QUOTES XII
Quotations about
PIAGET'S ACCOUNT OF THE GROWTH OF INTELLIGENCE
IN THE TYPICAL CHILD
DOES INTELLECTUAL MATURATION OCCUR IN MARKED 'STAGES', REQUIRING
'INTERACTION WITH THE ENVIRONMENT', AND YIELDING A PROGRESSIVE
DEPARTURE FROM EARLIER 'INFANTILE IRRATIONALITY'?
Though Jean Piaget's work in Geneva began in the 1920's,
it was not until the post-behaviourist era, around 1970, that
Piagetianism was to influence-and briefly to dominate-psychology
in the English-speaking world. The Piagetian focus was on the
growth in understanding and in the capacity for understanding
that takes place through childhood. Supposedly there were marked
stages of development through which children progressed away from
the unreasoning, infantile world of the senses; and each advance
left yet other problems to be solved by the child's further interaction
with the world. How the child matured was by, first,
assimilating new information and, eventually, accommodating
to it. Precisely what matured so as to make possible new
and productive interactions with the environment that had not
occurred previously? Piagetians answered that these new interactions
were enabled by the child's gradual construction of its
own intelligence-rather than by biological maturation alone.
In many ways there was 'no contest' between Piagetian ideas and
the notions of Spearman, Burt, Eysenck and the 'London School'.
After all, IQ-testing derived from Binet's work which had been
precisely concerned to chart the growth through childhood of untaught
mental abilities in children. The differential psychologist could
be quite happy in principle with the idea that at least some
aspects of the intelligence of all children develop 'through interaction
with the environment'. (Whether such exploration of and adaptation
to the environment is itself a source of lasting individual
differences between children is a quite distinct empirical
question.) However, there was always room for misunderstanding
between Piagetian and psychometric psychologists along the following
lines.
1. Piagetians sometimes seemed to believe that they were offering
a replacement for conventional tests of intelligence. Thus
Olson (1975, Bull. Brit. Psychol. Socy.) wrote of 'the
new IQ derived from Piaget'. In fact, however, Piagetian measures
(of 'conservation', 'transitivity of reasoning', 'egocentrism',
'moral reasoning', etc.) invariably turned out to correlate with
general intelligence (g) just as highly as their own reliabilities
would allow. [Some Piagetian tests remained psychometrically at
the 'pilot stage', no doubt because of a lack of interest in differences
between children of the same age on 'tests' of any kind {see 2,
below}; and many Piagetian assessments proved difficult to administer
reliably because of the substantial involvement of the judgement
of the tester (in the delicate exercise of the Piaget-preferred
méthode clinique).]
2. Piagetians sometimes liked to seem egalitarian. They
were not quick to correct interpretations of their ideas as implying
that all children would develop (with the help of such
repeated interaction with the environment as might prove necessary)
and arrive at a similar more, advanced stage in the end
(even if some children had arrived ahead of others). In
fact, such a view is probably no part of Piaget's own doctrines,
which placed as much stress on maturation as on interaction; and
many adolescents certainly remain demonstrably and lastingly incompetent
on many Piagetian measures of formal reasoning ('formal operations')
and even of conservation. That Piagetianism sometimes appeared
more egalitarian and utopian than the traditional London School
approach to intelligence was merely because Piagetians simply
chose to neglect altogether lasting individual differences and
to concentrate on describing the typical development of the typical
child.
3. There was a Piagetian stress on the importance of interaction
with the environment. This seemed to conflict with psychogenetic
research findings that individual differences in g are
not much dependent on Genetic x Environmental Interaction.
{See Quotes V and X; and, for a variable that is apparently
influenced by G x E Interaction, see Quotes XVI.} In
fact there is no such conflict. Psychogenetic G x E interaction,
when it is invoked, is meant to help explain phenotypic differences;
and it would be said to occur if people with similar genes (e.g.
