Piaget: Scholar

Three verdicts — where the tasks were redesigned, and what survived

A course on the thought of Jean Piaget.

Psychology

What you will learn

  • Explain the competence/performance distinction and why a search task can underestimate knowledge.
  • Describe the violation-of-expectation method and Baillargeon's finding.
  • Weigh strong constructivism against core-knowledge nativism on object permanence.
  • Describe the naughty-teddy result and what it implies about the standard conservation task.
  • Describe Hughes's policeman task and what it implies about egocentrism.
  • Generalise: distinguish a genuine conceptual limit from a task-demand artefact.
  • Contrast Piaget's constructivism with Vygotsky's social-cultural theory (the ZPD).
  • State the main structural criticisms of the stage model.

Course outline

  1. The Infant Knew More — Object permanence revisited. Baillargeon's violation-of-expectation studies find in 3-to-4-month-olds a knowledge Piaget's search test placed at eight months — forcing the competence/performance…
  2. The Question Behind the Question — Two redesigns that lift the pre-operational ages by years without changing the child — McGarrigle & Donaldson's 'naughty teddy' on conservation and Hughes's 'policeman' on egocentrism — and the…
  3. What Survives — The final accounting: Vygotsky's social-cultural alternative set against Piaget's lone constructor; the stage model's genuine problems (décalage, domain-specificity, gradualness); and the durable…

Works read in this course

  • Genetic Epistemology (1970) — my statement of the guiding question — how knowledge is constructed — which the core-knowledge debate directly contests.
  • Baillargeon et al., 'Object permanence in five-month-old infants' (1985) — the violation-of-expectation studies that found object knowledge months before my search test did.
  • Donaldson, Children's Minds (1978) — Margaret Donaldson's landmark case that my tasks underestimated children by ignoring the human sense a child makes of them; reports Hughes's policeman study.
  • McGarrigle & Donaldson, 'Conservation accidents' (1974) — the naughty-teddy study — accidental transformation quadrupled conservation.
  • Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978) — the social-cultural alternative — the zone of proximal development and learning leading development.

Part of the Simposeum course library.