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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

During the 1920s, Jean Piaget began a research program in Geneva, Switzerland, that has probably had a greater impact on contemporary theories of cognitive development than that of any other single researcher. Trained as a biologist, Piaget also had interests in philosophy and was especially curious about the origins of knowledge, a branch of philosophy known as epistemology. To discover where knowledge comes from and the forms that it takes as it develops, Piaget and his colleagues undertook a series of studies that provided many unique insights into how children think and learn about the world around them (e.g., Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Piaget, 1928, 1952b, 1959, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1980; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).

Although Piaget’s theory dates from the 1920s, its impact on psychological thought in the Western hemisphere was not widely felt until the 1960s, probably for several reasons. One likely reason is that Piaget, being Swiss, wrote in French, making his early work less accessible to English-speaking psychologists. Although his writings were eventually translated into English, his ideas initially gained widespread prominence and visibility largely through a summary of his early work written by the American psychologist John Flavell (1963).

A second reason that Piaget’s research program was largely overlooked for more than three decades was his unconventional research methodology. Piaget used what he called the clinical method: He gave children a variety of tasks and problems, asking a series of questions about each one. He tailored his interviews to the particular responses that children gave, with follow-up questions varying from one child to the next. Such a procedure was radically different from the standardized, tightly controlled conditions typical of behaviorist animal research and was therefore unacceptable to many of Piaget’s contemporaries in North America.

But perhaps the most critical reason that...