Piaget's View Research Articles

The Application of Playing in Early Childhood Education Based on Piaget’s Way of Thinking

Childhood is identic with playing, and children are also said to be Homo Ludens or creatures of play. The Indonesian government is promoting criteria emphasizing play as a learning process. In addition, an emancipated curriculum means that children are given the opportunity for freedom of choice and activities so that students can build their knowledge. This policy contributes to Piaget's concept of thinking, which sees how children learn by constructing their knowledge. This study looks at the application of play in early childhood education based on Piaget's way of thinking. This study uses a systematic literature review research method. The results of this study discuss how Piaget views the concept of play in early childhood. The update of this article from the previous article is that it will explain early childhood play activities more precisely according to Piaget's views. Piaget asserts that knowledge development occurs through imagination in new experiences, which actively builds and modifies prior knowledge, and play is the primary medium in which this process occurs. The results of this paper are useful for educators and parents who know better how play can provide an unconscious learning process in children.

The Role of Picture Books in Raising Children's Understanding of English Literature and Life Science Concepts: Selected Stories by Eric Carle

Abstract
 The current study is a theoretical study that aims to underline the role of picture books as a serious genre of children's literature in raising children's understanding of English literature and life concepts; especially for non-English speakers. Unfortunately, most Iraqi people have developed a social phobia of learning English since childhood. This phobia is resulted from the heavy traditional reading and writing assignments as well as hard exams. Therefore, this study suggests incorporating more interesting literary material like picture books that would bring pleasure and help in raising children's love and cognition of English Language. More significantly, it calls to replace the old curriculum with a more vital one where children can interact with all their senses; visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK). To make this possible, two of Eric Carle's books The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Tiny Seed have been carefully selected according to the American and English elementary school teachers' standards for children aged 3-6 years old. Each story element was submitted to a literary analysis, including pictures, life concepts, and language that enhance children's understanding of literature. Based on Piaget's view about the importance of involving sensorimotor actions in learning to help in children's cognition development, some VAK lesson plans and activities were designed using the concept development model and Synectics strategy. The study has concluded that incorporating picture books into the school curriculum and sensorimotor activities like coloring, cutting paper, games, sounds, and music would help in raising children's understanding of English literature and life science more interactively.

Enchanted animism: A matter of care

Jean Piaget, whose work continues to be very influential in early childhood education, associated young children’s animism with their ‘primitive thought’ claiming children remain animists until they reach a more advanced and rational stage of development. This article proposes a rethinking of the Piagetian view of animism, suggesting instead that children’s animism be conceived as a ‘matter of care’ which may then offer possibilities for living more responsively and attentively with non human others. Drawing on two recent research projects involving two-to-eight-year-old children, the article contends that children’s playful and speculative ‘enchanted animism’ can create a spaces for curiosity, wonder and immersion in and of the world. The author argues that enchanted animism has the potential to open children to their worldly embeddedness and can ignite possibilities for more responsive and attentive ways of living with an increasingly damaged Earth.

Class inclusion versus quantifiers comprehension tasks: an experimental study with school-aged children.

Literature in developmental psychology pays special attention to the difficulties met by preschool children when confronted with (universal vs. existential) quantified sentences. According to the pivotal Piagetian view, the difficulties exhibited in quantifier comprehension during the preoperational period (age 2-6) derive from the same limitations in logical reasoning that cause bad performance outcomes in class inclusion problems. Nevertheless, as far as we know, a direct comparison between the two tasks has never been produced. In this research we tested the logical hypotheses concerning the failure in quantifier comprehension of preschool children by administering a sentence-picture matching task to two groups of children (5-6 vs. 7-8years old). Pictures, obtained by partially pairing two entity sets, one of which outnumbers the other, were presented to participants. After each picture, children were asked to answer questions involving quantified versus class inclusion contents. Main findings showed that younger children performed the quantifier task worse than older children and their performance in that task was also worse with respect to the class inclusion task. This difference was not observed with older children who obtained better results than younger children in both tasks. These findings suggest that the specific abilities involved in solving the two problems evolve independently from each other during cognitive development. The results have been discussed in the light of the recent developmental theories.