MZ twins) were especially similar phenotypically [i.e. in observed
outcome] when (and only when) they had been reared in similar
environments. If G x E interaction occurs, a particular
gene-environment combination is necessary for the particular
phenotype (or phenotypic level) in question; or, to put it another
way, 'genetic and environmental values multiply with each other'
to yield the different phenotypes. By contrast, in the Piagetian
sense of interaction, we can all develop 'through interaction
with the environment' without differing thereby as individuals:
no particular gene-environment combinations are invoked
by the Piagetian to account for differences in. [Cruelly, some
might say that the Piagetian idea that we all develop 'through
interaction with the environment' makes no empirical predictions
and is nothing more than a feel-good catch phrase. But this hint
at unfalsifiability is probably unfair. Piagetian 'interactionist'
ideas must surely predict intellectual retardation and deficiency
for children whose severe physical handicaps limit the degree
to which they can explore, manipulate and react to the environment.
That plenty of children with gross sensory and motor handicaps
show good intellectual development means that-far from being unfalsifiable-the
distinctively Piagetian version of 'interactionism' looks quite
simply wrong.]
4. Piagetianism sometimes seemed to stress the non-improvability
of educational attainments in children. By contrast, the London
School psychologist, Arthur Jensen, along with many American behaviourists
of the 1960's, happily recommended rote learning as a way of improving
children's development. In fact, there was little contest here
(except of both Schools with behaviourism): London School psychologists
were somewhat happier to advocate procedures that might assist
particular children's schoolwork, but neither Piaget nor Jensen
(after 1968) offered anything that they claimed to improve g
itself.
In fact, the two schools had much to gain from each other by
co-operation on the question of what improved during developed,
and what precisely went into decline in old age. Neither
Spearman nor Piaget, in their original theorising, had provided
totally satisfactory answers to these questions: Spearman had
never shown in what precise 'mental energy' (or 'information processing
capacity', as we might now say) g consisted; and Piaget
had never explained why the g so carefully constructed
through childhood should quite often 'deconstruct' (at least in
its more 'fluid' forms - in psychometric gf) in old age
{see Quotes XXI}. (For a fuller comparison of the achievements
of Spearman and Piaget, see Brand, 1996, The g Factor,
Chapter II.)
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of Piagetian views of
the nature and development of intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
[The book was first issued, in March, but then withdrawn by the
'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed modern canons
of
'political correctness.']
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, and others' comments
and reviews, see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
*****************************************************************
INDEX to QUOTES XII
Page
(i) Are there marked 'stages' of mental development
in the typical child? 5
(ii) What is the 'interaction with the environment' that is
fêted in Piagetian theory? 9
Does development occur via ever-more-advanced
'assimilation' and 'accommodation'?
(iii) What is Piagetian intelligence? 12
What is its relation to psychometric g and to
information processing capacities? Are children
somehow 'irrational' until intelligence develops?
(iv) Can development be speeded up? 17
{See also Quotes X re Head Start programmes}
(v) Moral development 17
Epilogue
(i) Are there marked 'stages' of mental development
in the typical child?
"{There are three important laws of human development:
it is determined by innate rather than environmental factors;
the most necessary biological functions develop earliest; and
mental and physical development show periodic and alternating
fluctuations-mental development occurring markedly between
18 months and 4 years, between 7 and 11 years,
and between 14 and 18 years.}"
Mary COLLINS & J.DREVER, 1936, Psychology and
Practical Life. London University Press.
"[(i) The stage of sensory-motor operations] is characterised
by the progressive formation of the schema of the permanent object
and by the sensory-motor structuration of one's immediate spatial
surroundings;
[(ii) The stage of concrete thinking operations] is characterised
by a long process of elaboration of mental operations [followed
by] an equally long process of structuration [during which] concrete
thought processes are reversible;
[(iii) The third stage] is characterised by the development of
formal, abstract thought operations."
KESSEN & KUHLMAN, 1962, Thought in the Young Child,
giving
Barbara Inhelder's description of Piaget's hypothesized stages.
"Piaget follows earlier continental writers, who adopted
what I called a 'stratification theory' [of mental development].
He conceives cognitive development as proceeding by relatively
abrupt steps, like a staircase. My {own} conception was rather
that of an inclined plane, or.... "a continuously rising
line with slight retardations for purposes of consolidation"....
(Unlike Piaget....I believe simple syllogistic problems can
be solved by the average child of eight (cf. Burt, 1921).*)....
