Despite the criticism, the theory has had a considerable impact on our understanding of child development.
Support for the Theory
Piaget’s focus on qualitative development had an important impact on education.
In addition to this, a number of instructional strategies have been derived from Piaget’s work.
Traumrune/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0
He also interviewed other children with open-ended questions in his attempts to understand their logic and reasoning.
However, his methods were criticized for being biased.
Because of this unrepresentative sample, it is difficult to generalize his findings to a larger population.
Most of his work includes very little statistical detail about how he arrived at his conclusions.
Another issue lies with Piaget’s lack of clear operational definitions for the variables he studied.
With the information they have, researchers have been able to replicate many of Piaget’s observations.
To Piaget, there was no fixed limit to human development.
The stage approach is viewed as problematic as well.
Stage theories have fallen out of popularity in modern-day psychology for a number of reasons.
One of these is that they often fail to accurately capture the many individual variations that exist in development.
Piaget also proposed that each of the stages could be further divided into substages.
He also believed people could move beyond the 4th stage and did not limit the possibilities.
Piaget tested this using a three-dimensional model called thethree mountain task.
They selected the doll’s perspective from a stack of pictures.
The children frequently chose the same perspective as their own, indicating egocentrism.
However, other researchers purport egocentrism extends into adolescence.
He came up with the concepts of theimaginary audienceand thepersonal fable.
His work generated interest in child development and had an enormous impact on the future of education anddevelopmental psychology.
This approach involves conducting intensive interviews with subjects about their own thought processes.
Piaget’s theory also helped change the way that researchers thought about children.
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