Piaget's theory: key concepts, main directions, methods of application

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive concept about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was formulated by a Swiss psychologist and philosopher. His name was Jean Piaget. It deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how people gradually begin to acquire, construct and use it. Piaget's theory is mostly known as the developmental stage theory.

Merit of a psychologist

Piaget was the first psychologist to systematically study cognitive development. His contributions include the stage theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to measure various cognitive abilities.

Piaget's intention was not to measure how well children can count, write, or solve problems. Most of all, he was interested in the way in which such fundamental concepts as the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice and other things appeared.

Before workPiaget's point of view in psychology was that children are simply less competent thinkers than adults. A scientist has shown that young children think differently compared to adults.

According to Piaget, children are born with a very simple mental structure (genetically inherited and developed) on which all subsequent knowledge is based. The purpose of theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which a child develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

Main idea

According to Piaget, maturation is the development of mental processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience. He believed that children create an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment, and then adjust their ideas accordingly. Language depends on knowledge and understanding acquired through cognitive development. Piaget's early work received the most attention.

Flaws

Piaget's theory, despite its general approval, has some limitations. Which the scientist himself recognized. For example, his concept supports sharp stages rather than continuous development (horizontal and vertical decaling).

Philosophical and theoretical foundations

Piaget's theory notes that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change. Reality is defined with reference to two conditions. In particular, he argued that reality includes transformations and states.

Transformations refer to all the ways in which a thing or person can change. States refer to conditions or phenomena.

People change in their characteristics as they grow up: for example, a baby does not walk or run without falling, but after 7 years, the sensory-motor anatomy of the child is well developed and now acquires new skills faster. Thus, Piaget's theory states that if the human intellect is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and static aspects of reality.

He suggested that the operational intelligence is responsible for representing and manipulating the dynamic or transformational aspects of reality, while the figurative intelligence is responsible for representing the static aspects of reality.

Operational and figurative intelligence

Operational intelligence is the active aspect of intelligence. It includes all actions, overt or covert, taken in order to trace, reconstruct or anticipate transformations of objects or persons of interest. Piaget's theory of development insists that the figurative or representational aspects of intelligence are subordinate to its operational and dynamic aspects. And, therefore, this understanding essentially follows from the operational aspect of the intellect.

At any time, operational intelligence forms an understanding of the world, and it changes if the understanding is not successful. The development theory of J. Piaget argues that this process of understanding and change includes twomain functions: assimilation and adaptation. They are the driving force behind the development of the mind.

Pedagogy

Piaget's cognitive theory is not directly related to education, although later researchers have explained how the features of the concept can be applied to teaching and learning.

The scientist had a huge impact on the development of educational policy and pedagogical practice. For example, the British government's 1966 survey of primary education was based on Piaget's theory. The result of this review led to the publication of Plowden's report (1967).

Learning through learning - the idea that children learn best by doing and actively learning - was seen as central to transforming the primary school curriculum.

Recurrent topics of the report are individualized learning, curriculum flexibility, the centrality of play in children's learning, use of the environment, discovery-based learning, and the importance of evaluating children's progress - teachers should not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.

Because Piaget's theory is based on biological maturation and stages, the notion of "readiness" is important. It concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught. According to Piaget's theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.

According to the scholar (1958), assimilation and adjustment require an active learner, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot be learned, they mustbe discovered.

First stage

According to Jean Piaget's theory, the development of object permanence is one of the most important achievements. Object permanence is the child's understanding that the object continues to exist. Even if they can't see or hear it. Peek-a-boo is a game in which children, who have yet to fully develop object permanence, react to suddenly hiding and revealing their faces.

Second stage

The preoperative stage is rare and logically inadequate in relation to mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts, as well as magical beliefs. Thinking at this stage is still self-centered, which means it is difficult for the child to see the point of view of others.

The preoperative stage is divided into a sub-stage of symbolic function and a sub-stage of intuitive thinking. The first is when children can understand, imagine, remember and picture objects in their mind without having an object in front of them. And the intuitive stage of thinking is when children tend to ask questions: “why?” and “how did it happen?”. At this stage, children want to understand everything. Piaget's theory of intelligence is very interesting because of these conclusions.