{However,} Dr James {a fellow contributor to a symposium} is not
quite correct in saying that Piaget developed his theories independently
of British work. His biological basis was avowedly derived largely
from Spencer; and he quotes and uses several of my tests. It is
doubtless the influence of Spencer which accounts for the resemblances
between Piaget's developmental theories and my own which Dr James
has noted: thus we each regard cognitive activity as a mode of
adaptation, involving both
{i} discriminative or analytic processes (the essence of what
Piaget calls 'accommodation to outer reality') and
{ii} integrative or synthetic processes (the essence of 'assimilation',
i.e. 'the construction of apperceptive schema').
It is also the influence of Spencer that led us both (in common
with many other psychologists) to distinguish much the same four
stages in the child's cognitive development."
Sir Cyril BURT, c. 1970, in C.B.E.James, Modern Concepts
of Intelligence. 94, Chatsworth Road, Croydon : R.S.Reid.
{ *Burt maintained that the following item (individually administered,
with the child first reading the problem from a card) would
be passed by the average eight-year-old:
I don't like sea voyages.
And I don't like the seaside.
I must spend Easter either in France or among the
Scottish Hills, or on the South Coast.
Which shall it be? }
"Piaget believed that mental growth involves major qualitative
changes. This hypothesis is relatively recent. According to eighteenth-century
empiricists, the child's mental machinery is fundamentally the
same as the adult's, the only difference being that the child
has fewer associations. Nativists also minimized the distinction
between the child's mind and the adult's, for they viewed the
basic categories of time, space, number and causality as given
a priori, being part of the native equipment that all humans
have at birth."
H.GLEITMAN, 1986, Psychology, 2nd edition.
New York : Norton.
"A tribute to the particularity of at least one
conservation task is provided by Rowell and Renner (1976, Brit.J.Psychol.)
in their study of conservation of volume by Australian postgraduate
students for a Diploma in Education. When asked to judge whether
a ball of plasticine would change its volume when gently rolled
into the shape of a sausage, no less that 18% of the students
- and 28.4% of the female graduates from Arts backgrounds- said
that it would, thus exhibiting failure to conserve volume.
And this is no unique finding: Rowell and Renner were following
up studies in which rates of non-conservation had been found as
high as 61% in female first-year students of mathematics."
C.R.BRAND, 1977, 'Piagetian intelligence'.
(For E.U. Psychology, Year IV Class.)
"There is a growing feeling that Piaget's stage model of
cognitive development is in serious trouble.... It is proving
less credible to developmentalists and less useful to educators....
However we may wish it otherwise, human cognitive growth may simply
be too contingent, multiform, and heterogeneous-too variegated
in developmental mechanisms, routes and rates-to be accurately
characterizable by any stage theory of the Piagetian kind."
J.FLAVELL, 1978, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 1.
"....there is no compelling support for Piaget's hypothesis
that his cognitive stages do more than re-describe age-related
changes in behavior."
C.J.BRAINERD, 1978, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 1.
"....the criticism [of Piagetian theory] is that different
behaviours belonging to the same stage are acquired at very different
times.... When empirical research demonstrated the validity of
this criticism.... [some Piagetian writers] suggested that simultaneous
acquisition of different stage-defining behaviours was not crucial
to the theory. However, if the hypothesis is abandoned, other
evidence must be found to support the claim that stages are general
descriptions of cognitive functioning at some period in development.
In short, a Piagetian who eats his cake must be taught (with the
help of rote learning if necessary) that he no longer has it."
T.J.BERNDT, 1978, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 1.
"It seems premature to take a firm stand now as to whether
development should be sliced into three or more macrodevelopmental
levels, irrespective of their formalization."
Annette KARMILOFF-SMITH, 1978, Behavioral & Brain Sciences
1.
"One of the basic predictions of Piaget's theory is that
children's performance will be consistent across a wide range
of tasks.... An eight-year-old should be able to pass all concrete-operations-level
tasks (conservation, class inclusion, seriation, transitivity,
etc.) but should fail all formal-operations-level tasks (balance
scale, projection of shadows, probability, pendulum, etc.)....
It has become increasingly apparent that the concurrence assumption
is at best overstated."
