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Understanding Piaget: An Introduction to Children's Cognitive Development
A revised introduction to Piaget's thought incorporates research done by scholars of the "Genevan School" to discuss Piaget's theory of knowledge, the notion of identity, empirical and reflective abstraction, and the process of equilibration
248 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1980
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October 27, 2025
AN EXCELLENT EXPLANATION OF PIAGET’S THEORIES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Mary Ann Spencer Pulaski [1917-1992) was a children’s psychologist, who taught at many levels. She wrote in the Introduction to this 1980 (revised and expanded edition) book, “Why should one wish to read about the psychological theory of Jean Piaget? Because he is one of the most influential of [modern] thinkers. His ideas about the development of cognition in children are affecting research, preschool programs, methods of parenting, curriculum planning and many other areas of psychology and education today…. Piaget is casting new light on our understanding of children’s intellectual growth. Thinking, knowing, imagining, perceiving, remembering, recognizing, abstracting, generalizing---all these processes are included in the term ‘cognition,’ which refers to all the intellectual activities of the mind. Piaget’s studies of human cognitive development help us to understand what to expect of children, how they perceive the world around them at different ages, and why they ask questions and interpret information in ways that may seem strange to adults.” (Pg. xiii)
She explains in the first chapter, “During his adolescent years, Piaget read extensively in philosophy, religion, sociology, and psychology… The study of knowledge---of how we come to know and what it is we know---is called epistemology… The ancient Greeks… [and] philosophers such as Descartes, believed that ideas were innate in the mind of man. Others, like Locke… insisted that… all knowledge came from the environment through the senses… Piaget has always firmly rejected both of these positions. He does not believe in innate ideas, but in knowledge that is constructed by each individual in interaction with his or her own environment… the individual… seeks it out, organizes it, and assimilates it into his or her previous state of knowledge. Thus Piaget is neither a nativist nor an empiricist, but an INTERACTIONIST… The key to the study of knowledge, he believes, is a developmental approach.” (Pg. 2-3)
She explains, "For Piaget… ADAPTATION is the essence of intellectual functioning, just as it is the essence of biological functioning. It is one of the two basic tendencies inherent in all species. The other is ORGANIZATION, the ability to integrate both physical and psychological structures into coherent systems. Adaptation takes place through organization; the organism discriminates among the myriad stimuli and sensations by which it is bombarded and organizes them into some kind of structure… Adaptation has a dual structure; it consists of twin processes that go on continuously in all living organisms.” (Pg. 9)
She notes, “The concept of EQUILIBRIUM is one of Piaget’s earliest theoretical insights… He sees it as the arrival at a relatively ‘steady state’ in a system of constantly changing balances and coordinations between the organism and its surroundings. The system is an open system in which feedback from the environment contributes to a constant process of self-regulated, internal reorganization… Piaget’s emphasis now is mainly on the PROCESS that brings about these progressive states of equilibrium; the dynamic, ongoing self-regulating process which he calls ‘equilibration.’” (Pg.. 11)
She asks, “What stimulates the child to achieve ever higher stages of cognitive development?... Piaget recognizes first of all the dynamic factor of maturation, or the physiological growth of heredtiary organic structures… The second factor that Piaget calls upon to explain cognitive development is EXPERIENCE. By this he means physical and empirical experience such as the child encounters while…. Interacting with the environment. From experiences such as these the child constructs two kinds of knowledge. First there is physical knowledge, which comes from acting on objects… Second there is …logical-mathematical knowledge: as the child acts on objects, he constructs logical relationships between or among them… A third factor is what Piaget calls ‘social transmission’--- information learned from other children or transmitted by parents… The fourth and most important in the development of knowledge… is the ‘equilibration process,’ which coordinates and regulates these other three factors.” (Pg. 12-14)
