Slater and Quinn Piaget chapter FINAL

Klahr Slater and Quinn Piaget chapter FINAL.docx 2 The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) remains unchallenged as the most influential developmental psychologist in history. Indeed, as one prominent researcher put it over 25 years ago, " Before Piaget began his work, no recognizable field of cognitive development existed " (Siegler, 1986 ,pp 21-22). The vast sweep of Piaget's theories, and his ingenious approaches to studying the development of children's minds have profoundly impacted the field. And even though the field has moved well beyond its long period of almost total acceptance of Piagetian stage theory, his detailed analyses of children's behavior at specific points in development remain a source of continued experimental and theoretical inspiration. Because Piaget published his early work – starting nearly a century ago – in French, his influence on English-speaking developmental psychologists didn't really take off until the late 1950s when his papers and books began to be translated into English. Of particular importance was John Flavell's (1963) interpretive volume which made Piaget (and Flavell!) widely read in English. Piaget's Empirical Investigations So, what aspects of children's thought processes did Piaget investigate and what did he discover about them? Well, it seems that he investigated just about everything, and discovered something interesting in every case! The topics include children's developing thinking processes about time, speed, distance, living things, people, space, mathematics, logic, morality, physical causality and psychology (to mention just a few). In many cases, Piaget discovered what Patricia Miller (1993) called the " surprising features of children's thinking " with respect to a wide variety of domains, including, among others: • Physics: Infants under 8 months old do not expect objects to be permanent: if an object is covered or obscured, it simply doesn't exist in the infant's mind. • Number: Preschoolers believe that if row of several cookies is spread out, so that they take up more space, that there are now more cookies to eat than before they were spread out. • Liquid quantity: Four-and five-year-old children believe that when water is poured from a short wide glass into a tall thin glass that there is more water in the latter. • Morality: Five-year olds believe that wrongness of an act depends on how much damage resulted, rather than the intent of the perpetrator. Klahr Slater and Quinn Piaget chapter FINAL.docx 3 • Psychology: Young children don't realize that what they know isn't …