69 Facts About Jean Piaget

1.

Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development.

2.

Jean Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, and directed the center until his death in 1980.

3.

Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchatel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland.

4.

Jean Piaget was the oldest son of Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchatel, and Rebecca Jackson.

5.

Jean Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world.

6.

Jean Piaget became fascinated that he had somehow formed a memory of this kidnapping incident, a memory that endured even after he understood it to be false.

7.

Jean Piaget developed an interest in epistemology due to his godfather's urgings to study the fields of philosophy and logic.

8.

Jean Piaget was educated at the University of Neuchatel, and studied briefly at the University of Zurich.

9.

Jean Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris after his graduation and he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys.

10.

Jean Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children consistently made types of mistakes that older children and adults managed to avoid.

11.

In 1921, Jean Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

12.

In 1923, he married Valentine Chatenay ; the couple had three children, whom Jean Piaget studied from infancy.

13.

From 1925 to 1929, Jean Piaget worked as a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchatel.

14.

In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968.

15.

In 1979, Jean Piaget was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences.

16.

Jean Piaget died on 16 September 1980, and, as he had requested, was buried with his family in an unmarked grave in the Cimetiere des Rois in Geneva.

17.

Jean Piaget received a doctorate in 1918 from the University of Neuchatel.

18.

Jean Piaget then undertook post-doctoral training in Zurich, and Paris.

19.

Jean Piaget was hired by Theodore Simon to standardize psychometric measures for use with French children in 1919.

20.

Jean Piaget proposed that children moved from a position of egocentrism to sociocentrism.

21.

Jean Piaget began the interview by asking children standardized questions and depending on how they answered, he would ask them a series of standard questions.

22.

Jean Piaget was looking for what he called "spontaneous conviction" so he often asked questions the children neither expected nor anticipated.

23.

Jean Piaget theorized children did this because of the social interaction and the challenge to younger children's ideas by the ideas of those children who were more advanced.

24.

For Jean Piaget, it led to an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.

25.

Jean Piaget argued infants were engaging in the act of assimilation when they sucked on everything in their reach.

26.

Jean Piaget claimed infants transform all objects into an object to be sucked.

27.

Jean Piaget then made the assumption that whenever one transforms the world to meet individual needs or conceptions, one is, in a way, assimilating it.

28.

Jean Piaget observed his children not only assimilating objects to fit their needs, but modifying some of their mental structures to meet the demands of the environment.

29.

Jean Piaget conceived intellectual development as an upward expanding spiral in which children must constantly reconstruct the ideas formed at earlier levels with new, higher order concepts acquired at the next level.

30.

Jean Piaget studied areas of intelligence like perception and memory that are not entirely logical.

31.

Jean Piaget defined himself as a 'genetic' epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge.

32.

Jean Piaget considered cognitive structures' development as a differentiation of biological regulations.

33.

Jean Piaget believed answers for the epistemological questions at his time could be answered, or better proposed, if one looked to the genetic aspect of it, hence his experimentations with children and adolescents.

34.

Jean Piaget had sometimes been criticized for characterizing preoperational children in terms of the cognitive capacities they lacked, rather than their cognitive accomplishments.

35.

Jean Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole.

36.

Jean Piaget began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of sweets, one with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of sweets in a line placed more closely together.

37.

Jean Piaget believed he could test epistemological questions by studying the development of thought and action in children.

38.

Jean Piaget defined this field as the study of child development as a means of answering epistemological questions.

39.

Jean Piaget described three kinds of intellectual structures: behavioural schemata, symbolic schemata, and operational schemata.

40.

Jean Piaget administered a test in 15 boys with ages ranging from 10 to 14 years in which he asked participants to describe the relationship between a mixed bouquet of flowers and a bouquet with flowers of the same color.

41.

Jean Piaget used the psychoanalytic method initially developed by Sigmund Freud.

42.

Jean Piaget argued that children and adults used speech for different purposes.

43.

Jean Piaget wanted to examine the limits of naturalistic observation, in order to understand a child's reasoning.

44.

Jean Piaget realized the difficulty of studying children's thoughts, as it is hard to know if a child is pretending to believe their thoughts or not.

45.

Jean Piaget recognized that psychometric tests had its limitations, as children were not able to provide the researcher with their deepest thoughts and inner intellect.

46.

Indeed, one modern reviewer has commented that "many of Jean Piaget's pioneering investigations would probably be rejected from most modern journals on methodological grounds of sample size, non-standard measurement, and lack of inter-rater reliability".

47.

Jean Piaget's research relied on very small samples that were not randomly selected.

48.

Furthermore, critics such as Linda Siegel have argued that Jean Piaget's experiments did not adequately control for social context and the child's understanding of the language used in the test task, leading to mistaken conclusions about children's lack of reasoning skills.

49.

Jean Piaget wanted to research in environments that would allow children to connect with some existing aspects of the world.

50.

Later, after carefully analyzing previous methods, Jean Piaget developed a combination of naturalistic observation with clinical interviewing in his book Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, where a child's intellect was tested with questions and close monitoring.

51.

Jean Piaget was convinced he had found a way to analyze and access a child's thoughts about the world in a very effective way.

52.

Jean Piaget's research provided a combination of theoretical and practical research methods and it has offered a crucial contribution to the field of developmental psychology.

53.

Jean Piaget then comes up with a hypothesis testing it and focusing on both the surroundings and behavior after changing a little of the surrounding.

54.

Jean Piaget is considered to be the most influential figure in developmental psychology.

55.

Jean Piaget's theory allows teachers to view students as individual learners who add new concepts to prior knowledge to construct, or build, understanding for themselves.

56.

Jean Piaget's teacher has given a set of particular instructions that he must follow in a particular order: he must write the word before defining it, and complete these two steps repeatedly.

57.

Jean Piaget defined knowledge as the ability to modify, transform, and "operate on" an object or idea, such that it is understood by the operator through the process of transformation.

58.

Jean Piaget specified that knowledge cannot truly be formed until the learner has matured the mental structures to which that learning is specific, and thereby development constrains learning.

59.

In particular, Jean Piaget's focus on children's interactions with objects in the concrete operational stage has led to an approach to education in which young children are encouraged to learn mathematics by manipulating real objects, but without the necessary direct instruction from teachers that they need to understand what they are doing and to link their activities to symbolic mathematics.

60.

Jean Piaget believed in two basic principles relating to character education: that children develop moral ideas in stages and that children create their conceptions of the world.

61.

Jean Piaget believed that children made moral judgments based on their own observations of the world.

62.

Jean Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of peer interaction and that it was autonomous from authority mandates.

63.

Jean Piaget attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationships, introducing a fundamental distinction between different types of said relationships.

64.

Jean Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, illustrating it through reference to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group.

65.

In such circumstances, where children's thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, Jean Piaget believed "the reconstruction of knowledge", or favorable conditions for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, exists.

66.

In short, cooperative relations provide the arena for the emergence of operations, which for Jean Piaget requires the absence of any constraining influence, and is most often illustrated by the relations that form between peers.

67.

Shortly before his death, Jean Piaget was involved in a debate about the relationships between innate and acquired features of language, at the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, where he discussed his point of view with the linguist Noam Chomsky as well as Hilary Putnam and Stephen Toulmin.

68.

Jean Piaget had a considerable effect in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence.

69.

Jean Piaget inspired innumerable studies and even new areas of inquiry.