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16
Part One
Learning, planning and evaluation
1.6
Jean Piaget’s contributions to the knowledge
about the child
Jean Piaget’s contribution can be considered a precursor of cognitive
psychology in which he anticipated the ideas of mental structures and
of operating schemes of thought that can process sensory informa-
tion and perception. He tried to interpret the mental processes as
active construction and the organisation of ideas.
Piaget can be considered a representative of the genetic epistemolo-
gy school because his interests are oriented towards a systematic study
of the development of cognitive structures from their origin: from
the birth of the entities until they reach adulthood.
The main purpose of his studies was the intent to identify the origin
of all forms of knowledge in children.
Born in Neuchâtel in 1896, he died in Geneva in 1980; and was the
student of Édouard Claparède and his successor in the direction of
the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva.
The results of Jean Piaget’s research in the development of the cog-
nitive development and the development of intelligence have led to
the identification and differences between a child’s mental life and
an adult’s mental life also describing how the child’s way of thinking
operates during development.
In the study of the evolutionary processes, Piaget analysed the early
stages of the mental development by detecting child’s patterns and
manners of thought, following the transformation of the child’s men-
tal patterns from simple structures into increasingly complex struc-
tures up to a final phase that corresponds to adulthood.
He raises the issue of the relationship between formal logic and the
psychology of the intellectual development.
Formal logic describes the formal reporting systems already complete-
ly constructed by thought and independent of experimental verifica-
tion, i.e. not susceptible to arbitrary changes by the same thought.
The psychology of the intellectual development seeks to establish how
the thought comes to realise the existence of systems of logical relation-
ships, and, above all, it is concerned about ascribing a real meaning to
such relationships, considering them as a description of the methods of
work of the thought, when this has reached a high level of development.
Thus, general and abstract formal logic will create a model of the
operations that the thought should be able to accomplish when it has