Piaget

Educational Pioneer ● August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980 ● Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist ● “Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... but for me and no one else, education means making creators.... You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists."

Binet & Da Boyz ● Taught at the school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. ● While helping mark the tests Piaget noticed that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. ● This led him to the theory that young children's thought or cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults.

Theory of cognitive development 4 Stages: 1) Sensorimotor 2) Preoperational 3) Concrete operational stage 4) Formal Operational stage

Sensorimotor Stage From birth to age 2 we see development in: ● Reflexes ● Habits ● Coordination between vision and prehension (grasping objects) ● Sense of object permanence ● Goal orientation: the deliberate planning of steps to meet an objective ● Creativity (yeah!)

Preoperational stage ● Symbolic functioning - the use of mental symbols words or pictures which the child uses to represent something which is not physically present. ● Centration - focusing or attending to only one aspect of a stimulus or situation. ● Intuitive thought - occurs when the child is able to believe in something without knowing why she or he believes it. *Operation in Piagetian theory is any procedure for mentally acting on objects. This pre-op stage from ages 2 to 7 is characterized by :

Preoperational stage ● Egocentrism - a version of centration, this denotes a tendency of child to only think from their own point of view. ● Inability to Conserve - mass, volume, number, etc.

Concrete operational stage ● Decentering - child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it ● Reversibility - child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state. ● Conservation - understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items. From ages 7 to 11 this stage is characterized by the deveolopment of logic:

Concrete operational stage ● Serialisation - the ability to arrange objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristic. ● Classification - the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic, ● Elimination of Egocentrism - the ability to view things from another's perspective (even if they think incorrectly).

Formal Operational stage After age 11 this stage is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly and draw conclusions from the information available. Understanding such things as love, "shades of gray", and values. Many people do not successfully complete this stage, and "fixate" at the concrete operational stage.

Accommodation and Assimilation Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is thus caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganizing.

Constructivism ● Knowledge is not simply acquired from outside the individual, but it is constructed from within. ● Once knowledge is constructed internally, it is then tested against reality the same way a scientist tests the validity of hypotheses. Like a scientist, the individual learner may discard, modify, or reconstruct knowledge based on its utility in the real world.

Piaget in the Classroom ● Take a constructivist approach ~Children learn best when they are active and seek solutions for themselves ● Facilitate rather than direct learning ~Design situations that all students to learn by doing ● Consider the child’s knowledge and level of thinking ~Interpret what a student is saying and respond in a mode of discourse that is not too far from the student’s level.

Piaget in the Classroom ● Use ongoing assessments ~Math and language portfolios, individual conferences, verbal explanations ● Promote the student’s intellectual health ~Children’s learning occurs naturally and cannot be pushed forward ● Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and discovery ~Emphasis on student’s exploration and discovery ~Observation of student’s interests and participation in activities to determine what the course of learning will be

Metacognitive Reflection What stage are you on? How has accommodation and assimilation lead to your current sense of reality? Any particular events that shaped the way you think about what is truth or your beliefs? Do you agree with his theory and his stages? Is there an absolute order to the stages that everyone goes through?