Word: piaget
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...becomes "more to drink" when it is poured from a short, squat glass into a tall, thin one with the same capacity. The reason for this stubborn misconception is that the child is paying attention only to static features of his environment, not to transformations. Now, at the age Piaget calls that of "concrete" intellectual activity, the child can deduce that pouring does not change the quantity of the water. He has begun to reason and to grasp the essential principle of the equation...
Between the ages of eleven and 15, the child begins to deal with abstractions and, in a primitive but methodical way, set up hypotheses and then test them, as a scientist does. In one experiment, Piaget handed children a weight at the end of a string and asked them to find out what determines the speed of the pendulum's swing. As he watched and asked questions, he found that the children were spontaneously considering all the possible variations: changing the weight, letting it drop from increasing heights, giving it stronger shoves, or changing the length of the string...
Classroom Hens. The timetable that seems to control the development of intellectual skills, Piaget is convinced, suggests that man's capacity for logical thought is not learned but is embedded, along with hair color and sex, in his genes. These innate rational tendencies do not mature, however, unless they are used. Although Piaget has refrained from applying his findings directly to teaching, educators see some implications. A child cannot be forced to develop understanding any faster than the rate at which his powers mature to their full potential, and there is a limit to what overeager parents and teachers...
...Piaget has observed repeatedly that children explore the complexities of their world with immense zest, and his findings have given encouragement and innumerable specific suggestions to the "discovery method" of teaching. Now used in many schools across the U.S. and in Great Britain, the method draws also on the ideas of John Dewey, Italian Educator Maria Montessori and Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner. Discovery classrooms, in essence, are informal laboratories where children gain an early familiarity with the principles of Euclidean geometry by manipulating variously shaped objects, and learn fundamentals of counting and reproduction by charting the egg production of classroom...
...Piaget himself is a lapsed biologist who never outgrew his fascination with the orderly growth of organisms. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he was a child prodigy who published important papers on mollusks before he was out of high school, later became "haunted by the idea of discovering a sort of embryology of intelligence." In 1920 he went to work in the Paris laboratory of Psychologist Théodore Simon, a co-developer with Alfred Binet of the first successful IQ test. Poring over the "wrong" answers that children regularly gave on the tests, Piaget was surprised...