Jean Piaget. The Foundations of Early Childhood Education

Contributions of Jean Piaget to the Foundations of Early Childhood Education and Education for Young Children
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Contributions of Jean Piaget to the Foundations of Early Childhood Education and Education for Young Children
Introduction
Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss biologist, gained interest in understanding children’s thinking during his work with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who developed intelligent tests (Shahsavari, 2012). During this time, Piaget became intrigued with the process of how children think in line with the wrong answers they supplied during the tests. His background in biology became influential in modelling his ideas in regards to thinking, learning, and his intelligence theory. Piaget was involved in research in Switzerland at the Institute Jean Jacques Rousseau where he developed a clinical methodology of interviewing and observing the children. In this approach, Piaget identified four major steps that children undergo in human cognitive development, with each individual stage being unique from each other (Shahsavari, 2012). All children must pass through all the four stages because each stage is followed by the preceding stage and serves as a foundation for the next stage. In this paper, the contributions of Jean Piaget to the Foundations of Early Childhood Education in the field of cognitive development will be discussed and his work related to the Education for Young Children.
Jean Piaget conceptualized that human cognitive development in children follows four major stages, with each stage varying from the other. These stages do not vary in sequence and no child will skip any other the stages (Ojose, 2008). From birth to up until 2 years of age, infants will transform from creatures responding primarily through reflexes to individuals who can organize their sensorimotor activities predicated on the environment. At this stage, the child can manipulate objects, and through such encounters, the child will advance from the stage of reflexes to applying trial-and-error method learning to solve simple problems. Children at this stage also become more objective oriented and develop the ability to learn from what they hear, see, and touch. It is at this stage where Piaget theorized object permanence when children assume things to exist even when they are not able to hear, see, or touch them. The other stages of development that follow include the preoperational stage between 2 and 7 year, where language develops; the concrete operations stage between 7 and 11 years, when children can solve hands-on problems in a logical manner, and formal operation stage between 12 and 15 years, a stage when children can solve most abstract problems (Shahsavari, 2012). In developing these stages of human cognitive development, Piaget made enormou...