Jean Piaget - Research Paper Example

Jean Piaget was a French Philosopher and psychologist who concentrated most of his life pursuing developmental psychology as his major field of inquiry. In this regard, he is known to have spent most of his lifetime listening to children and watching their behaviors on a closer note. He was born on the 9th of August 1896 and died on the 16th of September 1980. In his pursuit of epistemology in the field of child development, he managed to come up with the theory of cognitive development. He was highly concerned with child education; a phenomenon that we would refer to as learning while he would prefer to call it adaptation. The investigations he made towards models of child adaptation were the starting point for his major contribution to the field of psychology. He divided them into two parts; assimilation and accommodation. According to him, this is a cognitive biological process that occurs as a result of the interaction between the mind and the environment. His close observation of children made him realize that there are periods in children when assimilation is dominant, periods when accommodation is dominant as well as periods when there is relative equilibrium between the two. As a result of this investigation, he was able to develop the stages of cognitive development. Therefore, this paper is going to look into Jean Piaget’s life and his major contributions to the field of psychology and the impacts they have on the history of developmental psychology.