Piaget’s Theory of Development - iiNet（皮亚杰的发展iiNet理论）.pdf

Piaget’s Theory of Development file:///Users/tonymac/Documents/Notre%20Dame/ED%204236%20P... Jean Piaget’s Theory of Development Pam Silverthorn EDIT 704 Summer 1999 Jean Piaget was born just before the turn of the century in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1896 and died in Geneva in 1980 at the age of 85. During high school, at the very young age of 11, Piaget completed his first important scientific work, a short paper about albino sparrows. This was the beginning of a brilliant scientific career made of more than 60 books and several hundred articles. In 1923, Piaget and Valentine Châtenay were married. They had three children together: Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent, whose intellectual development from infancy to language was studied by Piaget (). How does knowledge grow? Piaget spent his life searching for the answer to this very question. His research in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology was directed at elaborating upon a theory of knowledge about cognitive development in children also known as genetic epistemology (Driscoll, 1994). His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower, less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood. Therefore, children’s logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults (). Piaget referred to his view as constructivism, because he believed that the acquisition of knowledge is a process of continuous self-construction. Wh