Jean Piaget was one of the most influential experimenters and theorists in the history of developmental psychology and the study of human intelligence, and he is most renowned for his studies of how children learn. His contributions to learning theory help explain the process of discovery learning, the natural mode of learning of the organism in terms of certain stages of development postulated by Piaget.
Piaget became fascinated in his early studies with his discovery that children of the same age often gave the same incorrect answers to questions, suggesting that there were consistent, qualitative differences in the nature of reasoning at different ages, not simply a quantitative increase in the amount of intelligence or knowledge. This discovery marked the beginning of Piaget's continuing effort to identify changes in the way children think how they perceive their world in different ways at different points in development. Piaget's contributions can be summarized by grouping them into four main areas. First, he produced literature on the general stages of intellectual development from infancy through adulthood. This concern occupied him from 1925 to 1940, and after 1940 he began to describe some of the developmental stages in formal, structural terms using models from symbolic logic. Second, Piaget did extensive work (1940 60) on perceptual development, refuting the Gestalt approach and suggesting that the child plays a more active role in creating and interpreting his or her perceptions. A third concern (1940 80) was the study of how children come to understand various scientific concepts, such as space and time, an endeavor suggested to Piaget by Albert Einstein. After 1950, Piaget returned to the questions of theoretical epistemology (Flavell, 1963, 1-9).
The different stages postulated by Piaget help to explain different rats of learning at different ages as well as the types of learning possible at different ...