FREE ESSAY ON JEAN PIAGET

JEAN PIAGET

Introduction
Now known as one of the trailblazers of developmental psychology, Jean Piaget initially
worked in a wide range of fields. Early in his career Piaget studied the human biological
processes. These processes intrigued Piaget so much that he began to study the realm of
human knowledge. From this study he was determined to uncover the secrets of cognitive
growth in humans. Jean Piaget's research on the growth of the human mind eventually lead
to the formation of the cognitive development theory which consists of three main
components: schemes, assimilation and accommodation, and the stage model. The theory is
best known for Piaget's construction of the discontinuous stage model which was based on
his study of children and how the processes and products of their minds develop over
time. According to this stage model, there are four levels of cognitive growth:
sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. While a
substantial amount of psychologists presently choose to adhere to the constructs of the
information processing approach, Piaget's ground breaking cognitive development view is
still a valuable asset to the branch of developmental psychology. Whether or not Piaget
uncovered any answers to the mysteries of human knowledge is disputable, but one belief
that few dispute is that Jean Piaget did indeed lay a strong foundation for future
developmental psychologists.
Historical Background
In 1896 the summer in Switzerland was just an ordinary, uneventful three months. However,
during this ordinary and uneventful span of time, a child was born who would become an
extraordinary developmental psychologist and fulfill the future with ground breaking
events in the field of cognitive psychology. He was the son of an intelligent man and a
stern, smart religious woman, and the godchild of respected epistemologist Samuel Cornut.
With such scholarly surroundings, there is little surprise that Jean Piaget developed
into such an intelligent individual. 
At age eleven, young Piaget wrote a paper on albino sparrows and got it published. This
publishing provided him with the opportunity to meet a man who would turn out to be very
influential, Paul Godet, the curator at the local museum. Young Piaget also benefited
highly from his prestigious high school in Neuchatel, along with the aforementioned
godfather Samuel Cornut who introduced him to one of the two fields he would grow to
love, epistemology, and the most of all Jean Piaget's parents who not only instilled an
academic home environment but also provided a solid religious background. 
Another big moment came in the from of a book. Piaget names Henry Bergson's L'Evolution
Creatrice as the most influential piece of writing he has ever read in his adult life.
From this book Piaget developed a desire for biology to go along with his existing
interest in philosophy, epistemology to be exact. Piaget stated in his first two books
that he had ambitions of constructing a structure that addressed the basic questions of
epistemology. However, Piaget's strong initial interest in philosophy declined somewhat
when he discovered that the philosophers did not really know any factual answers to
questions that have plagued humanity. Piaget now became equally interested in biology and
epistemology. This dual interest attracted him to psychology, yet he still was unsure of
what direction he should take in his career. 
It was not until Piaget traveled to Paris to hear his favorite writer of the time,
Bergson, that he began to get an idea of what he wanted to do. There Piaget met James M.
Baldwin who would motivate him and teach him the importance of imitation and of
reversible operations. Both of these qualities would play a key role in the formation of
Piaget's development theory. However, Piaget's major turning point came when the
co-worker of the late Alfred Binet, Dr. Simon, requested that he standardize an
intelligence test. Piaget flourished in the role of answering complex philosophical
questions. Yet, Piaget did not go along with the traditional epistemologists who simply
laid back and tried to conjure up answers. Piaget opted for the more biological-type of
experiments with epistemology topics. This method of biological experimentation with
epistemology gave Piaget the motivation to begin testing children and to do what he felt
he was destined to do, determine how the mid grows. His result was the cognitive
development theory. 
Theoretical Constructs
The cognitive development theory is Jean Piaget's attempt to explain how the human mind
develops. A common description of Piaget's view of the mind is that it is and active
biological system that uses environmental information to fit with or adjust to its own
existing mental structures. Now, to describe how this biological system develops, Piaget
breaks the development process down into three main components: schemes, assimilation and
accommodation, and the stage model of cognitive growth. 
Schemes are the structure or organizations of actions as they are transferred by
repetition in similar or analogous circumstances. In simple terms, schemes guide thoughts
based on prior experiences, thus, serving as the building blocks of cognitive growth.
Except, with simple schemes, which are the first schemes to develop in a child's life,
the child has very little, if any, past experiences to guide his or her thoughts.
Therefore, early thoughts depend almost entirely on the new born child's reflexes to
senses. These basic schemes later combine with each other in order to develop more
complex schemes that are more capable of guiding the child than reflexes. However, the
complexity of the schemes depend upon how well and how much an individual either
assimilates or accommodates information that is new to the mind. If schemes are
considered building blocks, then the assimilation and accommodation processes can best be
describes as the construction crews. These two processes aid in cognitive growth by
arranging the new information with schemes that are already present in the individual's
mind. The more new information the child assimilates or accommodates, the less his or her
schemes will have to rely on physical objects to create cognitive operations. Of course,
according to Piaget's stage model, this reliance on physical objects will not decrease
until the latter stages of the child's cognitive growth. 
