Jean Piaget's Theory Of Genetic Epistemology Essays

Known to be a discontinuous form of cognitive development that goes through a set of stages. Piaget’s developmental theory takes’ only one course of development but, is well-assumed that it is universal. The influence of nature and nurture is found to be in

Jean Piaget was a psychologist who looked at a child’s developing their reasoning skills. Piaget carried out detailed observations of them and as his work started taking shape on how our understanding a child’s intellectual skills and as a result of this he has made changes in education. Piaget understood that cognitive developments occurred in stages, his research concentrated on how children learn and start to gain an understanding of their stage of development to be able to learn new concepts. He identified a four-stage process of cognitive development all the way through childhood. He stated that every child would go through each stage but not at the same time, but he also said that some children would sometimes never reach the later stages.

“According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based,” (McLeod).

Jean Piaget, was a trained biologist who was employed at the Binet Institute, where his main job was to develop a French version of an intelligence test. Piaget was very interested in the reason why children would give wrong answers to questions which called for some type of logical thinking. It was believed by Piaget that these wrong answers showed some very drastic differences between the way children and adults both thought ( McLeod, 2015), this is where his theory of Cognitive Development came in, Piaget’s work is described as being the origins of thinking or genetic epistemology (McLeod, 2015), Genetics is where one studies the origins of something. Epistemology discusses the categories of thinking, basically, it shows the properties of structural intelligence. Piaget’s Cognitive Development theory branched off into three different branches, the first one being Schema, the Adaption Process that allow transitions from one stage to another, and finally the four Stages of Development

Piaget asserts that, the instincts children have when they are born are inherited scripts, called schema, these schema are building blocks for cognitive development. As a child grows, he acquires more of these building blocks; moreover, these building blocks become more complex as the child progresses through different stages in development (Huitt, Hummel 2003). Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development are as follows. First, The sensorimotor stage where an infant has

At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and

Jean Piaget researched how the environment and personal experience plays a role in cognitive development for children (Case-Smith & O’Brien, 2010). Piaget established four concepts: adaptation, schema, assimilation, and accommodation (Case-Smith & O’Brien, 2010). Adaptation is described as the process of adjusting to one’s surroundings (Case-Smith & O’Brien, 2010). For example, 5-year-old Betty enters a birthday party full of laughing children. Betty may start smiling and clapping along with her peers.

Secondary circular reactions is the third substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage. It occurs from four months to eight months and includes repeating pleasing actions that involve objects and the baby’s own body (McLeod, 2010). Two examples of the secondary circular reactions substage are, when an infant shakes a rattle for the pleasure of hearing the sound and when an infant coos to make a person stay near them. The fourth substage happens from eight to twelve months and is known as coordination of secondary circular reactions. During this substage, the infant now shows that they can use their knowledge to reach a goal (McLeod, 2010). The infant is now able to know to use a stick to bring a toy within reaching capacity (Santrock, 2015). Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity occurs from twelve months to eighteen months and is the fifth substage of the sensorimotor stage. In the fifth substage, infants become interested in the many effects of objects and what they can make the objects do; such as spinning a block, making it fall, sliding it across the ground, and hitting another object (Santrock, 2015). Piaget’s last substage of the sensorimotor stage is internalization of schemes, this lasts from eighteen months to twenty-four months. Once infants reach this last substage, they can form mental representations of objects and “develop the ability to use primitive

Piaget called his collective theories on child development a "genetic epistemology" (i.e. the origins of thinking). He also relied on the concept of schemas, defined as the cognitive structures and frameworks through which we understand the world, to help further explain his developmental theories. Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His other contributions include detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities. Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

First, Jean Piaget determinated important facts about children’s development. According to Saul McLeod, before Piaget started his research, psychologists thought that children were just not as intelligent as adults. Nevertheless, after observing his own children, Piaget discovered that children do not think like adults, and that they are intelligent in their own manner. Thinking that way, he elaborated a theory in which he said that children develop the ability to learn different things according to their age. This information is crucial, because it explains how children progress. Therefore, Piaget

Jean Piaget was a great mind and contributed copious amount of knowledge and expertise to psychology as a whole, changing the world using children as a primary focus. He founded a study referred to as genetic epistemology, which consisted of his theory of cognitive development and epistemologist view. He believed that children were the future and focused extensively on understand their cognitive development, which he was able to able to the education system. He once said, “Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.” (Piaget, Munari, 2000) and he stood by that claim until the end. Piaget is known all over the world and he work is still used in many fields including psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law.

Jean Piaget was one of the most influential theorist of the 20th Century. A constructivist, he was born in Switzerland in 1896, he published his first paper at the age of 10 on an Albino Sparrow. At the age of 16 he was offered a position as curator of a museum but had to turn down as he was still at school. Piaget went on to University and studied Biology, Psychology and Philosophy and rather than choose one he combined all three into a new discipline which he called “genetic epistemology”, meaning “the developmental theory of knowledge”, how we know the world. https://moodle.ncirl.ie/course/view.php?id=2389&section=

Piaget’s theory also allowed us a way to accept and understand that children's cognitive behavior is intrinsically motivated. Social and other reinforcements do influence children's cognitive explorations but children learn because of the way they are built. In Piaget’s mind cognitive adapts to the environment through assimilation. Also accommodation is a type of biological adaptation (Flavell, 1996). According to Piaget in order to characterize cognitive development in humans we need to understand co-present in cognitive activity which is cognitive structure (Flavell, 1996). Piaget was the first psychologist to try explaining describing cognitive development. His argument is that intellectual advances are made through the equilibration process that has three steps: the first step is for the cognitive equilibrium to de at a low development level; then, cognitive disequilibrium has to be induced by discrepant or inassimilable phenomena and lastly cognitive equilibration has to be at a higher developmental level.

Several years ago, an insightful and profound man, Jean Piaget, established a theory of cognitive growth during childhood. This theory was viewed as a major model for understanding the intricate steps of mental development from the thinking to understanding for a child. This theory also gave rise to the mentality that cognitive processes during childhood are not minuscule versions of adults but rather an irrational yet unique process with its own rules. Even though Piaget’s theory seems quite reasonable and logical, under the light of recent speculation his theory has been widely challenged. However, Piaget’s theory holds great impact in today’s psychology.

The first stage of Piaget’s development theory is the sensorimotor stage which takes place in children most commonly 0 to 2 years old. In this stage, thought is developed through direct physical interactions with the environment. Three major cognitive leaps in this stage are the development of early schemes, the development of goal-oriented behavior, and the development of object permanence. During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they