Jean piaget who is he

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Monitor on Psychology. Piaget J author , Duckworth E translator. Genetic Epistemology. American Behavioral Scientist. Piagetian theory. APA Dictionary of Psychology. The science of false memory. Oxford University Press; Smith L. A brief biography of Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget Society. Updated August Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.

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Selected Publications. In His Own Words. Best Known For Theory of cognitive development Genetic epistemology. Important Milestones of Cognitive Development in Children. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback!

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He received one from the Sorbonne in , the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in , on top of an earlier one from Harvard in And, in and , he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology. In , he became a professor at the Sorbonne.

In , he created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology, of which he served as director the rest of his life. And, in , he created the School of Sciences at the University of Geneva. He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more years. By the end of his career, he had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16, , one of the most significant psychologists of the twentieth century.

Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist! But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams. As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking. Finding relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label.

He called it genetic epistemology , meaning the study of the development of knowledge. He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills.

These skills he called schemas. For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. This Piaget called assimilation , specifically assimilating a new object into an old schema. When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and thrust.

This of course works poorly with the new object. This is called accommodation , specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the US were talking about. He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain.

Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our competency in it. According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good or at least good-enough model of the universe.

This ideal state he calls equilibrium. As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated, periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing.

And so he developed the idea of stages of cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology. The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage. It lasts from birth to about two years old.

As the name implies, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills. Between one and four months, the child works on primary circular reactions -- just an action of his own which serves as a stimulus to which it responds with the same action, and around and around we go.

For example, the baby may suck her thumb. That feels good, so she sucks some more Or she may blow a bubble. Between four and 12 months, the infant turns to secondary circular reactions , which involve an act that extends out to the environment: She may squeeze a rubber duckie.

At this point, other things begin to show up as well. And they begin to develop object permanence. Older infants remember, and may even try to find things they can no longer see. Between 12 months and 24 months, the child works on tertiary circular reactions. I hit the drum with the stick -- rat-tat-tat-tat. During these stages children learn naturally without punishment or reward. Piaget saw nature heredity and nurture environment as related and reciprocal, with neither absolute. He found children's notions about nature neither inherited nor learned but constructs of their mental structures and experiences.

Mental growth takes place by integration, or learning higher ideas by assimilating lower-level ideas, and by substitution, or replacing initial explanations of an occurrence or idea with a more reasonable explanation.

Children learn in stages in an upward spiral of understanding, with the same problems attacked and resolved more completely at each higher level. Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and others introduced Piaget's ideas to the United States circa , after which the translations of his books into English began. The post-Sputnik goal of American education, to teach children how to think, evoked further interest in Piaget's ideas. His definable stages of when children's concepts change and mature, derived from experiments with children, are currently favored over the hitherto dominant stimulus-response theory of behaviorist psychologists, who have studied animal learning.

Piaget's theories developed over years as refinements and further explanations and experiments were performed, but these refinements did not alter his basic beliefs or theories. Piaget received honorary degrees from Oxford and Harvard universities and made many impressive guest appearances at conferences concerning childhood development and learning.

He remained an elusive figure, though, preferring to avoid the spotlight. A quieter life allowed him to further develop his theories. Piaget kept himself to a strict personal schedule that filled his entire day. He awoke every morning at four and wrote at least four publishable pages before teaching classes or attending meetings.