R.S.SIEGLER & D.D.RICHARDS, 1982, in R.J.Sternberg,
Handbook of Human Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
"In Piaget's experiment on conservation of volume, the experimenter
shows the child two tumblers, one short and squat, the other tall
and thin. He fills the short, squat one with water, and then pours
the water from that tumbler into the other. He asks the child,
who has watched this whole procedure, if there is the same amount
of water in both tumblers. Because of the difference in shapes,
the water is closer to the top of the long, thin tumbler. It appears
to be full, unlike the short, squat one. Because of this, the
young child will usually say "no". Bruner performed
this experiment in exactly the same manner, with one difference:
before he emptied the liquid from one tumbler into the other,
he placed a screen between the tumblers and the child. When he
asked the question, "Is there the same amount of water now?"
the four-year-olds, unable to see the pouring of water
into the tumblers, answered "yes". Thus, it appears
that when there is no information overload, constancy can be
achieved even at this early age."
R.ORNSTEIN, 1985, Psychology.
San Diego : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
"Piaget and his co-workers produced evidence of, for example,
their stage theory, and the presence or absence of certain logical
structures at specific ages. But then researchers started to modify
their procedures slightly, revealing abilities in children which
were simply not brought out, or were inhibited, in the previous
procedures, and the 'evidence' of Piaget started to crumble (see
M.Donaldson, 1978, Children's Minds, and contributions
in K.Richardson & S.Sheldon, 1987, Cognitive Development
in Adolescence)."
K.RICHARDSON, 1988, Understanding Psychology.
Milton Keynes : Open University Press.
(ii) What is the 'interaction with the environment' that
is
fêted in Piagetian theory?
Does development occur via ever-more-advanced
'assimilation' and 'accommodation'?
" The basic epistemological alternatives are predestination
or some sort of constructivism."
J.PIAGET, 1971, Structuralism.
"Piaget's theory of operations has troubled some of us as
being rather abstract and philosophical; but when he says that
motor activity is "the fountainhead of the operations",
he brings his position within the boundaries of empirical science."
C.JAMES, c. 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts of Intelligence.
94, Chatsworth Road, Croydon : R.S.Reid.
"....while the fecundity of the subject's thought processes
depends on the internal resources of the organism, the efficacy
of these processes depends on the fact that the organism is not
independent of the environment but can only live, act or think
in interaction with it."
Jean PIAGET, 1971, Biology and Knowledge.
Edinburgh University Press.
"Piaget was an interactionist: the biological brain needs
opportunities to flex its cerebral potential, especially by fiddling
with objects in space."
D.COHEN, 1983, Piaget. London : Croom Helm.
"[Assimilation and accommodation] are interesting ideas,
but very general, and as such difficult to pin down to any experiment.
Nor surprisingly, Piaget does not offer any direct experimental
evidence for assimilation and accommodation."
P.BRYANT, 1974, Perception and Understanding
in Young Children. London : Methuen.
"Contrary to Piaget's formulation that cognitive development
is unidirectional and that little cognitive change occurs during
adulthood, the elderly display lower levels of cognitive ability
than younger adults (and sometimes as low as children) on measures
of moral judgement and egocentrism, and certain logical operations
tasks, such as those requiring conservation ability."
H.L.MINTON & F.W.SCHNEIDER, 1980, Differential Psychology.
Belmont, California : Wadsworth (Brooks / Cole).
"The expectation that constructions of sensory-motor intelligence
determine the character of a mental organ such as language seems
to me to be hardly more plausible than a proposal that the fundamental
properties of the eye or the visual cortex or the heart develop
on that basis."
Noam CHOMSKY, 1980, 'On cognitive structures and their
development: a reply to Piaget'. In M.Piattelli-Ialmarimi,
Language and Learning: the Debate between Jean Piaget and
Noam Chomsky. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
"In our view, those who propose that genotype-environment
interactions are major determinants of intellectual variation
in populations are more interested in putting roadblocks in the
way of studies of normal human variation than in clarifying the
scientific issues."
Sandra SCARR & Louise CARTER-SALTZMAN, 1982, in R.J.Sternberg,
Handbook of Human Intelligence. Cambridge University
Press.
"Many researchers (such as Bower, 1974, and Butterworth,
1981)....are opposed to Piaget's constructionist theory of perception.
