Piaget and Vigotsky
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland on August 9, 1896. He was the first child of Arthur and Rebecca Piaget. Jean began showing an interest in the natural sciences at a very early age. By age 11, he had already started his career as a researcher by writing a short paper on an albino sparrow. He was also very interested in mollusks and by the time he was a teen, his papers on mollusks were being widely published. He continued to study the natural sciences and received his Ph.D. in Zoology from University of Neuchâtel in 1918. In 1918, Piaget also spent a semester studying psychology at the University of Zürich, where Piaget developed a deeper interest in psychoanalysis. Over the course of the next year, he studied abnormal psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1920, Piaget worked with Théodore Simon at the Alfred Binet Laboratory in Paris. Piaget evaluated the results of tests, put together by Simon, that were meant to measure child intelligence and draw connections between a child’s age and the nature of his errors. For Piaget, it raised new questions about the way that children learn. Piaget ultimately decided that the test itself couldn’t really be changed. In the revised version, he allowed children to explain the logic of their "incorrect" answers. In reading the children’s explanations, he realized that children’s power of reasoning was not flawed after all. In areas where children lacked life experience as a point of reference, they logically used their imagination to compensate. He additionally concluded that factual knowledge should not be compared with intelligence or understanding.
Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less skilled thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. Over the course of his six-decade career in child psychology, Piaget also identified four stages of mental development, called Schema.
In 1920, Piaget worked with Théodore Simon at the Alfred Binet Laboratory in Paris. Piaget evaluated the results of tests, put together by Simon, that were meant to measure child intelligence and draw connections between a child’s age and the nature of his errors. For Piaget, it raised new questions about the way that children learn. Piaget ultimately decided that the test itself couldn’t really be changed. In the revised version, he allowed children to explain the logic of their "incorrect" answers. In reading the children’s explanations, he realized that children’s power of reasoning was not flawed after all. In areas where children lacked life experience as a point of reference, they logically used their imagination to compensate. He additionally concluded that factual knowledge should not be compared with intelligence or understanding.
Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less skilled thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. Over the course of his six-decade career in child psychology, Piaget also identified four stages of mental development, called Schema.