Jean Piaget was one of the most significant contributors to our current understanding of how children think and learn, from birth through to adolescence. In this comprehensive and accessible new book, Ann Marie Halpenny and Jan Pettersen capture the key concepts and principles of Piaget’s fascinating work on children’s thinking, and explore how thinking evolves and develops from infancy through the early years and beyond. Areas covered in Introducing Piaget include: key milestones and achievements in children’s thinking; understanding the physical world through senses and movement in infancy; supporting the emergence of symbolic thought and language in the early years; understanding object permanence; implications of egocentric thinking in early childhood learning and development. Throughout the book, the consequences of these developments for children’s social, emotional and intellectual development are discussed. Updates on Piaget’s theory are also outlined with reference to more recent work on cognitive development in childhood. Each chapter provides a concise summary of material presented through a consideration of the implications for practice in working with children. A glossary of key Piagetian terms is also included. With a particular focus on how Piaget’s principles and concepts can be applied to children in early childhood, this exciting new book is an invaluable resource for teachers, practitioners and students with an interest in learning and development in the early years.
THE GREAT IMPORTANCE of the work of Professor Jean Piaget for child psychology, and thus for education, has only in recent years been fully recognized. This work has gone on for some thirty-five years, but the sequence of books translated between 1927 and 1932, though very stimulating, seemed open to a good many doubts. However, the volumes published in English during the last decade, and others still untranslated, have shown beyond question how much Professor Piaget can help us to understand children’s intellectual growth. We owe to him a striking fresh picture of the child himself as the architect of this growth. Piaget’s interest lies chiefly in the building-up of the basic framework of thought, which later the child, and we, mostly take for granted; but that is what makes the new picture so illuminating. And from the angle of Infant School teachers it is noteworthy that the period from 4-5 years to 7-8 years turns out to be a specially important one, anyway for the average run of children. For their biggest step forward in the building of that framework usually falls within this period. The present essay will offer a thumbnail sketch of the whole story, as Piaget presents it, and will then dwell more fully on the happenings of the Infant School phase.
`At the end of the day, what is crucial is to enable educationalists to promote and apply their own metatheories and models of child development which they feel comfortable with and which enable children to develop. ... Peter Sutherland should be credited with making a significant contribution towards achieving this fundamental goal' - Educational Psychology in Practice ` ... this book deserves to become a classic in the field. Will appeal alike to academics and students in higher education, and to serving teachers- BPS: Educational Review Section This book provides a general outline of the dominant schools of thought on cognitive development, with a focus on Piaget. His views are outlined and a range of critical responses and alternatives are detailed. The author examines the application of these schools of thought to teaching pre-school, primary and secondary children. Each chapter includes a summary and questions for discussion. The book concludes with a glossary of terms.
A supplemental text for an Issues in Early Childhood Education or Introduction to Early Childhood Education course in Early Childhood Education departments or in Child and Family Studies departments. Covers five leading theorists whose perspectives are studied and applied widely in early childhood education. The book distills each theorist's work and explains how it relates to early care and education. Brief, inexpensive; a perfect complement to foundational courses.
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was listed among the 100 most important persons in the twentieth century by Time magazine, and his work - with its distinctive account of human development - has had a tremendous influence on a range of disciplines from philosophy to education, and notably in developmental psychology. The Cambridge Companion to Piaget provides a comprehensive introduction to different aspects of Piaget's work in a manner that does not eschew engagement with the complexities of subjects or debates yet is accessible to upper-level undergraduate students. Each chapter is a specially commissioned essay written by an expert on the subject matter. Thus, the book will also be of interest to academic psychologists, educational psychologists, and philosophers.
This volume marks the 20th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. Some of the American contributors were among the first to introduce Piaget to developmental and educational psychology in the United States, while some of the international contributors worked with Piaget to develop his program of genetic epistemology and continue to make significant contributions to it. Within this volume the possibility of Piaget's paradigm is reviewed not only as the stuff of normal science, yielding fascinating empirical questions that linger within it, but also, and more importantly, as the stuff of revolutionary science, with continuing potential to comprehensively structure our thinking about developmental theory. The constructive contribution Piaget's theory has for developmental theory emerges as four central themes in the volume: understanding the intentional or semantic aspect of mental life without abandoning the Piagetian assumption that is rational and committed to truth testing; examining mental life and its development as a dialectical relation of function and structure--a relation Piaget introduced in his study of the developmental relation between procedural and operational knowledge; exploring new and interdisciplinary perspectives on equilibration as the driving force of constructive adaptive processes; understanding social and historical forces in individual and cultural development--not necessarily as forces antithetical to Piaget's perspective but as forces that take on new meaning within his framework which avoids erroneous dichotomies such as the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge.
Children's play is a universal human activity, and one that serves a significant purpose in personal development.Throughout this volume, which is an extension of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, the editors and contributors explore assumptions about play and its status as a unique and universal activity in humans.As a whole, Play