She continues, “At birth, says Piaget, the infant is ’locked in egocentrism.’ By this he means … that he is unaware of anything beyond himself… In the sixth and final stage of sensory-motor behavior (18-24 months) the child begins to do his groping mentally rather than physically… Thus in six easy stages Piaget shows us how the infant develops from a biological organism into a social one. He traces the growth of cognition from the first primitive reflex to the complex and varied combinations of behavior soon to be telescoped in thought. Always there is the upward spiral of development.” (Pg. 24-25)
She notes, “But [the child’s] thought is still limited by his own concrete experiences; he is not yet capable of dealing with pure abstractions in the form of inferences and hypotheses. Therefore Piaget calls this period from 7 to about 11 or 12 the period of ‘concrete abstractions.’” (Pg. 29)
She recounts, “‘Conservation’ is the ability to realize that certain attributes of an object are constant, even though that object is transformed in appearance. Through Piaget’s conservation experiments, which are probably his most famous, he demonstrates the stages of cognition as it develops from early childhood through adolescence.” (Pg. 31) She adds, “Piaget feels, on the basis of his experiments, that until a child is about 7 he is not capable of grasping the notion of conservation because he does not have the logical structure.” (Pg. 34)
She explains one of these famous experiments: “One might measure one cup of orange juice into a tall, thin glass and another into a shallow bowl… Most children younger than seven will say the tall glass holds more because the level of juice in it is higher, although some children may choose the bowl because it is wider. Then there will be a period of confusion and disequilibrium, and finally, when the concept of conservation has been constructed, the children will realize that both receptacles hold the same amount of juice.” (Pg. 34-35)
She observes, “The genius of Piaget is never more apparent than in his analysis of the little child’s way of thinking. He is the rare psychologist who really listens to children and tries to understand not only what they are saying but why they are saying it… He discovered that they believed everything has a reason and a purpose.” (Pg. 41) She continues, “It is his sensitivity to the child’s point of view, his willingness to accept rather than instruct the child, that makes Piaget’s approach so fascinating and at the same time so revolutionary.” (Pg. 43)
She states, “As the child approaches seven, the traditional age of reason, we begin to see the fruit of all his years of experimenting with objects, with images and symbols, and finally with thoughts. He is moving into the period of ‘concrete operations,’ a period characterized by the ability to reason logically, to organize his thought into coherent, total structures, and to arrange them into hierarchic or sequential relationships.” (Pg. 55)
She reports, “As Piaget points out repeatedly, it is very difficult to ‘teach’ a child logical operations, he must construct them for himself through his own actions. Then, and only then, can he assimilate the full meaning of the language that describes these actions or transformations.” (Pg. 95-96)
She says, “Piaget makes it quite clear that structurally and functionally, perception is subordinate to intelligence. Perception gives us direct knowledge of the world around us but it is subject to error. Perception corrects itself through decentration, but it is not reversible, as is thought…What Piaget is really rejecting here is the position of the Gestalt psychologists, who … argued that the laws of organization, of figure-ground discrimination and perceptual constancy, are innate and immediate, whereas Piaget has shown that they are acquired gradually through sensory-motor experience.” (Pg. 110)
She reports, “Piaget feels that, to a remarkable degree, children develop mathematical concepts independently and spontaneously. Parents may spend hours teaching a child to count but what they are teaching him is mere rote verbalization.” (Pg. 142)
She also points out, “In spite of the many areas of cognitive development that Piaget has explored, he has consistently avoided the subject of education. He has been asked so many times how his findings might be used to accelerate learning that he calls it ‘the American question.’ Mostly he has left it up to the educators to draw implications for teaching from his work, insisting, 'I am not a pedagogue.’” (Pg. 202)
This is a really EXCELLENT presentation of Piaget’s ideas. (She outlines his various developmental ‘stages’ MUCH clearer than he does in his own writings, for example.) This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Piaget.
