Biography of Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was born on August 8, 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His life was one of scholarship and hard work. At age 10, he managed his first publication, a portrayal of a partly albino sparrow he observed in a public park. At age 15, he decided to proceed his work in biology, a goal that is clearly shown in his later work. In 1915, Jean Piaget received his baccalaureate from the University of Neuchâtel. Three years later, he received a doctorate in the natural sciences from the same university. Piaget studied the development of mollusks in the lakes around Neuchâtel. He was intrigued by the way they adapted to being moved from one place to another. By age 21, he published 25 papers on mollusks and was known as one of the world's few experts on mollusks (Wadsworth, 1996). His rigorous work in biology led him to believed that biological development was a process of adaptation to the environment. It could not be explained by maturation alone. He moved from biology to philosophy and eventually to psychology.
He began working in Alfred Binet's laboratory administering early intelligence tests to children. This sparked his want to know more about the thought process of children. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers on the questions that required logical thinking (Wadsworth, 1996). He believed that the incorrect answers that were given revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. According to McLeod (2009), "Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development." His theory of cognitive development has had an enormous impact on early childhood education. Rowland states (2012), "Cognitive development can be described as the gradual improvement of skills such as information processing, memory, conception, reasoning, perception, and language." Before Piaget's studies, the common assumption in psychology was that children have a slower rate of thinking than adults. Yet Piaget showed that children think in a whole different way than adults. Whether time proves Piaget's studies to be correct or incorrect, his works have generated more interest and research than those of any other person in psychology over the past 60 years (Wadsworth, 1996). Piaget died at age 84 on September 16, 1980. |
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