Although they would agree with Piaget that the baby's 'knowledge'
is not the same as the adult's and has yet to be developed, nevertheless
they would not agree that the newborn baby lives in a chaotic
world which can only gradually be structured through the infant's
own activity. In contrast, they take a 'Gibsonian' view....that
some properties of objects in space (such as three-dimensionality)
are directly perceptible by the sensory system and not
dependent on the experience mediated by motor activity."
Maureen COX, 1986, The Child's Point of View.
Brighton, Sussex : Harvester.
"The process whereby the genotype reads out into the phenotype
and creates individual environments that then feed back, causally,
into the phenotype, may be called one of transaction. This
is arguably an important process that has been neglected, or at
least imprecisely formulated, while inchoate developmental psychologists
have preferred to opt out of nature vs nurture arguments
about human differences by appealing to the omnipresence of obscure
'interaction effects' that are, in their work, forever unspecified.
Transaction, by contrast, is a clear spelling-out of the
basic hereditarian idea: that individuals move in their own ways,
when given the opportunities, to select and to create environments
that are enriching and fulfilling - or, in some cases, otherwise."
Editorial in Biology & Society 4, ix 1987.
"....the reaction of Piagetians to marked similarities between
separated identical twins {cf. Matheny, 1975, Developmental
Psychol. 11} and to marked dissimilarities between adopted
children reared together is one of boredom - apparently because
such findings tell us so little in detail about how, precisely,
such differences come about."
C.R.BRAND, 1988, in D.Anderson, Full Circle.
London : Social Affairs Unit.
(iii) What is Piagetian intelligence?
What is its relation to psychometric g and to information
processing capacity? Are children somehow 'irrational'
until intelligence develops?
"....the new IQ which is based on Piaget measures competence
with the quantitative dimensional logic which modern science finds
so useful."
D.R.OLSON, 1975, Bulletin of the British Psychological Socy
28.
"For Piaget, intelligence is not 'what the tests test' but
what his tests test."
Edinburgh University Honours Psychology student, 1980.
"Around 1968, Jean Piaget replaced Sigmund Freud....as the
leading guru for academic psychologists who inclined to believe
that dark irrationality and impenetrable subjectivity might be
found somewhere near the core - or at least near the developmental
source - of
the human psyche."
C.R.BRAND, 1988, Psychology News 2, No.2.
"It was possible to demonstrate that an essential step in
the solution of a conservation problem is the processing
of an equation. By increasing the number of originally equal quantities,
the number of distributions and redistributions, the number of
parts formed thereby, and the number of so-called reversibility
steps necessitated by a particular test question, equations could
be generated to define systematically the contents of problems.
The greater the value of these parameters, the larger the number
of equations presented by it. The larger the number of equations
involved in a problem, the greater its informational content.
The correlation between subjects' pass rate and information
load was .943 (N=150)."
V.HAMILTON & J.MOSS, 1974, Child Development.
"H.J.Butcher (1968, Human Intelligence) has noted....the
unfortunate involvement of leading questions in some attempts
to explore the alleged irrationality of the mind of the child:
when children are asked (as in some reported [Piagetian] studies]),
'Does the wind know it makes the clouds move?' it is hard to resist
thinking that it is merely the implicit 'animism' of the
question that - coupled with the acquiescence of young children
- yields the supposed 'animism' of the answers.... {Anyhow} it
appears to be the case that the course of development as characterised
by Piagetians is....one that can be broadly represented as a progress
in....information processing capacity.... Halford (in P.C.Dodwell,
1972, New Horizons in Psychology II, Penguin) refers to
calculations by McLaughlin, Pascual-Leone and himself that the
differences between the Piagetian tasks that can typically be
solved by children of different ages can be represented as differences
in the number of 'bits' or 'chunks' of information that have to
be processed."
C.R.BRAND, 1976, 'Conceptions of intelligence:
a discussion paper'. (For E.U. Psychology, Final Honours Class.)
"Serpell (1976, Culture's Influence on Behaviour,
Methuen) notes that, although one study in Nigeria and another
in Hong Kong have found development of concrete-operational conservation
at typical Western ages, most cross-cultural studies find results
that will not surprise any of the critics of the 'culture-boundness'
of IQ tests. So, "[according to Dasen], a typical curve...of
"retarded" development has been reported many times....
