Overview of Piaget’s Life and Work
Prior to Piaget’s theory, children were often thought of simply as mini-adults. Instead, Piaget suggested that the way children think is fundamentally different from the way that adults think. Piaget’s theory had a tremendous influence on the emergence of developmental psychology as a distinctive subfield within psychology and contributed greatly to the field of education. He is also credited as a pioneer of the constructivist theory, which suggests that people actively construct their knowledge of the world based on the interaction between their ideas and experiences. In a 2002 survey of 1,725 American Psychological Society members, Piaget was named the second most influential psychologist of the 20th century.
Biography of Piaget’s Life
Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9, 1896, and began showing an interest in the natural sciences at a very early age.
Early Life
By the time he was 11, Piaget had already started his career as a researcher by writing a short paper on an albino sparrow. Piaget continued to study the natural sciences and received his doctorate in zoology from the University of Neuchâtel in 1918. During this time, he published two essays that provided a foundation for his future thoughts and theories. While his early career consisted of work in the natural sciences, during the 1920s he began to move toward work as a psychologist.
Personal Life
Piaget married Valentine Châtenay in 1923 and the couple went on to have three children. Piaget’s observations of his own children served as the basis for many of his later theories.
Later Years
In 1925, Piaget returned to the University of Neuchâtel as a professor of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. From 1929 to 1967, he served as the Director of the International Bureau of Education in Geneva. He also taught at the University of Geneva. Piaget founded the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in 1955. He died in 1980 and was buried in Geneva.
Piaget’s Career and Theories
Piaget had several ideas or theories about cognitive development throughout his career. Piaget also wrote his autobiography for a chapter in “History of Psychology in Autobiography,” volume 4, published in 1952.
Intellectual Development
Piaget developed an interest in psychoanalysis and spent a year working at a boys’ institution created by Alfred Binet. Binet is known as the developer of the world’s first intelligence test, and Piaget took part in scoring these assessments.
Roots of Knowledge
Piaget identified himself as a genetic epistemologist. In his paper Genetic Epistemology, Piaget explained, “What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.” His early work with Binet’s intelligence tests led Piaget to conclude that children think differently than adults. While this is a widely accepted notion today, it was considered revolutionary at the time. It was this observation that inspired his interest in understanding how knowledge grows throughout childhood.
Schemas
Piaget suggested that children sort the knowledge they acquire through their experiences and interactions into groupings known as schemas. When new information is acquired, it can either be assimilated into existing schemas or accommodated through revising an existing schema or creating an entirely new category of information.
Stages of Cognitive Development
Today, Jean Piaget is best known for his research on children’s cognitive development. Piaget studied the intellectual development of his own three children and created a theory that described the stages that children pass through in the development of intelligence and formal thought processes. The four stages of Piaget’s theory are as follows:
Sensorimotor stage: The first stage of development lasts from birth to approximately age 2. At this point in development, children know the world primarily through their senses and movements. Preoperational stage: The second stage of development lasts from the ages of 2 to 7 and is characterized by the development of language and the emergence of symbolic play. Concrete operational stage: The third stage of cognitive development lasts from the age of 7 to approximately age 11. At this point, logical thought emerges, but children still struggle with abstract and theoretical thinking. Formal operational stage: In the fourth and final stage of cognitive development, lasting from age 12 and into adulthood, children become much more adept at abstract thought and deductive reasoning.
Piaget’s Contributions to Psychology
Piaget contributed to psychology in various ways. He provided support for the idea that children think differently than adults and his research identified several important milestones in the mental development of children. His work also generated interest in cognitive and developmental psychology.
“Origins of Intelligence in the Child,” 1936"Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood," 1945"Main Trends in Psychology." 1970"Genetic Epistemology," 1970"Memory and intelligence," 1973
Piaget’s theories are widely studied today by students of both psychology and education. In the case of the latter, he once said, “The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”
Piaget’s Influence on Psychology
Piaget’s theories continue to be studied in the areas of psychology, sociology, education, and genetics. His work contributed to our understanding of the cognitive development of children. Piaget helped demonstrate that childhood is a unique and important period of human development. In their 2005 text, “The Science of False Memory,” authors C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna wrote of Piaget’s influence: “In the course of a long and hugely prolific career, he contributed important scholarly work to fields as diverse as the philosophy of science, linguistics, education, sociology, and evolutionary biology. Above all, however, he was the developmental psychologist of the 20th century. For two decades, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, Piagetian theory and Piaget’s research findings dominated developmental psychology worldwide, much as Freud’s ideas had dominated abnormal psychology a generation before. Almost single-handedly, he shifted the focus of developmental research away from its traditional concerns with social and emotional development and toward cognitive development.”
Influence on Psychologists
Piaget’s work influenced other notable psychologists including Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg.
Howard Gardner: Gardner developed the theory of multiple intelligences in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike Piaget, Gardner believed that there are various types of intelligence vs. a single type of intelligence of which people have greater or lesser amounts. Gardner cited Piaget as greatly influencing his work, as he sought to prove Piaget’s theory wrong.Robert Sternberg: Similar to Gardner, Sternberg’s work uses classical theories of intelligence like Piaget’s, but contradicts them. Sternberg is best-known for his triarchic theory of intelligence in which he posits there are three types of intelligence: practical, creative, and analytical. According to Sternberg, IQ tests only measure analytic intelligence, which doesn’t give a complete picture of someone’s intelligence.
Influence on Education
Piaget’s work continues to influence education. He advocated for the following principles, which are still often used in classrooms:
Discovery learning: This emphasizes the idea that children should be given the freedom to explore and discover new information on their own. A learning environment should also provide courses such as music, dance, and art.Problem-solving: Piaget believed that children should be taught by solving problems; in addition, teachers should pay attention to how a child arrives at a correct answer.Stage-based teaching: Since each child falls into a different stage of cognitive development (and children progress through the stages in their own time), Piaget believed it was important that the learning environment reflects which stage a child is in.
A Word From Verywell
Jean Piaget helped shape our foundational knowledge of childhood cognitive development. His theories have influenced not just the field of developmental psychology, but also other fields, including sociology, education, and more. Piaget theorized that egocentrism developed between the stages of autistic thought (thought that is undirected and symbolic) and scientific thought (thought that is more logical and socialized)—which is roughly between the ages of 3 and 7.
