BARRY: The difficulty when discussing the works of Piaget is not finding information to include but more a matter of how to précis the vast amount of information there is in the time allocated to us. I have tried to condense this as much as possible but do apologize in advance for the large amount of text on each slide. Rather than miss anything out I have risked trying the fast moving, but extremely informative presentation. The good news is that you won’t need to take notes as we have not only presented the information here but also posted it to the web at www.ucn-web.info/piaget htm. We will split the presentation into 3 parts introducing the Man, the works and the closing So for those, who haven’t done Psychology before and still think that Piaget is an expensive Swiss watch, hold onto your seats. For those who have done Psych. please just try to look interested and ask lots of questions after

This Piagetian* quote seems to reinforce the underlying Piagetian theories. This is one for example that I personally like. Those with children of their own should bear this in mind the next time they try to tell their kids that something is hot.

This presentation has been produced for the benefit of those who are hearing of Piaget for the first time but I hope that those who already have a working knowledge of the man will also glean some new information from my work.

Albert Einstein remarked: His discovery is so simple that only a genius could have thought of it. Jean Piaget was born in the town of Neuchatel, in the French speaking part of Switzerland on August 9, 1896. He was the oldest child of Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval literature and of Rebecca Jackson.(one of his students) At the age of 10 Jean published his first papers on subjects like the sighting of an Albino Sparrow – It was a one page note and his publishers didn’t know how old he was - and Mollusks. His observations led to questions that could be answered only by accessing the University library. When he was a pupil at Neuchâtel Latin high school he was a child prodigy who soon became interested in studying nature. Which made him recognised by the European Zoologists of those times. During his late adolescence his interest for mollusks (invertebrates like snails, oysters and other sea life) was developed. In fact, he became a well-known malacologist by the time he finished school. After leaving school he studied natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel where he obtained a Ph.D. in Zoology in 1918 Equipped with a Doctorate in Zoology he trained further as a Biologist, he conducted research in the new field of Genetic Epistemology – the theory of knowledge on Genetics. He worked for a year at the University of Zurich where he got interested in psychoanalysis and especially on the subject of Child Intelligence and its development when he studied abnormal psychology under Carl Jung. He also worked with Bleuler in Dr. Gottlob Triedrich Lipps Laboratory. Lipps had a Ph.D. from Leipzig and was the professor and director of the Psychological Laboratory which had been established in 1911.This changed his life and Piaget moved to France In 1919 He was teaching psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Here he met Simon, of Simon–Binet fame. De Simon and Alfred Binet had co-founded the  “Ecole de la rue de la Grange-aux-Belles”, an Institute for boys. Binet was the pioneer of Intelligence Testing and had developed techniques for testing along with Simon. After Binet’s death in 1911, Simon took over as the faculty in Sorbonne University. In 1921 Dr.Clapare’de the Institute head, appointed Piaget as the director of studies at the J.J. Rousseau Institute. The same year he was awarded a doctorate degree in Zoology, Natural Science from the University of Paris. Piaget standardised Cyril Burt’s test of Intelligence and his first article, his findings were published in a reputed Parisian Journal, Journal de psychologie. It was around that period Piaget would administer the Binet reading tests to the children of Paris. He added to his findings with data obtained from children confined with mental disorders. This changed Piaget’s life forever and as a result he took up the study of Child Psychology. 1923  Married Valentine Chatenay and had 3 children. Piaget and his wife studied their intellectual development from infancy to language. Critics claim that because his studies were largely of his own children that the research is tainted. It was during this period that he published philosophical essays in 1923 on The language and thought of the Child and in 1924 Judgement and Reasoning in the Child In 1925 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel. No doubt, it was his Alma Mater.(nourish, support, foster + Mother)

1925-29 He held the Chairs of Psychology, Sociology and History of science at Neufchatel Then he left the post in 1929 for the University of Geneva as professor of the history of scientific thought. 1929 – 39 He was busy reorganising the affiliation of the Institute Rousseau with the University of Geneva and he became director of the Bureau International d’education which has since become jointly affiliated with and sponsored by the International office of Education and UNESCO In the post war years Piaget remained active in educational affairs, both with the Swiss Government and with UNESCO In 1940, the professorship title was changed to professor of experimental psychology and he became the director of its laboratory of psychology. In 1948 he published “The Origins of Intelligence in Children”  which was Revised in 1952

