Editing Jean Piaget (section)

=== Education ===

By using Piaget's theory, educators focus on their students as learners. As a result of this focus, [[education]] is learner-centered and constructivist-based to an extent. It allows teachers to view students as individual learners who add new concepts to prior knowledge to construct, or build, understanding for themselves.<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite journal|last1=Henson|first1=Kenneth|title=Foundations for Learner-Centered Education: A Knowledge Base|journal=Education|date=2003|volume=1124|issue=1|pages=5–16}}</ref> Teachers who use a learner-centered approach as a basis for their professional practices incorporate the several dispositions.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> They provide experience-based educational opportunities. These teachers also contemplate the learners' individual qualities and attitudes during curriculum planning. Educators allow learners' insights to alter the curriculum. They nourish and support learners' curiosity. They also involve learners' emotions and create a learning environment in which students feel safe.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

There are two differences between the preoperational and concrete operational stages that apply to education. These differences are reversibility and decentration. At times, reversibility and decentration occur at the same time.<ref name="Educational Psychology">{{cite book|last1=Seifert|first1=Kelvin|last2=Sutton|first2=Rosemary|title=Educational Psychology|date=2009|publisher=Orange Grove|location=Florida|isbn=978-1-61610-154-1|edition=2nd|url=http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Educational-Psychology.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131025015203/http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Educational-Psychology.pdf |archive-date=2013-10-25 |url-status=live|access-date=22 June 2015}}</ref> When students think about the steps to complete a task without using a particular logical, sequential order, they are using reversibility.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> Decentration allows them to concentrate on multiple components of a problematic task at a time.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> Students use both reversibility and decentration to function throughout the school day, follow directions, and complete assignments.

An example of a student using reversibility is when learning new vocabulary. The student creates a list of unfamiliar words from a literary text. Then, he researches the definition of those words before asking classmate to test him. His teacher has given a set of particular instructions that he must follow in a particular order: he must write the word before defining it, and complete these two steps repeatedly.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> A child in the preoperational stage gets confused during this process and needs assistance from the teacher to stay on task. The teacher refers him back to his text in order to notate the next word before he can define it.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> A child in the preoperational stage does not understand the organization required to complete this assignment. One in the concrete operational stage understands the organization, and can recall the steps in any order while being able to follow the order given.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> Using decentration, the child has the two activities on his mind: identify words and find them in the dictionary.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/>

A sample of decentration is a preschooler may use a toy banana as a pretend telephone. The child knows the difference between the fruit and a phone. In this form of play, he is operating on two levels at once.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> In an older child at the concrete operational level, decentration allows him to complete subtraction of two-digit numbers and indicate which of the problems also involved borrowing from the other column.  The student simultaneously does both.<ref name="Educational Psychology"/> Using reversibility, the student has to move mentally between two subtasks.

Regarding the giving of praise by teachers, praise is a reinforcer for students. Adolescents undergo social-emotional development such that they seek rapport with peers. Thus, teacher praise is not as powerful for students who see teachers as authority figures. They give no value to praise provided by adults, or they have no respect for the individual who is giving praise.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Hawkins|first1=Shannon M.|last2=Heflin|first2=L. Juane|title=Increasing Secondary Teachers' Behavior-Specific Praise Using a Video Self-Modeling and Visual Performance Feedback Intervention|journal=Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions|date=2001|volume=12|issue=2|pages=97–108|doi=10.1177/1098300709358110|s2cid=143631715}}<!--|access-date=July 7, 2015--></ref>

During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget's works also inspired the transformation of European and American education, including theory and practice, leading to a more 'child-centered' approach. In ''Conversations with Jean Piaget'', Bringuier says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for me and no one else, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists" (Bringuier, 1980, p.&nbsp;132).

His [[Piaget's theory of cognitive development|theory of cognitive development]] can be used as a tool in the [[early childhood education|early childhood]] classroom. According to Piaget, children developed best in a classroom with [[Social interaction|interaction]].