Dete i odrasli u svetlu fenomenoloških shvatanja M. Merlo-Pontija

The paper offers an analysis of the child-adult relationship problems in the context of the phenomenological psychology and pedagogy of M. Merleau-Ponty. The authors first outline Merleau-Ponty's key philosophical standpoint on which he builds his views on psychological and pedagogical problems. The paper focuses on the problem of understanding a child's world and the possibility of communication between children and adults, as well as on the problem of children's perception of the world around them. The authors also look at Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Piaget's views on the above-mentioned problems.

The Role of Equilibration in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development and Its Implication for Receptive Skills: A Theoretical Study

Piaget’s theory, which is at the center of cognitive approaches to psychology and learning, gave a significant importance to the construct of equilibration. This construct plays a paramount role in cognitive adaptation. It is the unifying factor, and thus the sufficient condition of cognitive development. An attempt was made in this paper to revisit the construct of equilibrium in the realm of cognitive development and relate it to the two receptive language skills, namely; listening and reading comprehension. Topics analyzed included, overview of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, assimilation and accommodation in the process of equilibration and their role in cognitive adaptation, kinds of equilibration, schema theory, Rutherford’s neo-Piagetian view of assimilation and accommodation. Then the process of equilibration was related to the practical contexts and its implications and contributions to the listening and reading comprehension was described. It’s also described how critical thinking, schemata, assimilation, accommodation, and reading comprehension are interrelated to each other in implication section. Finally, Rutherford’s neo- Piagetian view is contributed to reading comprehension from socio-cultural perspective.

TEACHING MATHEMATICS WITH PIAGET'S THEORY

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence first developed by Jean Piaget. It is primarily known as a developmental stage theory, but in fact, it deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans come gradually to acquire it, construct it, and use it. Moreover, Piaget claims the idea that cognitive development is at the centre of human organism and language is contingent on cognitive development. Below, there is first a short description of Piaget's views about the nature of intelligence and then a description of the stages through which it develops until maturity.This paper presented student’s way of thinking in mathematics learning. Jean Piaget’s theory brought here as the main concept applied on children thinking process in mathematics. Through observation, some fact emerges in every stage of development process. Those display on “Cant and But Can’t” Table.

Profiles of international archives: Les archives Jean Piaget, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

This research report provides a look behind closed doors at the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva, Switzerland. It situates the potential visitor, contextualizes the Archives in its own history, and then describes what scholars can expect to find. New details about Piaget's views on Equal Rights and Equal Pay are also provided, including a look at how they affected the women who worked his factory (esp. Bärbel Inhelder). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

How can children inform our understanding of exploratory learning in non-human animals?

Introduction Piaget's view – that children learn through play and exploration – is widely accepted as being integral to cognitive development. Surprisingly few scientists have systematical ly investigated how exploration is structured to support learning mechanisms in different situations and even fewer have studied it in non-human animals. Traditional ly, the methodological approach for studying cognitive development in human and non-human animals has been very different, but a comparative approach can be very informative. We exploited the strong explorative tendencies of parrots and human children , and designed a series of comparative experiments to provide a window into the mechanisms and strategies used in causal learning.

Historical Perspectives on Games and Education from the Learning Sciences

This paper reviews three classic theorists’ writing on games, learning, and development. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner all wrote about games and play as important to thinking and learning. This review attempts to synthesize their perspectives as a means to revisit underused theoretical perspectives on the role of games in education. The views of Piaget and Vygotsky are applied with respect to the role of games and play in learning and development to the design of a popular commercial game. Bruner’s perspective offers the embodiment of games into a larger and controversial curriculum intended to teach young people about human culture. Each of the perspectives is reviewed and considered in light of new gaming technologies and their potential for educational change.

Development of hierarchical structures for actions and motor imagery: a constructivist view from synthetic neuro-robotics study

The current paper shows a neuro-robotics experiment on developmental learning of goal-directed actions. The robot was trained to predict visuo-proprioceptive flow of achieving a set of goal-directed behaviors through iterative tutor training processes. The learning was conducted by employing a dynamic neural network model which is characterized by their multiple time-scale dynamics. The experimental results showed that functional hierarchical structures emerge through stages of developments where behavior primitives are generated in earlier stages and their sequences of achieving goals appear in later stages. It was also observed that motor imagery is generated in earlier stages compared to actual behaviors. Our claim that manipulatable inner representation should emerge through the sensory-motor interactions is corresponded to Piaget's constructivist view.

