Did Piaget Underestimate What Children Understand about the Physical World?

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. Many psychologists consider him to be the most influential developmental psychologist of the twentieth century. He made detailed observations of children's activities, talked to children, listened to them talking to each other, and devised and presented many tests of children's thinking.

It was Piaget who founded genetic epistemology, the study of the development of knowledge. Originally based on the observations he made of his own children, he concluded that younger children's intelligence is both qualitatively and quantitatively different to that of older children's. Piaget suspected that the way that we are able to form and deal with concepts changes as we move from childhood to adolescence.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development focuses on the organisation of intelligence and how it changes as children grow, and he identified a number of distinct stages of intellectual development (sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational). He suggested that children progress through each stage in turn, in sequence. However, it has been argued that it is possible for children to reach later stages without progressing through earlier ones (Horn, 1976) an example of this is some children walk without ever crawling. The notion of "stages" as suggested by Piaget is disputed and has both supporters, such as Flavell, 1971, and opponents, such as Sternberg, 1990.

Some researchers have been critical about Piaget's "stages" theory, arguing that discontinuous, step-like changes in cognitive development suggested by stages are improbable and that development proceeds in a continuous style (Keating, 1980). Bee (1995) considers that deve...

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...rovided a starting point for other researchers, and if he was still alive today, it is likely that he would have continued his research and made necessary alterations to his original ideas.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Piaget did miscalculate what children understand about the physical world. Many people have made efforts to enhance our knowledge of cognitive development based on Piaget's theory.

References

Tony Malim and Ann Birch (1998) Introductory Psychology London: MacMillan Press Ltd

Richard Gross and Rob McIlveen (1998) Psychology: A new Introduction London: Hodder and Stoughton<

Child development, 1976, 47. 812-819

Sex Differences: A study of the eye of the beholder John Condry and Sandra Condry

Child development, 1985, 56. 225-233

Sex and Aggression: The influence of Gender Label on the perception of Aggression in Children