Cognitive Developmental Theory
...papers on them by the time he was 21) but moved into the study of the development of children's understanding, through observing them and talking and listening to them while they worked on exercises he set.
"Piaget's work on children's intellectual development owed much to his early studies of water snails"
(Satterly, 1987:622)
His view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously influential, particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigators, his importance comes from his overall vision.
He proposed that children's thinking does not develop entirely smoothly: instead, there are certain points at which it "takes off" and moves into completely new areas and capabilities. He saw these transitions as taking place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years. This has been taken to mean that before these ages children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain ways, and has been used as the basis for scheduling the school curriculum.
Piaget's Key Ideas
Adaptation What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation
Assimilation
The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.
Accommodation
The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation.
Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.
Classification The ability to group objects together on the basis of...
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