In 1955 he became a director of the International Centre for Epistemology at the University of Geneva, and also he worked as co-director of the International Bureau of Education. 1980 Death :During his academic and professional career, he published an extraordinary number of books and scientific research papers, not just on child development, but also on education, the history of thought, philosophy and logic. He continued his prodigious output right up to his death, wrote more than 50 books and monographs during his long career. Piaget discovered that the mind of the child evolves through a series of set stages of adulthood. Contemporaries of Piaget who have shared the respect for children, were John Dewey in United States, Maria Montessori in Italy and Paulo Freire in Brazil. You may have heard of the Montessori schools however Piaget’s influence on education is enriched and deeper in sense as well as pervasive. They all fought for changes in teaching methodology. Piaget has been adored by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge as traditional pedagogical theory had put forth, but they are active builders of knowledge. Children are the little scientists. They are constantly creating and testing their own world of life. Although, Piaget devoted over half a century to his psychological research in new area of psycholinguistics, his basic ideas appear within the first decade of his research. He stimulated considerable experimental research in cognition and child language development, which provoked criticism throughout the world. Jean Piaget’s contribution is known all over the world and is still an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law as witnessed in the annual catalogues of the Jean Piaget Archives. Jean Piaget was still researching, at the age of eighty-four, at the time of his death in Geneva on September 17, 1980. Shortly after Piaget’s death, John Flavell, a leading Piagetian scholar, described what we owe Piaget: Firstly we owe him a host of insightful concepts of enduring power and fascination… concepts of object permanence, conservation, assimilation, accommodation, and Decentration. Second, we owe him a vast conceptual framework that has highlighted key issues and problems in human cognitive development. This framework is the now-familiar vision of the developing child, who, through its own active and creative commerce with its environment, builds an orderly succession of cognitive structures en route to intellectual maturity. These two debts add up to a third, more general one: We owe him the present field of cognitive development…Our task is not to extend and go beyond what he began so well.

JESSICA It is remarkable that Piaget wrote and published his first scientific paper on his observations of an albino sparrow and by 15 his several publications on mollusks and gained him a reputation among European Zoologists who all believed that he was an adult. In his work Piaget identified the child’s four stages of mental growth. His researches in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology had one unique goal. After a semester spent at the University of Zurich where he developed an interest for psychoanalysis and intelligence testing, Piaget spent one year working at the Ecole de la rue de la Grange–aux–Belles, a boy’s institution created by Alfred Binet. There he standardized Burt’s test of intelligence and did his first experimental studies of the growing mind. The interest of Jean Piaget in cognitive development began when he started working with Theodore Simon in his Paris Laboratory for preparation of intelligence tests. He was required to administer intelligence tests to children in order to try and establish better test norms. During his work, Piaget found himself becoming more interested in the quality of children’s answer to questions rather than how many they got wrong or right. Then Piaget became interested with reasoning process that lay behind the answers that children gave. After that, work of Piaget was solely focused on cognitive development, which he continued to study till his death. In Paris, Piaget devised and administered reading tests to school children and he became interested in child language development and what types of errors they made. These studies, lead him to explore the reasoning process in children. Piaget worked on cognitive development of the child. The influence of Jean Piaget’s work has not fallen short of that of Freud. He spent most of his life directing an institute of child development in Geneva. 

He worked out his ideas in the context of philosophical discussion to study the children’s behaviour. He based much of his work on detailed observation of limited numbers of individuals, rather than studying large samples. Piaget placed great emphasis on the ability of child activity to make sense of the world. According to him children do not passively seek up information, but select and interpret what they see, hear and feel in the world around them. Piaget undertook a number of observations of children as well as numerous experiments to study their way of thinking and development of language. Piaget interned in Genetic Epistemology and in latter life he established The Centre for Genetic Epistemology.

What is Epistemology?
Epistemology is a term for a part of Cognition Theory. Epistemology endeavours to investigate cognition in the most varied fields of knowledge by throwing a critical light on the objects of investigation.

