help on Piaget!?

Question

Can anyone help fill in some missing information in my understanding of piaget's domain general theory?

Answer 1

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who developed genetic epistemology, the study of the development of learning. His studies centered on children.

From birth until about age two, children are in the sensorimotor stage. They are learning to control their body functions and to identify things in the world around them. Initially, things exist only if they can be seen. Toward the end of the stage, children understand that things exist even though they can't see them.

From 2 to 7 is the preoperational stage. Children understand things only from their own point of view. They understand proportion, but not value. Consequently, given a choice of one of two coins, they'll choose a nickel instead of a dime (assuming that each is bright and shiney). The nickel is bigger, but the dime has more value.

During the state of concrete operations, children not only learn about value, but also about cause and effect. A three-year-old can use a seesaw or teeter-totter, but an eight-year-old can figure out how and why it works. This is the stage from 7 to 12. Most adults can achieve the stage of concrete operations.

After age 12, children enter the stage of formal operations. This requires abstract thought. Hypothetical situations are understood. For example, if I pour water on this fire, what will happen? Thought becomes more complex. The following is a true story: Earlier today, I went to the dry cleaner's to pick up some shirts. The bill came to $8.53. I gave the counter person a ten-dollar bill and three pennies. She was totally befuddled. I had to tell her that I gave her the pennies so that I would get $1.50 change, thereby not receiving a whole bunch of smaller coins.

So, while virtually everyone who has a genetic capacity for normal intelligence achieves the stages of sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operations, not all can master the stage of formal operations.

Piaget died in 1980, but his work is carried on at the Jean Piaget Clinic in Zurich.

Answer 2

Equilibrium is a dual process of combining assimilation (incorporation of new events into pre-existing coginitive structures) and accommodation (Existing structures change to accomodate new information) to advance understanding of the world and competency in it. It refers to the balance between mind structure and the environment, with a congruency between the two, to tell you if you have a good enough model of the universe. The dual process allows a child to form schema, it helps to strike a balance between him or her self and the environment around them. According to Piaget, equilibration was one of the biggest factors in explaining why some children advance more quickly in terms of logical intelligence than others do.

Answer 3

Piaget served as professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975 and is best known for reorganizing cognitive development theory into a series of stages, expanding on earlier work from James Mark Baldwin: four levels of development corresponding roughly to (1) infancy, (2) pre-school, (3) childhood, and (4) adolescence. Each stage is characterized by a general cognitive structure that affects all of the child's thinking (a structuralist view influenced by philosopher Immanuel Kant). 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.

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as
*Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
*Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)
*Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
*Formal Operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).
These chronological periods are approximate, and in light of the fact that studies have demonstrated great variation between children, cannot be seen as rigid norms. Furthermore, these stages occur at different ages, depending upon the domain of knowledge under consideration. The ages normally given for the stages, then, reflect when each stage tends to predominate, even though one might elicit examples of two, three, or even all four stages of thinking at the same time from one individual, depending upon the domain of knowledge and the means used to elicit it.
Despite this, though, the principle holds that within a domain of knowledge, the stages usually occur in the same chronological order. Thus, there is a somewhat subtler reality behind the normal characterization of the stages as described above.
The reason for the invariability of sequence derives from the idea that knowledge is not simply acquired from outside the individual, but it is constructed from within. This idea has been extremely influential in pedagogy, and is usually termed constructivism. (See "Constructivism (learning theory)") 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. Much of this construction (and later reconstruction) is in fact done subconsciously.
Therefore, Piaget's four stages actually reflect four types of thought structures. The chronological sequence is inevitable, then, because one structure may be necessary in order to construct the next level, which is simpler, more generalizable, and more powerful. It's a little like saying that you need to form metal into parts in order to build machines, and then coordinate machines in order to build a factory.

Piaget's view of the child's mind
Piaget viewed children as little philosophers, which he called tiny thought-sacks and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge. Some people have used his ideas to focus on what children cannot do. Piaget, however, used their problem areas to help understand their cognitive growth and development.

The developmental process
Piaget provided no concise (or clear) description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:
The child performs an action which has an effect on or organizes objects, and the child is able to note the characteristics of the action and its effects.
Through repeated actions, perhaps with variations or in different contexts or on different kinds of object, the child is able to differentiate and integrate its elements and effects. This is the process of reflecting abstraction (described in detail in Piaget 2001).
At the same time, the child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different kinds of action affect them. This is the process of empirical abstraction.
By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes a new level of knowledge and insight. This is the process of forming a new cognitive stage. This dual process allows the child to construct new ways of dealing with objects and new knowledge about objects themselves.
However, once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, they start to use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions. As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still more complex objects. Thus a new stage begins, which will only be completed when all the child’s activity and experience have been re-organized on this still higher level.
This process is not wholly gradual, however. Once a new level of organization, knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas. As a result, transitions between stages tend to be rapid and radical, and the bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this new cognitive level. When the knowledge that has been gained at one stage of study and experience leads rapidly and radically to a new higher stage of insight, a "gestalt" is said to have occurred.
It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of knowledge and action that are capable of being developed.
Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our own actions, Piaget’s model of development explains a number of features of human knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animal, they then acquire the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as ‘birds’, ‘fish’, and so on. This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs.
At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the ‘rules’ that govern in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child’s growing awareness of notions such as ‘right’, ‘valid’, ‘necessary’, ‘proper’, and so on. In other words, it is through the process of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also justified.

Influence
Despite ceasing to be a fashionable psychologist, the magnitude of Piaget’s continuing influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society, which holds annual conferences and attracts very large numbers of participants. His theory of cognitive development has proved influential in many different areas:
Development psychology
Education
Historical studies of thought and cognition
Evolution of human intelligence
Primatology
Philosophy
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
On the other hand, Piaget does not seem to have influenced therapeutic methods or models to any significant degree.

THERE ARE MORE INFORMATION IN THESE WEBSITES:
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/piaget.html
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/piaget.html

GOOD LUCK! BYE