Piaget’s theory of cognitive development AO3

• +Research support. Howe put 9-12 year-olds in groups to discuss how objects move down a slope. They found that the level of children's knowledge and understanding increased after the discussion. Crucially though, the children did not reach the same conclusions or pick up the same facts about movement down a slope. This means that the children formed their own individual mental representations of the topic - as Piaget would have predicted.
• +Revolutionised teaching. In 1960s, children sat copying text. In Piaget's activity-oriented classrooms children construct their own understanding, e.g. investigate physical properties of sand. At A level, discovery learning may be ‘flipped' lessons where students read up on content, forming their own basic mental representation of the topic prior to teaching. This shows how Piaget-inspired approaches may facilitate the development of individual mental representations of the world.
• +- There is no firm evidence to suggest that Piaget's teaching ideas are any more effective than others - the input from teacher may be the key (Lazonder and Harmsen 2016). This means that the value of Piaget's theory to education may have been overstated.
• -Underestimated the role of other people. Piaget recognised that other people can be important in learning, for example as sources of information. However others (Vygotsky) argued that knowledge first exists between the learner and someone with more knowledge supported by evidence. This means that Piaget's theory may be an

  incomplete explanation for learning because it neglects the role of other people in learning.
• Role of motivation

  Piaget believed that we are born with an innate motivation to learn in order to escape the unpleasant state of disequilibrium. However, Piaget may have overestimated this motivation to learn, possibly because he studied an unrepresentative sample of children. This suggests that children are born with a degree of intellectual curiosity, but perhaps less than that proposed by Piaget.