G.A. HELMORE’s scientific contributions

This chapter provides an overview of the Piagetian concept of intelligence and its development. Piaget defines intelligence as “the state of equilibrium towards which tend all successive adaptations of a sensori-motor and cognitive nature, as well as all assimilatory and accommodatory interactions between the organism and the environment”. Operations and their groupings are the main object of Piaget's developmental approach to concept formation. From his many experiments performed by children of all ages, he claims that there are five main stages in the development of a concept, through which the vast majority of children pass; the bright child will pass through the stages more quickly and the dull child may fail to reach the final stages of maturity.

This chapter presents the six experiments of Piaget that are adapted from the book The Child's Conception of Geometry. It presents an account of Piaget's investigation of the problems of measurement and metrical geometry, and by means of this investigation, to show the stages of development through which the child's concept progresses. The account of Piaget's experiments shows a progression of development through three or four stages from a complete faith in visual perception, through the evolution of hand and arm movements as an intermediate measure, to the use of a common measure that could finally be applied by the operation of unit iteration. The final stage of development of the concept he terms conservation, by which he means that length, area, or volume, etc. is unaltered by change of the position, or change in the order of the elements composing the whole.

This chapter discusses the Piagetian experiments. The published works of Jean Piaget fall into two main periods. The first of these extended from 19 24–932. The second period of Piaget's work commenced in 1936. In the books of this period, Piaget has occasionally had the assistance of collaborators and he adopted a recognizable pattern of approach. This pattern of approach is the use of the now famous Piagetian experiment. To investigate some point of inquiry, a sample of children is taken and each child in the sample is required to take part in one or more experiments. In these experiments, he is faced with a series of problems, in the solving of which, by means of careful questioning, the investigator can persuade the child to externalize his thought. From the pattern of the responses given by the children, of different chronological ages and levels of mental development, the developmental stages of the growth of the concept are made available for our study.

This chapter discusses the indications pointed by the results of the experiments and their interpretations. It discusses certain general factors that affect the learning and teaching situations. The factors that affect the learning situation are:(1) maturation, (2) the individual differences between children, (3) great differences in the general and specific experiences of children, and (d) the whole child is involved in the learning process. The factors that affect the teaching situation are: (1) the child needs to be ready for the teaching, (2) partial ability will precede the full concept, (3) verbal and formal teaching have little place in the primary school, and (4) a framework of development and progression is needed in the planned work.

This chapter provides an overview on Jean Piaget Jean's approach to his work. In 1918, having graduated in Natural Sciences, Piaget obtained a doctorate with a thesis entitled “Alpine Molluscs”. Piaget got enrolled in the psychological laboratory at Zurich. There he attended Jung's lectures and amongst others read the works of Herbert Spencer which exercised considerable influence on his later writings. In his work the problem of Piaget has always been the same, and it arises out of Spencer's own doctrine of adaptation. Piaget's published works are extremely difficult to read, especially in the theoretical sections. There are several reasons for this and the first is that he is investigating and writing about an extremely intricate and involved process. Another minor cause is that all of his publications are written in French and it is often extremely difficult to find exact English equivalents for the original French terms used.

This chapter describes the results of the six Piagetian experiments. After the completion of each set of experiments, each subject's completed protocol for the experiment was compared with the salient features of each stage of development of the appropriate experiment and the performance was placed provisionally in the appropriate stage. In five of the six experiments, the protocols showing performance levels evenly balanced as transition from one stage to another occurred. In such cases, it was decided to allocate a transition age, for example, IIIA–IIIB. Because of its simplicity, the highest stage attainable in the experiment of the lengths of lines and the coincidence of their extremities was stage IIB. Of the 30 children, 23 gave responses that were placed in that stage, the balance of seven were placed in stage IIA.

This chapter reviews Piaget's theories. At the same time as the first section of Piaget's work, Susan Isaacs was carrying out her experimental work in the Malting House School. Her plan was to have the children under continual observation, and this was the great difference between her approach and Piaget's. She observed the whole child in an unstructured situation and she was keenly critical of Piaget in two matters in particular. Firstly, Susan Isaac stated that the differences between her conclusions and his were that he attributed to maturation certain phenomena that can be shown to be, to a real extent, a function of experience, and secondly, that from the observations she made of the development of the children in her school her records as a whole cut right across any hard-and-fast notion of mental structures. In the second period of Piaget's work, which began in 1936, Piaget very considerably changed his approach and it resulted in far less criticism.