the psychology of intelligence by jean piaget

Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.īasically this is the “staircase” model of development mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.By stages he meant a sequence of thinking patterns with four key features: The long-term developments are really the main focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory.Īfter observing children closely, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence. The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term developmental change. Piaget was a psychological constructivist: in his view, learning proceeded by the interplay of assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). Because his theory is especially popular among educators, we focus on it in this chapter.

Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become able to think logically and scientifically. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget. Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes.

The psychology of intelligence by jean piaget