“Epistemology itself can be science when it is concerned with research into mechanisms of scientific knowledge”. In a wider sense the term Epistemology is often used instead of cognition theory, or theory of knowledge. In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget explored the role played by the child’s reasoning process in their cognitive development. We will here mention a typical Piaget dialogue with Julia, a small girl:

Piaget: What makes the wind?
Julia: The trees.
Piaget: How do you know?
Julia: I saw them waving their arms.
Piaget: How does that make the wind?
Julia: I saw them waving their arms.
Piaget: How does that make the wind?
Julia: (Waving her hand in front of his face): Like this. Only they are
bigger. And there are lots of trees.
Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?
Julia: It blows there from the land. No it’s the waves….

Piaget’s conversation with Julia shows five-year-old Julia’s beliefs, which are not correct by any adult criterion, but are not incorrect either. Piaget believed that they are sensible and convert within the framework of the child’s way of knowledge. When we classify them as ‘true’ and ‘false’ we miss the real point and show a lack of respect for the child. The dialogue between Piaget and Julia on wind, by referring to body actions, which showed that young children are in very good stead when they do not know enough or have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation that elders would prefer to have known.

Piaget’s put forth findings in his research in cognition area of children at the Maison des Petits of the Institute. They issued progress reports sequentially of their research in his books: (1) The Language and Thought of the Child, published in 1923, (2) Judgment and Reasoning in the Child; published in 1924; (3) The Child’s conception of the world, published in 1926, (4) The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality, published in 1930, and The Moral Judgment of Child, published in 1932. From this publication one can gauge Piaget’s contribution in child development, particularly in area of mental growth and language development. The common theme throughout his lifelong work is that of a developmental principle. He went through the research on an evolutionary process in which a person progresses from the mentality of a child to that of grown up to adulthood. From Piaget’s observations, one can conclude that despite their interpersonal activity, children are much more egocentric and much less social in thought and speech than adults.

"The adult thinks socially, even when he is alone and the child under seven thinks egocentrically, even in the society of others." Piaget’s observations conclude that only a spurious social life is found among children less than seven years of age. Instead of reasoning in universal terms, children’s thoughts deal with individual instances. The child’s ego-centrism does not permit him to think in relative terms, but they think in absolute terms. Self-contradictions are not avoided, due to the transductive reasoning of the child. They are reasoning from one particular instance to another rather than reasoning from deduction to induction. Due to animistic thinking (Doctrine that the soul is a vital principle), a seven-year-old child assumes that the sun moves because it is alive and the child generalizes that all things that move are alive. In fact, the child’s conception of the world is animistic, inputting spontaneous movement to bodies.

Piaget had not only worked on Genetic Epistemology, child’s reasoning process and language development, but he had also worked on moral development. Piaget argued that there are four stages of moral development of child. He narrated his views in his book Moral Judgment of the Child (1932). After working on moral judgment, Piaget structured four stages of cognitive development in his book Logic and Epistemology (1953). Piaget believed that from birth, human beings are active and do not require external incentives. He proposed that the cognitive development occurs in four stages. Piaget also worked on and in his book on Logic and Epistemology; he identified infants as initially forming basic sensorimotor skills in relation to their physical environment. As this set or schema of basic sensorimotor skills developed, it increasingly laid foundations for the development of another set or schema of exploratory skills. Piaget in his child developmental research gradually built up a theory, which included a large number of different skill sets of schemas. He argued that each of these skills sets tended to be open to be attended by children of differing ages as they become adapted to the world around them. He also suggested that there might be preoperational, concrete, operational and formal operational stages of development. Piaget was influenced by Gestaltists, which we can observe from his book on The Child Conception of Space (with Barbel Inhelder, 1948). Piaget observed that a child views space topologically, rather than geometrically. For a child special relationships are qualitative rather than quantitative and later child develops his conception of space. Piaget first intended to study children for the purpose of understanding the development of thought, both in individuals and in the species. In his early days of research work on child development, he was interested in studying genetic epistemology from a scientific viewpoint instead of a philosophical one. That led him into studies of cognitive development; language and moral and intellectual development trait brought him fame not as a biologist or a philosopher, but as a Child Psychologist. Piaget’s work on child psychology not just focuses as on his observations, but also on his methodology in studying children. Mostly, he had adopted the method of observation to understand the child behaviour. In fact, Piaget’s work has also been much criticized on grounds of his method. How can findings based on observations of small numbers of children all living in a Geneva or Paris be generalized? Yet for most, Piaget’s thoughts and ideas on cognitive development of child have stood up well in the light of the enormous amount of subsequent research. He has stimulated considerable experimental research throughout the world. The eminent psychologist of Harvard, Roger Brown, who has a high opinion of Freud, remarked that, "After Freud, it is Jean Piaget, I think, who has made the greatest contribution to modern psychology."