Dasen's review cites such results from studies of African children
in Rhodesia, Senegal and Uganda, Arab children in Algeria and
Aden, Eskimo and Indian children in Canada, children of the West
Indies in Europe and Australia.... ....Further evidence of the
relation between conservation abilities and IQ is seen
in Rushton and Wiener's (1975, Brit. J. Soc. & Clin. Psychol.)
study of altruism and cognitive development in 7-to-11-year-old
children. This study was concerned-amongst other things-with 'the
notion of generalized cognitive developmental levels'. Tests of
role-taking, egocentricity, cognitive complexity, conservation
and IQ were administered to the children in their schools in Hertfordshire.
The failure of the standard liquid conservation task (scored in
terms of the adequacy of the justifications given by the children)
to contribute any variance beyond that of IQ was noticeable: once
age and IQ were partialled out, conservation was left with one
small correlation (with cognitive complexity) which the authors
themselves dismiss as a chance finding. In their study as a whole,
there were twenty-three significant correlations between test
variables out of a possible forty-five: only five of these remained
significant once the effects of age and IQ had been partialled
out."
C.R.BRAND, 1977, 'Piagetian intelligence'.
"The Piagetian rejoices in the instances of unreasonable
childish notions that can be thought to have something deeply
in common. Thus Olson (1978, Behav. & Brain Sci. 1)
volunteers:
"at one time in his life, a child fails to see that active
sentences are logically equivalent to passive ones, that "not
more" is logically equivalent to "less", that an
ascending series, or staircase, is simultaneously a descending
one, and so on, because his cognitive structures lack the property
of reversibility.... If a child is asked to construct an "X"
pattern with checkers, he is unwilling to allow the center checker
to serve simultaneously as a part of both the left oblique and
the right oblique.... If children are asked to build ascending
and descending staircases, they are unwilling to allow the top
block in the ascending series to serve also as the top block of
the descending series; rather, they have two top blocks side by
side, one for the top of each of the ascending and descending
series.... Young children are unwilling to let one bell serve
for two notes in producing a tune like "Ba Ba Black Sheep"
- they insist upon one bell for each of the first two notes.
And so on. In a Piagetian scheme, all these forms of intelligent
behaviour would be accounted for by the same underlying structure."
By contrast with Olson, the phlegmatic differentialist and his
empiricist allies would suppose it all too typical of 'depth'
psychology to impute self-contradiction to young Jack when he
[takes "not more" as tolerantly licensing the perfectly
reasonable claim to be "neither more, nor less" (e.g.
'neither more nor less tall than young Jill')]..... Again, Harris
(1976, Brit.J.Psychol.) found that the understanding of
the passive voice [which is strongly related to mental age (as
measured by a traditional psychometric measure of verbal intelligence)]
is not so consistently incorrect in young children as to
suggest any kind of irrationality; and, in fact, children of a
mental age of five could cope with passives where subject and
object are non-reversible in common sense ("The cow is ridden
by the farmer") even though they could not cope with potentially
reversible passives ("The lamb is licked by the dog").
What "underlying cognitive structure" is needed to account
for the occasional and grammatically unsystematic errors of young
children?.... Is not a great deal more care necessary before saying
that certain kinds of thinking only appear at a certain stage,
let alone that systematic irrationality was the rule prior to
the various happy transitions?"
C.R.BRAND, 1979, 'Piagetian stages: psychometric and ontogenetic
issues.' (E.U.Psychology, for Final Honours Class.)
"....it does not seem that current work {with apparent alternatives
to I.Q.-type tests} - with Piagetian tasks, with concept formation
and learning, or with cognitive styles - is capable of yielding
much more diagnostically useful information than present intelligence
tests."
P.E.VERNON, 1979, Intelligence: Heredity and Environment.
San Francisco : Freeman.
"....it is instructive to look at a principal components
analysis of Piagetian items. A study by Garfinkle (1975) provides
intercorrelations among fourteen Piagetian tasks administered
to ninety-six kindergarten and first-grade children. The mean
inter-item correlation is +.34.... The first principal component
accounts for 40 per cent of the total variance in these fourteen
items.... The communalities (which are close to the squared multiple
correlation of each item with every other item) of the fourteen
Piagetian items range from .41 to .80, with a mean of .61,
which is comparable to what we find for Wechsler subtests....