Genetic Epistemology and Piaget's Philosophy of Science

This paper concerns Jean Piaget's (1896–1980) philosophy of science and, in particular, the picture of scientific development suggested by his theory of genetic epistemology. The aims of the paper are threefold: (1) to examine genetic epistemology as a theory concerning the growth of knowledge both in the individual and in science; (2) to explicate Piaget's view of ‘scientific progress’, which is grounded in his theory of equilibration; and (3) to juxtapose Piaget's notion of progress with Thomas Kuhn's (1922–1996). Issues of scientific continuity, scientific realism and scientific rationality are discussed. It is argued that Piaget's view highlights weaknesses in Kuhn's ‘discontinuous’ picture of scientific change.

Teaching perspective-taking skills to typically developing children through derived relational responding.

Abstract Perspective-taking is an ability that requires a child to emit a selection response of informational states in himself or herself and in others. This study used an extended version of the Barnes-Holmes protocol developed in a series of studies by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, and Barnes-Holmes (2004) to teach typically developing children between the ages of 6-11 perspective-taking skills. The present demonstrational study used a multiple probe design to evaluate the participants' abilities to demonstrate a number of simple and complex relations, and examined both relation type and relational complexity. We also tested for generalization of perspective taking to new stimuli and real-world conversational topics. Results demonstrate that the capacity to alter perspectives can be established by means of a history of reinforced relational responding. Keywords: Perspective-taking, Relational Frame Theory, Theory of Mind, stimulus generalization, response generalization. ********** Perspective-taking is a phenomenon described in the developmental literature that requires a child to display knowledge of informational states in himself or herself and in others (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, Dymond, & O'Hara, 2001). A simple example of a child taking another's perspective occurs when, for instance, a child discriminates that when sitting in a different chair from which he is sitting in now, an object will look different from that different viewpoint. Perspective-taking skills are said by developmental psychologists to benefit children in their complex reasoning abilities. In addition, having the ability to take another person's perspective is an important social skill that children need in order to make and sustain friendships. There have been a multitude of studies conducted concerning perspective-taking skills in children. The majority of these studies have focused on the age at which children develop these skills. For example, Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) discussed the developmental psychologist Piaget's view on perspective taking. Piaget did not believe that these skills are developed in children before the age of 9-10 because of children's tendency to be egocentric, meaning that children have problems realizing that other people see things in different ways than themselves. Specifically, Piaget believed that children couldn't develop perspective-taking skills because they code spatial location differently from adults. For example, Piaget thought that children use a topographical system of spatial representation. Children code relationships through touching or proximity, whereas adults use metric coding of distance, such as coding the position of objects as being in the vicinity of landmarks. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979), however, argued that this lack of perspective-taking in children is not due to the children's difficulty with coding spatial locations, but rather conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference. Instead of relying on these frames of reference as in Piaget's studies, these authors asked preschoolers what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer, and this led to improved performance. The Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) study extended the results of the Huttenlocher and Presson study. The results clearly showed that the preschool children in their study could indicate locations relative to another person. Surprisingly, although young children still made egocentric errors, it is still quite notable that 3-year old performance was considerably above chance. Other studies conducted on perspective taking focused on the different aspects of this skill. Dixon and Moore (1990) for example, examined the difference between the two situations in which perspective taking can be seen. The authors labeled these two situations as Information effect--when the subject and the other person have contrasting information, and the Weighting effect--when the subject and the other person have the same information but use that information differently when deciding their own separate judgments. …