Mary Ann Spencer Pulaski [1917-1992) was a children’s psychologist, who taught at many levels. She wrote in the Introduction to this 1980 (revised and expanded edition) book, “Why should one wish to read about the psychological theory of Jean Piaget? Because he is one of the most influential of [modern] thinkers. His ideas about the development of cognition in children are affecting research, preschool programs, methods of parenting, curriculum planning and many other areas of psychology and education today…. Piaget is casting new light on our understanding of children’s intellectual growth. Thinking, knowing, imagining, perceiving, remembering, recognizing, abstracting, generalizing---all these processes are included in the term ‘cognition,’ which refers to all the intellectual activities of the mind. Piaget’s studies of human cognitive development help us to understand what to expect of children, how they perceive the world around them at different ages, and why they ask questions and interpret information in ways that may seem strange to adults.” (Pg. xiii)
She explains in the first chapter, “During his adolescent years, Piaget read extensively in philosophy, religion, sociology, and psychology… The study of knowledge---of how we come to know and what it is we know---is called epistemology… The ancient Greeks… [and] philosophers such as Descartes, believed that ideas were innate in the mind of man. Others, like Locke… insisted that… all knowledge came from the environment through the senses… Piaget has always firmly rejected both of these positions. He does not believe in innate ideas, but in knowledge that is constructed by each individual in interaction with his or her own environment… the individual… seeks it out, organizes it, and assimilates it into his or her previous state of knowledge. Thus Piaget is neither a nativist nor an empiricist, but an INTERACTIONIST… The key to the study of knowledge, he believes, is a developmental approach.” (Pg. 2-3)
She explains, "For Piaget… ADAPTATION is the essence of intellectual functioning, just as it is the essence of biological functioning. It is one of the two basic tendencies inherent in all species. The other is ORGANIZATION, the ability to integrate both physical and psychological structures into coherent systems. Adaptation takes place through organization; the organism discriminates among the myriad stimuli and sensations by which it is bombarded and organizes them into some kind of structure… Adaptation has a dual structure; it consists of twin processes that go on continuously in all living organisms.” (Pg. 9)
She notes, “The concept of EQUILIBRIUM is one of Piaget’s earliest theoretical insights… He sees it as the arrival at a relatively ‘steady state’ in a system of constantly changing balances and coordinations between the organism and its surroundings. The system is an open system in which feedback from the environment contributes to a constant process of self-regulated, internal reorganization… Piaget’s emphasis now is mainly on the PROCESS that brings about these progressive states of equilibrium; the dynamic, ongoing self-regulating process which he calls ‘equilibration.’” (Pg.. 11)
She asks, “What stimulates the child to achieve ever higher stages of cognitive development?... Piaget recognizes first of all the dynamic factor of maturation, or the physiological growth of heredtiary organic structures… The second factor that Piaget calls upon to explain cognitive development is EXPERIENCE. By this he means physical and empirical experience such as the child encounters while…. Interacting with the environment. From experiences such as these the child constructs two kinds of knowledge. First there is physical knowledge, which comes from acting on objects… Second there is …logical-mathematical knowledge: as the child acts on objects, he constructs logical relationships between or among them… A third factor is what Piaget calls ‘social transmission’--- information learned from other children or transmitted by parents… The fourth and most important in the development of knowledge… is the ‘equilibration process,’ which coordinates and regulates these other three factors.” (Pg. 12-14)
She continues, “At birth, says Piaget, the infant is ’locked in egocentrism.’ By this he means … that he is unaware of anything beyond himself… In the sixth and final stage of sensory-motor behavior (18-24 months) the child begins to do his groping mentally rather than physically… Thus in six easy stages Piaget shows us how the infant develops from a biological organism into a social one. He traces the growth of cognition from the first primitive reflex to the complex and varied combinations of behavior soon to be telescoped in thought. Always there is the upward spiral of development.” (Pg. 24-25)
She notes, “But [the child’s] thought is still limited by his own concrete experiences; he is not yet capable of dealing with pure abstractions in the form of inferences and hypotheses. Therefore Piaget calls this period from 7 to about 11 or 12 the period of ‘concrete abstractions.’” (Pg. 29)
She recounts, “‘Conservation’ is the ability to realize that certain attributes of an object are constant, even though that object is transformed in appearance. Through Piaget’s conservation experiments, which are probably his most famous, he demonstrates the stages of cognition as it develops from early childhood through adolescence.” (Pg. 31) She adds, “Piaget feels, on the basis of his experiments, that until a child is about 7 he is not capable of grasping the notion of conservation because he does not have the logical structure.” (Pg. 34)
