Cognitive competence and performance in everyday environments

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, the study of children's thinking has more and more been influenced by Piagetian research and ideas directed towards a theory of the growth of children's intellectual competence. Perhaps 30-40 percent of current published research on children's cognition is in some way connected with Piaget's work. His influence spreads beyond Psychology. More than a dozen books in print offer short courses on Piagetian theory for students in Psychology or Education. The longest "short course" (and one of the best) is The Essential Piaget, a set of commentaries and excerpts from Piaget's writings by Gruber and Voneche (1977) that runs to 881 pages. Eight hundred and eighty one pages make up a lot of essence but, of course, we are dealing with the work of a scholar who has to date published some 50 books and hundreds of articles. .At the moment, his productivity is not faltering. There are mixed judgments about Piaget's work among American psy chologists. Some tender him respect bordering on the reverential, but the number of psychologists who base their work completely and uncritically upon that of Piaget is really rather small. Those who see him as providing an important map of children's cognitive development generally concede that other mappings, such as those of Freud, Erikson, Bowlby, Werner, and Vygotsky, reveal important aspects of children's development not treated by Piaget. Piaget's map says that there are broad stage changes in children's cog nitive development, from sensorimotor intelligence to preoperational thought to concrete operations to formal operations. But careful studies have shown that the idea that children's thought advances in broad leaps is, at best, a very approximate picture of what is going on in children's cognitive development (Brainerd 1978; Gelman 1978).