Cognitive psychology has replaced behaviorism as the dominant school of thought in American psychology regarding learning and development. This paper investigates changes in the field that have led to this major shift. The different methods used by behaviorists and human information processing (HIP) psychology are described. The metaphor of the…

This book describes and develops an innovative program of teaching arithmetic in the early elementary grades. The educational strategies employed are based on Jean Piaget's constructivist scientific ideas of how children develop logico-mathematical thinking. The book is written in collaboration with a classroom teacher and premised on the…

Developmentalists have overlooked the problem of the real impermanence of things. Though the metaphor of impermanence is central to Piagetian and neo-nativist accounts of representation, the development of the understanding of impermanence is unstudied. This article proposes that the development of the concept of impermanence is distinct from the…

In this defense of Piagetian constructivism, sociocultural constructivism is critiqued as nihilistic, culturally relative, and dangerous when placed in the context of real science classrooms. (PR)

By using play activities, learning centers, and dramatizations, educators can build on children's literature to cross-fertilize across content areas, meet developmental needs, and help preschoolers "open the book" to themselves and their world. (Author/JOW)

Studied a possible convergence in the structure of cognitive abilities as specified by classical psychometric theory and two neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development by administering a large test battery to 120 children aged 7 to 10. Results support the integration of several theories of intelligence into a comprehensive system. (SLD)

According to Jean Piaget, children begin to develop a concept of an object, such as that it has sides that are not visible from the child's perspective or that it is likely to be where one saw it last, in early infancy. By the close of the prelinguistic phase at about 2 years old, the child has developed a mature object concept, one that…

Studies indicate that young children's literacy learning can be promoted in a play setting. Literacy interactions, strategies, and activities in the children's play environment can facilitate their acquisition of literacy. In literacy-related play experiences, children select and utilize their abilities that are essential for literacy learning in…

Lev Vygotsky (1986-1934) was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with the entire learning-teaching-development experience. Despite a wide-ranging interest in Vygotskian theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of general inquiries into his work. Thus, there…

This article is about the contributions children make in clinical interviews. This issue is studied by re-analysing a selection of the empirical excerpts used by Piaget in his seminal book The Child's Conception of the World. The focus is on how children use language non-literally, and especially on how they use meta-communicative markers ("as…

This paper describes a developmental psychological approach to understanding giftedness. A theoretical model of exceptional expertise is used to frame our understanding of how gifted children's conceptual knowledge develops in a variety of domains and how the interplay of this conceptual knowledge with domain-specific skills results in rich,…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of sequence relations and the process of mental rotation in four-year-olds. Subjects were 12 preschool children who were tested individually. They were given a State Comparison Task (SCT) in which they were shown pairs of animal pictures, half identical and half mirror images of one another,…

The persistence of the constructivist agenda within learning and developmental theory suggests that underneath the seemingly disparate views of Piagetian, socioculturalist, and ecological perspectives lie some unifying concepts that find their mutual expression in constructivism. The paper contends that semiotics provides the conceptual means to…

Piaget's theory of the cognitive development of the child is related to the recently developed non-linear "chaos" model. The term "chaos" refers to the tendency of dynamical, non-linear systems toward irregular, sometimes unpredictable, deterministic behavior. Piaget identified this same pattern in his model of cognitive…

Jean Piaget is credited with such topics as the synthesis of philosophy and the life sciences through a description of progressive stage by stage development, and a genetic epistemology founded on the principle of knowledge through processes of cognitive assimilation and accommodation. In actuality, these themes were originally postulated by James…