The purpose of this research is to examine the child
development theories of Jean Piaget.
Jean Piaget has long been the most influential figure in the field of child development. His vast volume of contributions was most notable in three particular aspects. First, his ideas were innovative with an awareness of problems which has never before been investigated. Secondly, research in child development has revitalized and reoriented the field, challenging it anew. Third, the research of Piaget is most thoroughly and appropriately founded upon the study of children (Ginsburg and Opper., 1969, p. IX).
Piaget is perhaps best known for his theory of cognitive
development. He defined cognition as:
a form of biological adaptation - the organism's constant
effort to bring about a harmonious interaction between his own schemata and the outer world. It is a system of living and acting operation that strives for equilibration or a balancing between what the individual knows and what he perceives in the world (Ambron, 1975, p. 125).
Piaget saw cognitive acts as organization of and adaptation to the perceived environment. These two acts were inseparable in the functioning of the total person. In developing this theory of cognitive development which defined intellectual organization
and adaptation, Piaget required the application of four basic concepts: "schema, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium" (Wadsworth, 1971, p. 10).
Schema are cognitive structures. These structures were used by Piaget to explain why children "make rather stable responses to stimuli, and to account for many of the phenomena associated with memory" (Wadsworth, 1971, p. 10). Each schema may be thought of as an index or file by which the individual can organize and then generalize incoming stimuli through differentiation. Schemata adapts and changes as the individual grows in mental development, and becomes more numerous.
The process k...