Evaluation

• Strength - Application to education

  Piaget's idea of learning through actively exploring has improved classroom teaching by replacing old-fashioned classrooms with children copying off the board, to activity-oriented classrooms where children actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understanding of the subject

  Discovery can occur through children investigating physical properties of sand and water, or older students studying before lessons and then learning higher level evaluation in lesson
• Strength - Research support of innate schema

  Robert Fantz (1961) devised a study in which infants' preferences for faces could be measured

  Found that infants as young as four days old showed a significant preference for a schematic face, as opposed to symmetrical and asymmetrical control faces

  This demonstrates that infants do prefer the unique arrangements of a human face, suggesting that we are born with 'face schema' as argued by Piaget
• Weakness - Lack of falsification

  Despite the 'wealth' of research support, Piaget's concepts are very difficult to operationalise, because he was interested in cognitive processes

  Measuring and observing equilibration or assimilation is virtually impossible

  This means that these processes are only inferred, rather than scientifically established

  Therefore, many of Piaget's ideas cannot be experimentally manipulated and evidenced

  Lacks scientific credibility