Piaget's Legacy

Abstract

There have been many published assessments of Jean Piaget's work over the years, both during his lifetime and since his death in 1980. One has only to look in any introductory textbook on developmental psychology or cognitive development to find examples. hlost of these assessments mention both praiseworthy and criticizable aspects of his work, but often give more space to the latter than to the former. This is understandable. In most cases, identified weaknesses in his work are proxies for important scientific discoveries made by subsequent researchers. That is, we learn that some Piagetian developmental story is probably wrong by doing research that points to some alternative, more correct-seeming story. Naturally, it is important for the people who write about cognitive development to communicate both the weaknesses and the scientific discoveries that revealed them and took us the next step forward.In the present assessment, I take a different tack, however. Useful though it is to examine the criticizable in Piagetiana, I focus entirely on the praiseworthy in this article. hly objective is to summarize what I believe to be Piaget's contributions to what we know about cognitive development and how we think about it. Everyone knows that Piaget was the most important figure the field has known; the purpose of this article is simply to explain why. PIAGET'S CONTRIBUTIONS1; Piaget's greatest contribution was to found the field of cognitive development as we currently know it. As hliller (1993) explained:Piaget transformed the field of developmental psychology. If a developmental psychologist were somehow plucked out of the 1950's and set down today, he would be bewildered by the talk around him. He would hear psychologists discussing strategies, rule-governed behaviors, cognitive structures, schemes, plans, and representations. instead of stimulus generalization, mean length of utterance, mental age. conditioning, discrimination learning, and learning set. To a great extent Piaget was responsible for this change. He altered the course of psychology by asking new questions that made developmentalists wonder why they had ever asked the old questions in the first place. Once psychologists looked at development through Piaget's eyes, they never saw children in quite the same way. (p. 81) As a developmental psychologist who began his career in the 1950s, 1 can attest to the accuracy of hliller's characterization. Piaget provided the field with an entirely new vision of the nature of children, and of the what, when, and how of their cognitive growth. This vision invaded the field during the 1960s and 1970s and largely supplemented the rather limited and uninteresting visions that were already there. The result was that

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“…Piaget clearly viewed children's cognitive behavior as being intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated; that is, children think and learn essentially because they are built that way (Flavell, 1996). At the same time, Piaget recognized the role of experience in cognitive development, noting that the physical and social contexts in which children act help to give shape to their constructions of the world (Fischer & Hencke, 1996).…”

“…These structures generate stable states of equilibrium that correspond to Piaget's major periods of cognitive growth. To Piaget, cognitive development represented a gradual, step-by-step process of structural acquisition and change, with each new mental structure growing out of its predecessor, through the continuous operation of assimilation and accommodation (Flavell, 1996). Thus, he viewed cognitive development not within the context of specific intellectual skills that children acquire at different ages, but rather, within the context of the knowledge structures responsible for the expression of those skills.…”

“…xxiii). Despite criticism of the specific structures proposed by Piaget, there is considerable agreement that some type of structural framework is needed to adequately characterize cognitive development (Flavell, 1996).…”

“…That is, he was concerned, not with how much children know, but how they come to know it (Singer & Revenson, 1978). Although Piaget's theory of cognitive development has its detractors, Piaget is variously credited with being the most important figure the field of cognitive development has ever known (Flavell, 1996), the single most influential developmental theorist and researcher of this century (Fischer & Hencke, 1996), the author of a theory that has no rival in developmental psychology in scope and depth (Beilin, 1992), and the man whose ideas and findings must be understood if one is to understand the field of developmental psychology (Siegler & Ellis, 1996). Piaget's most important contribution was to establish the field of cognitive development as it is known today, providing the field with a new vision of the nature of children and their cognitive growth (Flavell, 1996).…”

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“…But adaptation may be altered in situations, when unusual or unpredictable situations in social environment do not allow constant equilibration processes between assimilation and accommodation (Flavell, 1996;Kahneman & Tversky, 1973;Nisbett & Ross, 1980;Wadsworth, 1996). Individuals are inherently motivated to eliminate inconsistencies in their mental apparatus (Derry, 1996) and consequently strive for further assimilation and accommodation.…”