She explains one of these famous experiments: “One might measure one cup of orange juice into a tall, thin glass and another into a shallow bowl… Most children younger than seven will say the tall glass holds more because the level of juice in it is higher, although some children may choose the bowl because it is wider. Then there will be a period of confusion and disequilibrium, and finally, when the concept of conservation has been constructed, the children will realize that both receptacles hold the same amount of juice.” (Pg. 34-35)
She observes, “The genius of Piaget is never more apparent than in his analysis of the little child’s way of thinking. He is the rare psychologist who really listens to children and tries to understand not only what they are saying but why they are saying it… He discovered that they believed everything has a reason and a purpose.” (Pg. 41) She continues, “It is his sensitivity to the child’s point of view, his willingness to accept rather than instruct the child, that makes Piaget’s approach so fascinating and at the same time so revolutionary.” (Pg. 43)
She states, “As the child approaches seven, the traditional age of reason, we begin to see the fruit of all his years of experimenting with objects, with images and symbols, and finally with thoughts. He is moving into the period of ‘concrete operations,’ a period characterized by the ability to reason logically, to organize his thought into coherent, total structures, and to arrange them into hierarchic or sequential relationships.” (Pg. 55)
She reports, “As Piaget points out repeatedly, it is very difficult to ‘teach’ a child logical operations, he must construct them for himself through his own actions. Then, and only then, can he assimilate the full meaning of the language that describes these actions or transformations.” (Pg. 95-96)
She says, “Piaget makes it quite clear that structurally and functionally, perception is subordinate to intelligence. Perception gives us direct knowledge of the world around us but it is subject to error. Perception corrects itself through decentration, but it is not reversible, as is thought…What Piaget is really rejecting here is the position of the Gestalt psychologists, who … argued that the laws of organization, of figure-ground discrimination and perceptual constancy, are innate and immediate, whereas Piaget has shown that they are acquired gradually through sensory-motor experience.” (Pg. 110)
She reports, “Piaget feels that, to a remarkable degree, children develop mathematical concepts independently and spontaneously. Parents may spend hours teaching a child to count but what they are teaching him is mere rote verbalization.” (Pg. 142)
She also points out, “In spite of the many areas of cognitive development that Piaget has explored, he has consistently avoided the subject of education. He has been asked so many times how his findings might be used to accelerate learning that he calls it ‘the American question.’ Mostly he has left it up to the educators to draw implications for teaching from his work, insisting, 'I am not a pedagogue.’” (Pg. 202)
This is a really EXCELLENT presentation of Piaget’s ideas. (She outlines his various developmental ‘stages’ MUCH clearer than he does in his own writings, for example.) This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Piaget.
October 7, 2024
I. Studies of the Language, Logic, and Morality of the Pre-Operational Child
📚1924 The Language and Thought of the Child
📚1924 Judgment and Reasoning in the Child
1926 The Child's Conception of the World
1927 The Child's Conception of Physical Causality
✅1932 The Moral Judgment of the Child
Il. Studies of the Beginnings of Intelligence, Based on Piaget's Observations of His Own Babies During the Sensory-Motor Period
1936 The Origins of Intelligence in Children
1937 The Construction of Reality in the Child
✅1945 Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood
III. Logico-Mathematical Formulations of the Development
of Operational Thinking
1941 The Child's Conception of Number
1946 The Child's Conception of Time
📚1946 The Child's Conception of Movement and Speed
1947 The Psychology of Intelligence
1948 The Child's Conception of Space
1953 Logic and Psychology
1956 The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence
1959 The Early Growth of Logic in the Child
1960 The Child's Conception of Geometry
1961 The Mechanisms of Perception
1964 Six Psychological Studies
📚1966 The Psychology of the Child
1966 Mental Imagery in the Child
1968 Genetic Epistemology
1968 Structuralism
1969 Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child
📚1924 The Language and Thought of the Child
📚1924 Judgment and Reasoning in the Child
1926 The Child's Conception of the World
1927 The Child's Conception of Physical Causality
✅1932 The Moral Judgment of the Child
Il. Studies of the Beginnings of Intelligence, Based on Piaget's Observations of His Own Babies During the Sensory-Motor Period
1936 The Origins of Intelligence in Children
1937 The Construction of Reality in the Child
✅1945 Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood
III. Logico-Mathematical Formulations of the Development
of Operational Thinking
1941 The Child's Conception of Number
1946 The Child's Conception of Time
📚1946 The Child's Conception of Movement and Speed
1947 The Psychology of Intelligence
1948 The Child's Conception of Space
1953 Logic and Psychology
1956 The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence
1959 The Early Growth of Logic in the Child
1960 The Child's Conception of Geometry
1961 The Mechanisms of Perception
1964 Six Psychological Studies
📚1966 The Psychology of the Child
1966 Mental Imagery in the Child
1968 Genetic Epistemology
1968 Structuralism
1969 Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child
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