Piaget’s Developmental Theory: An Overview, DVD

The work of Jean Piaget has become the foundation of developmental psychology and the basis for changes in educational practice. In this program, David Elkind—author of The Hurried Child and Miseducation and a student of Piaget—explores the roots of Piaget’s work and outlines important vocabulary and concepts that structure much of the study of child development. Using both archival film of Dr. Piaget and newer sequences of Dr. Elkind conducting interviews with children of varied ages, the video can serve equally as an introduction or a review of Piaget’s developmental theory, its scope, and its content. Viewable/printable educational resources are available online. A part of the series Giants of Psychology. (25 minutes)

Length: 28 minutes

ORDER CODE: BVL44904

Copyright date: ©1989

Closed Captioned

Contents

Jean Piaget - Exceprt (01:11)
In a video excerpt, Piaget asks us to consider the goal of education: Is it to teach children only what is already known, or to teach them to be creative, innovative and learn through discovery?

Introduction to Piaget (01:04)
David Elkind introduces Piaget and orients the viewer to Piaget's enormous impact on experimental psychology.

Piaget in Context (01:25)
Piaget published scientific papers from age 10. At university, he combined biology, psychology and philosophy into a new discipline: genetic epistemology.

Experience and Mental Maturity (02:13)
Piaget wanted to understand how children construct their worlds. He made a connection between experience and mental maturity--the content of knowledge and the process of knowing. He studied the evolution of children's moral judgment and egocentric thinking.

Piaget's Semi-Clinical Interview (03:24)
David Elkind demonstrates the semi-clinical interview with a three year-old subject. Always begin with the same question and use open-ended questioning. David Elkind notes the egocentric answers given by the child in the interview.

Object Permanence (02:12)
Beginning in the 1930s Piaget studied the at beginnings of intelligence and understanding of the world that starts in infancy> He studied his own children through a set of non verbal tasks. Elkind demonstrates witha 6 month-old the concept of object permanence.

Assimilation & Accommodation (01:03)
Playing is almost a pure form of assimilation, the transformation of reality in the service of the self. The transformation of ourselves to meet the demands of the world is accommodation. All human thought and action involves both.

Permanent Object Schema (01:21)
Elking explains how conservation allows us to hold a schema from which we can identify objects in the world and think and talk about things with a shared understanding of what they are.

watch first half again (01:18)
A dimension of Piaget's genius was his ability to see beyond what had been seen before and to develop a theory to account for his observations. From the mid 1930s-1960s Piaget introduced logical model to describe the course of mental development.

Conservation Test Demonstrated (03:57)
Dr. Elkind demonstrates Piaget's experiment: He fills identical containers with equal amounts of liquid. After confirming with the child they are the same, he pours them into different containers with different shapes. The children no longer believe that the amount of water is the same.

Piaget's Stages of Development (02:23)
Dr. Elkind explains and offers examples of Piaget's stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational; concrete operational, and formal operational.

Memory (02:46)
Piaget explains in an excerpt from a talk in Tokyo in 1971 that, "The code of memory depends on the intelligence--on the child's operational level. The code changes from one level to another," improving and becoming more structured, "according to the progress of the child's intelligence."

Piaget's Contribution (01:26)
Piaget taught us that human intelligence always grows in a series of stages related to age and that human knowledge is always a creation. Knowledge always reflects both a child's mental activity and information coming from the environment.

Credits: Piaget’s Developmental Theory: An Overview (00:46)
Credits: Piaget’s Developmental Theory: An Overview