While both the assimilation and accommodation processes are responsible for establishing
a perfect cognitive fit between the scheme and the information, each completes the
process in different manners, hence the need for two different terms. Assimilation
reconfigures the new data to fit with existing schemes, and the accommodation process
restructures a child's schemes to accommodate the new environmental information. As
Piaget states, "Accommodation is the adjustment of the scheme to the particular
situation." He goes on to give an example of the two processes: An infant who's just
discovered ha can grasp what he sees (will then assimilate) everything he sees to the
schemes of prehension, that is, it becomes an object to grasp as well as an object to
look at or an object to suck on. But if it's a large object for which he needs both hands
he will (accommodate) the scheme of prehension. 
The main component of Jean Piaget's development theory has been addressed somewhat, but a
factor of this importance requires much more attention. The key component is the stage
model of cognitive growth. Piaget makes it clear that these stages are not determined by
age, but cognitive development in this very brief explanation of the model, "The stages
are an order of succession. The development isn't according to the average age." He goes
on to describe the model as a "sequential order" of cognitive growth. The stage model is
made of four stages and as one may infer from the statements form Piaget, these stages
are discontinuous. 
The first stage the child goes through is the sensorimotor. During this stage there is
"the existence of an intelligence before language." While age does not determine the
stage of growth, the average age of children in this stage is birth to two years old.
Piaget's conclusion on this stage is that "the child is tied to the immediate environment
and motor-action schemes, lacking the cognitive ability to represent objects
symbolically." The main task during the sensorimotor stage is for the child to control
and coordinate his or her body. While in the second year, most children begin, "to form
mental representation of absent objects." Finally, at the end of the sensorimotor stage
the child moves rather easily, can identify family members, has developed an
understandable language level, yet the child is still "illogical, egocentric, and unaware
of his self." 
The next stage is the pre-operational which ahas an approximate range of age from two to
seven years old. During this time, unfortunately, the child still can not carry out
logical operations. However, to reach this stage the child must increase the speed of his
or her manipulations, and become involved with more complex tasks. The child also creates
mental symbols for physical objects during this phase. Most importantly, though, are the
three features that preoccupy the mid during this stage: egocentrism - focus revolves
around themselves and no one else; animistic thinking - believing inanimate objects have
life and that they think; and there is centration - in which the child is often too
focused on one characteristic of the perception, thus, the child is prevented form
understanding the entire perception. Jean Piaget also notes that by the end of this stage
the child develops, "language, symbolic play, and mental images (which) permit the
representation of thought, but it is a preoperational thought."
The approximate age for the third phase of cognitive development is seven to eleven years
of age. The child can not think in abstracts during the concrete operational stage, but
can maintain mental operations which allows them to solve problems that are concrete such
as addition and subtraction. During this stage, the child has a general knowledge of the
requirements and guidelines for a complex task but the child can not complete the task
because he or she can not visualize any possibilities. This is because all possibilities
are represented by abstractions and the child can only represent objects in the concrete
form. However, the child does begin to focus on the entire perception, slowly breaking
away from the centration feature that is prevalent during the preoperational stage. Also,
the egocentrism that was so obvious during the preoperational stage is usually left
behind at that stage. One last improvement in the child's cognitive development is that
the child now understands the idea of matter conservation. 
The last stage of cognitive growth according to Jean Piaget is the formal operational
which usually consists of individuals on the average of eleven years old. The child's
cognitive formal operations, "no longer related directly to objects." The child can now
think in abstracts and he or she realizes that their reality is not the only one that
exists. The child also has "all the mental structures needed to go from being naive
thinkers to experts." Piaget described this stage best when he said that "The great
novelty of this stage is that the adolescent becomes capable of reasoning correctly." 
Overall, the schemes, the assimilation and accommodation processes, and the stage model
all are constructs that not only support Piaget's brilliant theory, but they themselves
are innovative theoretical components.
Impact on Society
Jean Piaget was the leaning experimental epistemologist, thanks in some part to Simon and
Binet's work, but he set the standard that would not be accepted by the ethnocentric
Americans until they were desperate during the Cold War and decided to open their eyes
and accept his findings. Once they did this, they implemented Piaget's theory into many
American school systems which would have had a much more beneficial outcome had the
powers that be implemented the great man's work more carefully. Yet Piaget and his theory
have survived and he is labeled as "the dominant force in shaping the cognitive-field and
perceptual-field theories." His theory was strong because he placed intellectual
development over the child's emotional, social, and moral development because he viewed
the intellect as having influence over these other developing entities. In conclusion,
Piaget summarized the cognitive development theory best in this statement: "My secret
ambition is that the hypotheses one could oppose to my own ill finally be seen not to
contradict them but to result from a normal process of differentiation."