Customer Reviews

Piaget's Theory of Intellectual Development (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Piaget's stage theory of intellectual development is rather common fodder for developmental psychology and education courses. Here is an excellent summary of the immense amount of material, both theoretical and experimental, that constitutes the corpus of Piaget's work.

Following almost all secondary authors who discuss Piaget, Ginsburg and Opper discuss each cognitive stage in a separate chapter, in this case, labelled after the common age periods exemplified by each stage.

I especially liked the introductory chapter that provides a theoretical overview of Paiget's developmental work, and a biographical account of the major publications reflecting the more important aspects of his work, and covering Piaget's entire career. This book is stronger than Flavell's "The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget" in explaining the cognitive mechanisms at work in stage transitions, the explication of formal operational thought in adolescence, and the application of Piaget to an educational context. I also liked the focus of this book. Ginsburg and Opper are more careful than Flavell to avoid digressions to touch upon peripheral aspects of Paiget's work. Flavell has greater appreciation of Paiget as an epistemologist.

If you intend to read some of Piaget, I strongly recommend this book as an introductory primer. Piaget can be somewhat dense without preparation beforehand.

This is a great little book that thoughtfully presents the many sides of Jean Piaget: child psychologist, genetic epistemologist, and loving father carefully observing his three children as they grow from birth through adolescence.

Piaget's observations of infants and toddlers are delightful to read. His careful observation and firm scientific approach beautifully capture the magic and mystery of how children learn.

My own particular interest is in how people learn and how they retain information. Over the years, I have discovered that many of Piaget's theories and techniques of education are equally applicable to adult learners. My college students have always learned better when their learning experiences allowed them to handle materials, use their five senses, and think for themselves.

Piaget seems timeless. His life spanned nearly a century and in that lifetime he saw many things. One of my favorite Piaget quotes from this book is the following:

"The great danger today is of slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thoughts. We have to be able to resist individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is proven and what is not. So we need pupils who are active, who learn early to find out by themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partly through material we set up for them, who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them."

Kim Burdick

Stanton, DE

This book brilliantly covers the complexity of Piaget's life work. Piaget is the greatest biological theorist of the 20th century, but his work is almost impossible to read.

This book is engagingly and clearly written,but there is no compromise on the complexity of Piaget's thought and theory.

A must read for any psychologist, epistemologist or biologist.