Piaget's Developmental Theory: An Overview

Question 1

What disciplines were combined and what were they combined into?

Answer 1

Biology, psychology, and philosophy –> Epistemology

Question 2

What is epistomology?

Answer 2

The branch of philosophy that attempts to answer the question, “how do we know the world”

Question 3

How did Piaget want to answer the question of how we know the world?

Answer 3

Experimentally, by putting the question to nature and by choosing to explore how children progressively construct the world as a result of both experience and mental maturity

Question 4

What makes Piaget’s theory a truly genetic epistemology?

Answer 4

The idea that our knowledge about the world grows in stages which parallel our mental growth

Question 5

What develops and allows children to construct and reconstruct their world?

Answer 5

Human intelligence, adaptive thought, and action

Question 6

What two issues do Piaget’s studies always deal with?

Answer 6

• The content thought with what children know
• The process of knowing the how and why of children’s knowledge

Question 7

What doesn’t Piaget believe there’s an absolute separation between?

Answer 7

The process of knowing and the content of our knowledge (there is no knowledge without intelligence and no intelligence without knowledge)

Question 8

During the 1920s, the first period of his work, what did he study and find?

Answer 8

Studied children’s language, their conceptions of the physical world, and the evolution of their moral judgments
- Found that children were egocentric in their thinking and failed to take the point of view of the other person in either their language or thought

Question 9

How do children go from being egocentric to sociocentric?

Answer 9

As children mature, they lose their egocentrism and begin to take other people’s standpoints into account

Question 10

How did Piaget create a new methodology and what was it called?

Answer 10

• Borrowed the idea of asking all children the same question from the field of mental testing
• Borrowed the idea of an open-ended inquiry from the field of psychiatry
• Combined these ideas and create the semi clinical interview

Question 11

How is a semi clinical interview conducted?

Answer 11

They examiner always begins by asking the same question but follows up by an open-ended unstructured question

Question 12

During the first period of his work, what was he concerned with?

Answer 12

Children’s language, moral development, and conceptions of the world - egocentric

Question 13

Towards the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, the second period began and looked at what? How?

Answer 13

The very beginnings of intelligence and the construction of the world as it emerged by devising a brilliant set of non-verbal tests to explore how infants explore and construct their world

Question 14

What did Piaget discover about object permanence?

Answer 14

It was not until the age of about 6 months that children really understood that objects continue to exist after they disappear from our senses

Question 15

How do children construct reality?

Answer 15

By means of assimilation (play) and accommodation (work)

Question 16

What does assimilation always involve?

Answer 16

A transformation of reality in the service of self

Question 17

What is accommodation a transformation of?

Answer 17

The transformation of ourselves to meet the demands of the world

Question 18

From the mid-1930s to the 1960s, what did the third stage of work cover?

Answer 18

Describing the course of mental development by introducing a logical model

Question 19

During the third period of his work, what were his published books on?

Answer 19

Children’s conception of space, time, number, speed, and the mechanisms of perception

Question 20

What did Piaget see his four major stages of development as?

Answer 20

• Saw mental growth as an upward-expanding spiral
• At each stage of development, the child deals with the same issues of space, time, causality, and so on, but at a higher and more complex level

Question 21

What years make up the sensorimotor period and what is the child primarily concerned with?

Answer 21

• First two years of life
• Primarily concerned with creating a world of permanent objects by grasping, dropping, tasting, etc.

Question 22

What years make up the preoperational stage and what does the child do?

Answer 22

• 2 to 7
• Child reconstructs the world at the symbolic level

Question 23

What does children’s “play” provide an opportunity for?

Answer 23

Unique opportunity for them to match their verbal labels with the real object

Question 24

What years make up the concrete operational stage and what does the child do?

Answer 24

• 7 to 11
• Child again, reconstructs the world, but now on the basis of rules, numbers, classes, and relations

Question 25

What years make up the formal operational stage and what does the adolescent do?

Answer 25

• 12 and up
• Construct and expansive world of ideals

Question 26

Between the 1960s and 1980s, the last phase of his work, what issues did Piaget deal with?

Answer 26

Memory and imagery

Question 27

What was he able to show about memory?

Answer 27

That it is not just a “file cabinet of stored facts,” but rather a dynamic system as children get older and attain higher levels of mental ability

Question 28

How did he demonstrate that children reconstruct the facts they have stored in memory and are able to recall them better as they age?

Answer 28

Simple longitudinal experiment where he was able to show that a child remembered a pattern at 8 years old better than at age 5 when they had only seen it once