Trystan J. Self
Oklahoma State University Jean Piaget’s Influence In the Field Of Psychology Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Switzerland. At an early age, Piaget was interested in sciences. His father was a smart man who was dedicated to his studies and Piaget began to show that trait at an early age. His mother was highly emotional and created tension in the family. At the age of 10, Piaget wrote a paper on an albino sparrow and was published widely. His readers didn’t know how old he was and considered him an expert. At age 15, he experienced a problem and he realized his religious and philosophical convictions lacked scientific foundation (Crain,2016). With that being a problem, …show more content…
Piaget’s theory and epistemological views together are called “genetic epistemology”. His theory on cognitive development is about how a child constructs a mental model of the world (McLeod, 2015). Before his work people just assumed that children are less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget’s work is different from other’s in many different ways; he focuses on children rather than all learners, it focuses on development rather than learning so it doesn’t focus on certain behaviors, and it proposes discrete developmental stages. The goal is the theory is to explain the mechanisms of an infant and the into a child who develops into an individual who can reason. To Piaget, children developed cognitively due to biological maturation and environmental experience. He believed that children construct an understanding of the world around …show more content…
Preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational) (McLeod,2015). The Schema can be thought of as the building blocks of behavior, almost like the bricks of a house, and used as a way to catalog and keep the knowledge learned organized. One way Piaget explained Schemas was how newborn babies have a reflex to suck whenever something touches their lips, which explains why pacifiers work without having to “teach” the child to suck on them. These ingrained reflexes are examples of schemas.
Piaget also studied adaptation when it came to cognitive development. Adaptation as Piaget explains it occurs through three different stages. Assimilation, which is like carry-over in sports training. When one sport is similar to the other and you develop skills for one sport, they carry over to the other sport, allowing you to reach a certain skill level with less relative work. Accommodation, which would be if you had above average soccer skills, but tried to take those skills into fly fishing, where the soccer skills would be no help, putting forth a need for the individual to learn new skills to be