Third stage (operating room)

At the age of 2 to 4 years, children still cannot manipulate and transform thought forms, think in images and symbols. Other examples of intelligence are language and pretend play. In addition, the quality of their symbolicgames may have implications for their future development. For example, young children whose symbolic play is violent are more likely to exhibit antisocial tendencies in later years. Piaget's intellectual theory proves this to us.

Third stage and animism

Animism is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of action and have vital qualities. An example would be a child who believes the pavement has gone mad and caused him to fall. Artificiality refers to the belief that characteristics of the environment can be attributed to human actions or interventions. For example, a child might say that it is windy outside because someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because someone has painted them that color. Finally, prejudice thinking, according to Piaget's theory of intellectual development, is classified under transductive thinking.

Fourth stage (formal operational, logical)

At the age of 4 to 7, children become very curious and ask a lot of questions, starting to use primitive reasoning. There is an interest in reasoning and a desire to know why things are the way they are. Piaget called this the "intuitive sub-stage" because children realize they have a vast amount of knowledge but do not know how they acquired it. Centering, preservation, irreversibility, inclusion in a class, and transitional inference are all characteristics of preoperative thinking.

Centering

Centering is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation while ignoring all others. Conservation is the realization that changing the appearance of a substance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation and exhibition concentration. Both centering and conservation can be more easily understood by seeing the hypothesis in practice. And you can do this by simply watching your children after reading this article.

Criticism

Are the listed stages of development real? Vygotsky and Bruner would have preferred to view development as a continuous process. And some studies have shown that the transition to the formal stage of operation is not guaranteed. For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students fail formal operational tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only a third of adults ever reach the formal operational stage.

Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he did not take into account the influence that social conditions and culture can have on cognitive development. Dasen (1994) cites research he has done in remote parts of the central Australian wilderness with Aboriginal people aged 8-14. He found that the ability to save aboriginal children appeared later - at the age of 10 to 13 years (as opposed to 5 to 7 years, according to Piaget's Swiss model). But the ability to spatial awareness developed in Aboriginal childrenearlier than in Swiss children. Such a study shows that cognitive development depends not only on maturation, but also on cultural factors - spatial awareness is critical for nomadic groups of people.

Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is critical to cognitive development. According to him, a child's learning always takes place in a social context in cooperation with someone more skilled. This social interaction provides language opportunities, and language is the basis of thought.

Piaget's methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. The scientist made careful, detailed naturalistic observations of the children, and from them he wrote diary descriptions reflecting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who could understand questions and carry on conversations. Since Piaget made the observations alone, the data collected is based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would be more reliable if the scientist made observations with another researcher and compared the results afterwards to check if they are similar (i.e. if they are valid between estimates).

Although clinical interviews allow the researcher to delve deeper into the data, the interviewer's interpretation can be biased. For example, children may not understand a question, have short attention spans, may not express themselves very well, and may try to please the experimenter. Suchmethods meant that Piaget could draw inaccurate conclusions.

Some studies have shown that the scientist underestimated children's abilities because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to understand (eg Hughes, 1975). Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child is capable of) and work (what a child can show when performing a certain task). When tasks were changed, productivity and therefore competence were affected. Therefore, Piaget may have underestimated the cognitive abilities of children.

The concept of schema is incompatible with the theories of Bruner (1966) and Vygotsky (1978). Behaviorism also refutes Piaget's schema theory because it cannot be directly observed as it is an internal process. Therefore, they claim that it cannot be objectively measured.

The scientist studied his children and the children of his colleagues in Geneva to derive general principles for the intellectual development of all children. Not only was his sample very small, but it consisted exclusively of European children from families of high socioeconomic status. Therefore, the researchers questioned the universality of his data. For Piaget, language is seen as secondary to action, that is, thought precedes language. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the development of language and thought go together and that the reason for reasoning has more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world.