This paper revolves around developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and his work.
While swaying from the personal to the professional sides of the Swiss
psychologist, the research touches on key influences that inspired young Piaget
to become such a driven and well respected psychologist. However, the most
extensive part of this paper is the explanation of his cognitive development
theory and how it evolved. The three main pieces to Piaget`s puzzle of cognitive
development that are discussed are schemes, assimilation and accommodation, and
the stages of cognitive growth. In addition to the material on the man and his
theory, there is the most important component of the paper, the ways Piaget and
his work molded the future. Piaget 3 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. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 3 Historical Background
4 Theoretical Construct 7 Impact on Society 12 Reference List 13 Piaget 4
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 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 most of all Jean Piaget`s parents who not only instilled an
academia home environment but also provided a solid religious background.
Another big moment came in the form of a book. Piaget names Henri Bergson`s L`Evolution
Creatrice as the most influential piece of writing he has ever read in his adult
life. He had this to say about it, reading Bergson was for me a revelation . . .
close to ecstasy, (Cohen, 1983). Piaget 5 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, according to Cohen (1983), 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, (Cohen, 1983). 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 6 Piaget the motivation to begin testing children and to do what he
felt he was destined to do, determine how the mind grows. His result was the
cognitive development theory. Piaget 7 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,
Ёan active biological system that (uses) environmental information to fit
with or adjust to its own existing mental structures, (Zimbardo &
Weber, 1994). 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, Ёare the structures or organizations of actions as they are
transferred by repetition in similar or analogous circumstances, (Piaget
& Inhelder, 1969). 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 Piaget 8 the
assimilation and accommodation processes can best be described 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
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 he 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,
(Bringuier, 1980). Piaget 9 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, ЁThe stages are
an order of succession. (The development) isn`t [according to] the average age,
(Bringuier, 1980). He goes on to describe the model as a, Ёsequential
order, (Bringuier, 1980) of cognitive growth. The stage model is made of four
stages and as one may infer from the statements from 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,
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). While age does not determine the stage of growth,
the average age of children in this stage is birth to two years old. Zimbardo
and Weber (1994) explain Piaget`s conclusion on this stage as one where, 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 representations of
absent objects, (Zimbardo & Weber, 1994). 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, Piaget 10 and unaware of his self, (Cohen, 1983). The
next stage is the pre-operational which has 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
mind during this stage as described by Zimbardo and Weber (1994): 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 from 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, (Bringuier, 1980). 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 Piaget 11 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 relate
directly to objects, (Bringuier, 1980). 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, (Zimbardo & Weber, 1994). Piaget described this stage best when he
said that, The great novelty of this stage is that . . . the (adolescent)
becomes capable of reasoning correctly, (Cohen, 1983). 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. Piaget 12 Impact on Society Jean Piaget was
the leading 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
. . . (Adelani, etc. 1990). 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 summarizes the cognitive development theory best in this
statement: My secret ambition is that the hypotheses one could oppose to
my own will finally be seen not to contradict them but to result from a normal
process of differentiation. (Bringuier, 1980).

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