Friday, March 8, 2013

Jean Piaget


Jean Piaget
(1896 - 1980)

Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions include a hypothesis of cognitive child development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a cycle of simple but ingenious tests to reveal dissimilar cognitive abilities. According to Piaget, children are born with a very essential mental structure on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

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

Piaget’s Stages of Development



Evaluation of Piaget's Theory

Strengths
· He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children.
He was an inspiration to several who came after and took up his thoughts, and has created a huge amount of research which has increased our perceptive of cognitive development.
· His ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating among children, mainly in the field of teaching and learning.

Weaknesses
· He failed to believe the effect that the social setting and culture may have on cognitive development.
· Piaget endorsed out his studies with a handful of contestants – in the early studies he generally used his own children.
· As more than a few studies have shown Piaget underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or complex to understand.

Reference
Web Quest. Retrieved on March 8, 2013, from http://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html#stages

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