But what makes this evidence even more striking testimony to Piaget's
genius in devising test items* that get at the most fundamental
aspects of intellectual development is the fact that the general
factor of the Piagetian battery is almost pure g in the
Spearman sense."
A.R.JENSEN, 1980, Bias in Mental Testing. London : Methuen.
{*However, as Jensen mentions later, Piagetian 'items' often take
as long to administer as does a whole Wechsler sub-test that is
composed of many items taking less than a minute to administer.}
"Piaget spent his whole working life trying to prove the
startling inadequacies of childhood.... there is now plenty of
evidence that Piaget's gloomy stance was, to say the least, exaggerated."
P.BRYANT, 1982, Nature, 11 xi.
"....Bower {a Piagetian sympathiser} (1979) has concluded
that babies 'appear to have a very limited information processing
rate. Many everyday events occur at a rate too high for babies
to register all the relevant information.' Altogether, it seems
reasonable to continue to hypothesize at this stage that intake
speed improves and declines in parallel with mental age."
C.R.BRAND & I.J.DEARY, 1982, in H.J.Eysenck,
A Model for Intelligence. New York : Springer.
"When cross-sectional studies of Piagetian tasks were carried
out, old people were found to perform more like young children
on classificatory tasks, to be more animistic, more egocentric,
and to be less likely to display formal thought than young adults."
Joanna TURNER, 1983, Cognitive Development and Education.
London : Methuen.
"....Luria's and Piaget's theories refer to similar psychological
processes. It also appears that cognitive development, as described
by these authors, is related to psychometric intelligence."
Rhona STEINBERG & J.JSCHUBERT, 1984, Bulletin
of the British Psychological Society 37.
"....constructivist theories tend to be rather vague. This
has been a problem since Kant himself, who was notably obscure
about key aspects [of his view that human knowledge and its development
are subject to logical constraints].... Many who acknowledge the
'richness' of [Piaget's] theory also complain that the logical
structures are abstract and difficult to operationalize (e.g.
R.Case, 1985, Intellectual Development)."
K.RICHARDSON, 1988, Understanding Psychology.
Milton Keynes : Open University Press.
"{Contrary to the Piagetian idea that young children are
especially egocentric, Maureen Cox, The Child's Point of View,
demonstrates that} it is precisely the acquisition of one's very
own pictorial perspective that is actually developmentally delayed-younger
children tend to draw what they know (e.g. they draw motor
cars seen from above, with the four wheels splayed out at the
sides), not what the see...."
C.R.BRAND, 1988, Psychology News 2, No. 2.
"Charles Spearman saw [analogical reasoning - 'pig : boar
:: dog : ? '] as central to intelligence. The Piagetian story
on analogical reasoning
is that it is one of the last abilities to develop, only appearing
at the age of 11 or 12. In contrast, U.Goswami (1992, Analogical
Reasoning in Children) is one of a new school who advance
a knowledge-based theory of development. This is a modified, nativist
theory which claims that we are, more or less, born with the mental
processes that do full-scale, analogical reasoning. However, because
the knowledge which these processes act on changes with development,
we witness....developmental shifts in behaviour. So, even very
young children basically know how to do analogies but, when the
analogy involves unfamiliar knowledge, they fail."
Mark KEANE, 1993, 'Born to reason why'.
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2 iv.
"{By the 1970's came} the first reports indicating that 'Piagetian
intelligence', far from being the non-g intelligence so
often sought by psychologists, correlated perfectly well with
traditional IQ, and especially with measures of fluid, untaught,
general intelligence (gf) (see Tuddenham, 1970; Steinberg
& Schubert, 1974; Kuhn, 1976; Humphreys & Parsons, 1979;
Willerman, 1979, pp.98-99; Carroll et al., 1984). For example,
Raven's Matrices and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
correlated with Piagetian measures of conservation, seriation
and class inclusion as highly as the reliabilities of the latter
would allow-and as high as .80 when Spearman's correction was
applied; and the Wechsler Scale correlated at .88 with a full
range of 27 Piagetian tests (Humphreys et al., 1985).
C.R.BRAND, 1996, The g Factor. Chichester, UK : Wiley
DePublisher.
(iv) