Piaget: Applied

Four interviews into predicting a child's mind

A course on the thought of Jean Piaget.

Psychology

What you will learn

• Order the six sensorimotor sub-stages and say what each adds.
• Distinguish primary, secondary, and tertiary circular reactions.
• Explain deferred imitation as evidence that representation has arrived.
• Predict egocentric responding on the three-mountains task and define egocentrism precisely.
• Recognise animism, artificialism, and transductive reasoning as pre-operational features.
• Explain the failure of class inclusion as centration on the perceptual sub-class.
• State the typical order of the conservations and define horizontal décalage.
• Predict which conservations a child of a given age will and will not have.

Course outline

1. Six Ways to Be an Infant — The sensorimotor stage taken apart into its six sub-stages — from reflexes, through the circular reactions that build and coordinate schemes, to the arrival of mental representation. The student…
2. The Shape of the Pre-Operational Mind — The whole pre-operational package mapped as one structure seen from many sides: egocentrism (the three-mountains task), animism and artificialism, centration and the failure of class inclusion, and…
3. The Many Conservations — Conservation is not one achievement but several, acquired in a fixed order across years — number, then length and mass, then weight, then volume (the horizontal décalage). The student learns to…
4. The Logic of the Possible — Formal operational thought (~11+): reasoning about the hypothetical and the possible, systematically. Through the pendulum problem the student learns to recognise hypothetico-deductive reasoning and…

Works read in this course

• The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1936) — the six sensorimotor sub-stages and the circular reactions, observed on my own three infants.
• Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (1945) — the symbolic function — deferred imitation, symbolic play, and the arrival of representation.
• The Language and Thought of the Child (1923) — egocentric speech and the collective monologue — the pre-operational child talking beside, not to, others.
• The Child's Conception of the World (1926) — animism and artificialism in the child's reasoning about nature.
• The Child's Construction of Quantities (1941, with Inhelder) — the horizontal décalage — conservation of substance, weight, and volume acquired in that order.
• The Growth of Logical Thinking (1955, with Inhelder) — formal operations — the pendulum and the control-of-variables strategy in adolescence.

Part of the Simposeum course library.