Piaget
- Jean Piaget was the founder of the modern study of developmental psychology. His research program was genetic epistemology and he was interested in the development of knowledge in the human species.
- He pursued his research by looking at it in children.
- ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: you can see the development of the species is repeated, recapitulated, in the development of every individual.
- Piaget thought of children as active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world.
- described these understandings as schemas these schemas were frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge.
- two psychological mechanisms that lead to the transformation of these schemas and the creation of new schemas. 1) assimilation: the process of taking in new information and new experiences and matching it up with an already existing schema. 2) accommodation: the process by which existing schemas are changed, or new schemas are created, in order to fit the new information and new experience.
- Approach: he asked children to solve problems, and then asked them about their reasoning behind the solution.
- View: children think in entirely different ways than adults. So he’s not a nativist suggesting that children know it all from the start nor is he an empiricist or a behaviorist who viewed learning simply as the accumulation of new knowledge. Or for the behaviorist, new conditioning and new responses. Rather, Piaget believed that children have theories of the world, and so do we. And children’s theories are very different from ours.
- he proposed that theories transform and that you could capture the development in terms of a series of stages. Each stage corresponding to a different style of thinking, a different way of making sense of how the world works. Different from Freud’s psychosexual theory, Piaget’s theory is more intellectual and scientific grounding.