Jean Piaget by Kelly Wasowicz

Jean Piaget  Born-1896 Died-1980

He started out working in the Binet Institute, translating questions into French from the English Versions of the Intelligence tests.

He became interested when he noticed children answering wrong to mostly questions having to do with thinking logically. And he wanted to see the difference between the way that adults learn and the way that children learn.  

Question: (Jean Piaget) Considering the meaning and history of the theory, the originator using the key terms for the principles of the theory. How can the classroom be effected by integrating it with ICT?

Piaget believed children's childhood plays a vital role as well as a very active role in a child's development. Piaget's idea is  known as a developmental stage theory.

Some of the key terms and principles of the theory are:

1. The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses. 
2. It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.
3.  It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.
4. It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.

With Piaget, as a result of using biological maturation and the environmental experience, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes. Children explore and conquer the wants and fears around them trying to figure things out on their own.  

Originators of the theory

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the most influential researchers in the area of developmental psychology during the 20th century. Piaget originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy and considered himself a "genetic epistemologist." He was mainly interested in the biological influences on "how we come to know." He believed that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our ability to do "abstract symbolic reasoning." Piaget's views are often compared with those of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), who looked more to social interaction as the primary source of cognition and behavior. This is somewhat similar to the distinctions made between Freud and Erikson in terms of the development of personality. The writings of Piaget (e.g., 1972, 1990; see Piaget, Gruber, & Voneche) and Vygotsky (e.g. Vygotsky, 1986; Vygotsky & Vygotsky, 1980), along with the work of John Dewey (e.g., Dewey, 1997a, 1997b), Jerome Bruner (e.g., 1966, 1974) and Ulrick Neisser (1967) form the basis of the constru

ctivist theory of learning and instruction. (Vygotsky, L., & Vygotsky, S. (1980). )

CONCLUSION

Jean Piaget's theory and way of thinking got other to look at situations in similar ways and in different ways. It started to make teachers look how they are teaching and how children learn in different ways. While others speculated what Jean Piaget was trying to accomplish, they had similar ideas and different ways of trying new things as well.