In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences. An infant progresses from reflective, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought. During this stage the child is mainly concerned with learning to co-ordinate purposeful movements with the information from the senses. The child is mainly concerned with learning to co-ordinate purposeful movements with the information from the senses. Moreover, object performance, means an understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight emerges at this time. By about the age of 11/2 the child begins to actively pursue disappearing objects, such as rolling ball behind the table.Before this they do not know wher the ball has gone if you hold it behind your back. Piaget believed that the younger infants behave as if hidden objects cease to exist but by age 2, the child can anticipate the movement of hidden or out of sight

In this stage, children begin to think symbolically and they use language. children begin to represent the world with words, images and drawings.
They may tell you that teddy was naughty, spilt the drink and fully expect you to believe that because they would. Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action. 
use of language is not always as sophisticated, as it might seem. For example, children tend to confuse words with objects they represent. Suppose the child calls a toy block a ‘scooter’ and makes a ‘bicycle’ with it, the child may be upset. However, although pre-school children can symbolically represent the world sometimes during this stage, children behave in an egocentric manner. Piaget believed that the child is not being selfish in the ordinary sense. He just doesn’t realize that your views differ from his.

Third Piagetian stage
This stage lasts from approximately 7 to 11 years of age. According to Piaget in this stage children can perform operations, and logical reasoning. They also replace intuitive thought as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples. there is a mastery of Conservation*. According to the concept of conservation, volume remains unchanged when the shape of objects changes.

(11 to 15 YEARS)
This stage appears  between the ages of 11 and 15. In this stage, individuals move beyond the world of concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms. The child learns in this final stage to manipulate abstract ideas, make hypothesis, and is also able to see the implications of his own thinking and that of others. They are able to compare their parents with ideal parents with the ideal standard. During this stage, full adult intellectual ability is attained to formal operations.

Older adolescents are capable to reason inductive* and deductive** way of logic. They are able to learn algebra, mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and other abstract subjects. Piaget’s concept of these cognitive developmental stages caused re-evaluation of older ideas of the child, of learning and of education. In fact, Piaget’s theory remains a valuable ‘road map’ to understand how children think but some critics suggest that the intellectual growth of the child is not strictly age and stage related as Piaget claimed. Moreover, according to learning theorists, children continuously gain specific knowledge. It is not true that mental abilities make sudden shifts in learning each time they enter a new stage.

Information Processing is also an important cognitive theory given by Piaget. According to Piaget information processing is concerned with how individuals process information about their world – how it is retrieved to perform such complex activities as problem solving and reasoning. EXPLANATION OF FIGURE
According to Piaget when children detect information from the world through their sensory and perceptual processes the cognition begins. After that the children store, transform and retrieve the information through the process of memory.    The main aim is to illustrate the main cognitive process and also their interrelations. Although the figure does not justify or represent sharply the distinct stages in processing information, there is a possibility in discontinuity and flow between the cognitive processes, as well as an overlap.

Moral Development
What is moral development?
By nature, moral development concerns rules and regulations about what people should do in their interactions with others. The child developmentalists believe that how children think, behave, and feel about such rules and regulations and through these ways of observations from society they proceed for moral development. In 1932, Piaget wrote a book on Moral Judgment of the Child in which he discussed the stages of child’s moral development, (from the personal observation and from the experimental research) after studying children for many years, often his own children. Piaget argued that as children grow, they proceed through a series of psychological stages that are defined by the changing ways in which children operate upon the world. With the processes of assimilation and accommodation in mind, Jean Piaget came up with four stages of cognitive, moral and intellectual development.

