concepts in the sensorimotor stage. This Piagetian view has led many educators to believe that it is not appropriate to teach simple arithmetic to young children as it will not lead to real understanding.[91] Experiments by Starkey et al. have shown that children have an understanding of abstract numbers from as young as 6 months old while more recent studies by Izard et al. have shown that even newborns can perceive abstract numbers.[92][62] For a full discussion of this, see Stanislas Dehaene's The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.[91]
Some supporters of Piaget counter that his critics' arguments depend on misreadings of Piaget's theory.[93] See also Brian Rotman's Jean Piaget: Psychologist of the Real, an exposition and critique of Piaget's ideas, and Jonathan Tudge and Barbara Rogoff's "Peer influences on cognitive development: Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives".[94]