Piaget defined knowledge as the ability to modify, transform, and "operate on" an object or idea, such that it is understood by the operator through the process of transformation.<ref name="Piaget">Piaget, J. (1964). "Development and learning". In R.E. Ripple and V.N. Rockcastle (Eds.), ''Piaget Rediscovered: A Report on the Conference of Cognitive Studies and Curriculum Development'' (pp. 7–20). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.</ref> Learning, then, occurs as a result of experience, both physical and logical, with the objects themselves and how they are acted upon. Thus, knowledge must be assimilated in an active process by a learner with matured mental capacity, so that knowledge can build in complexity by scaffolded understanding. Understanding is scaffolded by the learner through the process of equilibration, whereby the learner balances new knowledge with previous understanding, thereby compensating for "transformation" of knowledge.<ref name="Piaget"/>

Learning, then, can also be supported by instructors in an educational setting. Piaget specified that knowledge cannot truly be formed until the learner has matured the mental structures to which that learning is specific, and thereby development constrains learning. Nevertheless, knowledge can also be "built" by building on simpler operations and structures that have already been formed. Basing operations of an advanced structure on those of simpler structures thus scaffolds learning to build on operational abilities as they develop. Good teaching, then, is built around the operational abilities of the students such that they can excel in their operational stage and build on preexisting structures and abilities and thereby "build" learning.<ref name="Piaget"/>

Evidence of the effectiveness of a contemporary curricular design building on Piaget's theories of developmental progression and the support of maturing mental structures can be seen in Griffin and Case's "Number Worlds" curriculum.<ref name="Number Worlds">{{cite journal | last1 = Griffin | first1 = S.A. | year = 2004 | title = Building number sense with Number Worlds: a mathematics program for young children | journal = Early Childhood Research Quarterly | volume = 19 |  pages = 173–180 | doi=10.1016/j.ecresq.2004.01.012}}</ref> The curriculum works toward building a "central conceptual structure" of number sense in young children by building on five instructional processes, including aligning curriculum to the developmental sequencing of acquisition of specific skills. By outlining the developmental sequence of number sense, a conceptual structure is built and aligned to individual children as they develop.

The cognitive scientist Karen Fuson has argued that the impact of Piagetian theories in education has not been entirely positive because his work has frequently been misinterpreted. In particular, Piaget's focus on children's interactions with objects in the concrete operational stage has led to an approach to education in which young children are encouraged to learn mathematics by manipulating real objects, but without the necessary direct instruction from teachers that they need to understand what they are doing and to link their activities to symbolic mathematics. This has had a particularly negative impact on low-attaining children who need more support from a more knowledgeable other to make meaning and progress with their learning.<ref name="Fuson2009">{{cite journal|last1=Fuson|first1=Karen C.|title=Avoiding misinterpretations of Piaget and Vygotsky: Mathematical teaching without learning, learning without teaching, or helpful learning-path teaching?|journal=Cognitive Development|volume=24|issue=4|year=2009|pages=343–361|issn=0885-2014|doi=10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.09.009}}</ref>

Psychologist [[Mark Seidenberg]] has criticised the field of [[education studies]] for placing too much emphasis on the works of Piaget, [[Lev Vygotsky]] and other historical psychologists while failing to keep up with the major advances in cognitive science in the decades since they were active.<ref name=Seidenberg2017>{{cite book | last = Seidenberg | first = Mark | title = Language at the speed of sight: how we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it | publisher = Basic Books | page=260 | location = New York | year = 2017 | isbn = 978-1-5416-1715-5 }}</ref> Meanwhile, a 2016 [[systematic review]] of education research showed that constructivist approaches to early childhood education inspired by Piaget and Vygotsky are less effective than comprehensive approaches that incorporate direct skills teaching.<ref name="Chambers Cheung Slavin 2016 pp. 88–111">{{cite journal | last1=Chambers | first1=Bette | last2=Cheung | first2=Alan C.K. | last3=Slavin | first3=Robert E. | title=Literacy and language outcomes of comprehensive and developmental-constructivist approaches to early childhood education: A systematic review | journal=Educational Research Review | publisher=Elsevier BV | volume=18 | year=2016 | issn=1747-938X | doi=10.1016/j.edurev.2016.03.003 | pages=88–111}}</ref>