(1) Motor or Individual Stage : (Birth to 2 years)
In this stage, motor habits assume a ritual character or he responds according to his own desires.
(2) Co-operative Stage : (2 to 7 years of age)
In this stage, the child’s play is with a disregard for rules.
(3) Codification of Rules Stage : (7 to 11 years of age)
In this stage, rules are respected through the notion of them is vague.
(4) Egocentric Stage : (11 to 12 years of age)
In this stage, the child observes the society’s rules, customs, etc. The child proceeds from the mechanical, motor stage to the egocentric individual and then to the social stage of cognitive development. In social co-operative stage, rules for very young are sacred realities, while they are matters of mutual agreement for grown-up youth. For moral judgment of children, the social facts such as, constraint and unilateral respect is very important in the life of children. And for moral facts co-operation and mutual respect is very important for their development. In this regard, Piaget wrote: "The sense of justice, though naturally capable of being reinforced by the precepts and the practical examples of the adult, is largely independent of these influences, and requires nothing more for its development than the mutual respect and solidarity which holds among children themselves." In Piaget’s theory on moral development, we can observe that it distinguishes between the interonomus morality of younger children and the autonomous morality of older children. Piaget’s ideas on formal operational thought have implications for understanding adolescent’s moral development.

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
According to Piaget, there is a growth of intellect in childhood. Intelligence may be defined as the ability to manipulate abstract concepts effectively. Jean Piaget believed that all children pass through a series of distinct stages in intellectual development. In fact, many of his ideas came from the observations of his own children and other children, as they solved various thought problems. Through the observations, Piaget convinced himself that intellect grows through the process of Assimilation and Accommodation. Assimilation: means fitting new information into existing schemes. In other words, assimilation means the use of existing mental patterns in new situations.
Accommodation: is an altering of existing schemes or creating new ones in response to new information. In short, existing ideas are modified to fit new requirements. For example, a young child might think that the worth of a currency note of £10 is less than one 20p (coin). As the child begins to spend money, he or she will be forced to alter ideas about what ‘more’ and ‘less’ means. Thus, new situations are assimilated to existing ideas, and new ideas are created to accommodate new experiences.

When the baby says pa-pa or ma-ma or da-da for the first time, the parents or grandfather get very exited. It is a matter of fact that social interaction provides a foundation for language learning. By 6 months of age, the nervous system has matured enough to allow children to grasp objects, to laugh, sit up, to smile and babble. The ability to communicate and to understand language is a major achievement of human beings. At about the age of 1, children can stand on their own for a short time and respond to words such as yes or no. An amazing feature of child’s language development is the speed with which it is acquired. The children may address their parents as pa-pa or ma-ma. By the age of 1½ to 2 years, their vocabulary may include from 24 to 270 words, and this increases up to 2600 or more words at the age of six. By the time they start school the children understand around 8,000 words and use about 4000.

It is impossible to determine the number of sentence constructions that can be generated within a single language. By the age of three children, however, use syntactically correct sentences. The mental system does not require formal learning and will function perfectly, when language is available to the child. Chomsky Piaget was one of the theorists, concerned with the relationship between cognitive growth and language. As a child psychologist, Piaget was mostly interested in the cognitive development of children. It is now assumed that child’s language reflects their concepts and it develops as their concepts expand

PARENT’S ROLE IN THE CHILD’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Following are the guidelines, that parents can facilitate their child’s language development. FOR INFANTS
1. Be a proactive conversational partner.
2. Parents’ as well as other members of the family should talk as if the infant understands what they are saying
3. Family members should use a language style with which the child should feel comfortable. FOR TODDLERS
1. Continue to be an active, and in pleasant manner as a conversational partner.
2. Parents should remember to listen.
3. When you are in conversation use a language style with which you feel comfortable.
4. You should consider ways of expanding your child’s language abilities and horizons.
5. Parents and other family members should adjust to a child’s idiosyncrasies* instead of working against them.
6. One should resist making normative comparisons.

Barry You probably won’t be able to take in  all the terminology on the screen but don’t worry this presentation is available at