JEAN PIAGET
Cognitive Development
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
 Child development is an important concept for anyone going into a field of work
concerning children
 Such fields include child life specialists.
 Piaget was one of the main theorists in child development
 Born 9 August 1896, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
 As a teenager he studied mollusks
 Later in life he studied child psychology and identified 4 stages in development
 Died 16 September 1980, Geneva, Switzerland
 Received multiple awards
 He was the oldest sibling
 His father had a strong dedication to his studies which led to him to be the same way
 He was fascinated with mollusks by age 10. He would spend hours at the local museum of
natural history looking at mollusks
 Studied zoology at the University of Neuchâtel, Ph.D. in the natural sciences (1918)
 He spent a semester studying psychology under Carl Jung and Paul Eugen Bleuler at the
University of Zürich
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where Piaget developed a deeper interest in psychoanalysis
 The next year, he studied abnormal psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris
 In 1920, he worked with Théodore Simon at the Alfred Binet Laboratory in Paris
 Piaget evaluated the results of standardized reasoning tests that Simon had designed
 The tests were meant to measure child intelligence and draw connections between a
child’s age and the nature of his errors. It ended up raising new questions for Piaget about
the way that children learn.
 Piaget ultimately decided that the test was too rigid and revised it to allow children to
explain the logic of their "incorrect" answers.
 He realized that children’s power of reasoning was not flawed after all.
 Where children lacked life experience they used their imagination to come to a logical
answer. He also concluded that factual knowledge should not be equaled to intelligence
or understanding.
 Throughout his career, Piaget also identified four stages of mental development.
 sensorimotor;
 preoperational;
 concrete operational;
 formal operational
 The "sensorimotor stage," (0-2yr) involves learning through motor actions.
 The "preoperation stage," (3-7yr) children develop intelligence through the use of symbolic
language, fantasy play and natural intuition.
 The "concrete operational stage," (8–11yr) children develop cognitively through the use of
logic that is based on concrete evidence.
 "Formal operations," (12-15yr) children form the ability to think abstractly with more
complex understandings of logic and cause and effect.
 Piaget is responsible for developing entirely new fields of scientific study, having a major
impact on the areas of cognitive theory and developmental psychology
 http://piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html