The development of arithmetical abilities

Arithmetical skills are essential to the effective exercise of citizenship in a numerate society. How these skills are acquired, or fail to be acquired, is of great importance not only to individual children but to the organisation of formal education and its role in society. The evidence on the normal and abnormal developmental progression of arithmetical abilities is reviewed; in particular, evidence for arithmetical ability arising from innate specific cognitive skills (innate numerosity) vs. general cognitive abilities (the Piagetian view) is compared. These include evidence from infancy research, neuropsychological studies of developmental dyscalculia, neuroimaging and genetics. The development of arithmetical abilities can be described in terms of the idea of numerosity -- the number of objects in a set. Early arithmetic is usually thought of as the effects on numerosity of operations on sets such as set union. The child's concept of numerosity appears to be innate, as infants, even in the first week of life, seem to discriminate visual arrays on the basis of numerosity. Development can be seen in terms of an increasingly sophisticated understanding of numerosity and its implications, and in increasing skill in manipulating numerosities. The impairment in the capacity to learn arithmetic -- dyscalculia -- can be interpreted in many cases as a deficit in the concept in the child's concept of numerosity. The neuroanatomical bases of arithmetical development and other outstanding issues are discussed. The evidence broadly supports the idea of an innate specific capacity for acquiring arithmetical skills, but the effects of the content of learning, and the timing of learning in the course of development, requires further investigation.

Computational developmental psychology

Despite decades of scientific research, the core issues of child development remain too complex to be explained by traditional verbal theories. These issues include structure and transition, representation and processing, innate and experiential determinants of development, stages of development, the purpose and end of development, and the relation between knowledge and learning. In this book Thomas Shultz shows how computational modeling can be used to capture these complex phenomena, and in so doing he lays the foundation for a new subfield of developmental psychology, computational developmental psychology. A principal approach in developmental thinking is the constructivist one. Constructivism is the Piagetian view that the child builds new cognitive structures by using current mental structures to understand new events. In this book Shultz features constructivist models employing networks that grow as well as learn. This allows models to implement synaptogenesis and neurogenesis in a way that allows qualitative changes in processing mechanisms. The book's appendices provide additional background on the mathematical concepts used, and a companion Web site contains easy-to-use computational packages.

The meaning of autonomy in early childhood teacher education

The term autonomy has multiple meanings based on diversity in theoretical views in current educational literature. Examples are given of multiple meanings of autonomy, and comparisons are made to the Piagetian view of autonomy as self‐regulation implying separateness within community. A case is made for the relevance of autonomy as an educational aim. Implications are drawn for autonomy as an aim for early childhood teacher education based on a Piagetian view of autonomy.

Is a field theory of perseverative reaching compatible with a Piagetian view?

This commentary is a brief reflection on the relationship between the embodied cognition analysis and a Piagetian theoretical position. In particular, the place of A-not-B in the larger Piagetian framework and the importance of the concept of mental representation, in contrast with perceptual understanding, are noted.

Pain and Piaget: Qualitative change with age in the content area of children's ideas about pain

Piaget's views of qualitative change in the development of children's thinking have been criticised by Carey (1985) who proposed that development is a function of information. This paper describes the development of children's ideas about some aspects of pain in an Irish sample of 680 five to fourteen year olds. The results show statistically significant patterns consonant with Piagetian theory and with findings in other health-related areas. However, some areas in this and other studies are identified which also require specific information for conceptual development, which is especially relevant in the context of information provision to hospitalised children.

Where's the ball? Two- and three-year-olds reason about unseen events.

Children 2, 2 1/2, and 3 years of age engaged in a search task in which they opened 1 of 4 doors in an occluder to retrieve a ball that had been rolled behind the occluder. The correct door was determined by a partially visible wall placed behind the occluder that stopped the motion of the unseen ball. Only the oldest group of children was able to reliably choose the correct door. All children were able to retrieve a toy that had been hidden in the same apparatus if the toy was hidden from the front by opening a door. Analysis of the younger children's errors indicated that they did not search randomly but instead used a variety of strategies. The results are consistent with the Piagetian view that the ability to use representations to guide action develops slowly over the first years of life.

Logic of meanings and situated cognition

Inspired by the views of Piaget & Garcia (1991)that logico-mathematical knowledge has its foundations in a logic of meanings, this paper aims at a better understanding of how knowledge develops in everyday contexts, by taking into account situational aspects, individual reasoning processes, and logico-mathematical understanding. We first provide a re-analysis of data on the understanding of proportionality developed outside of school, in buying and selling activities. The set of studies we discuss shows how procedures to solve proportionality problems in specific contexts later develop as general and flexible approaches to solve problems in different contexts. Then, in an interview with an adult with restricted schooling, we show how understanding of graphical representation is achieved through the attribution of meanings to a graph on the basis of personal wishes, opinions, and knowledge about the situation and by a continuous search for logical coherence.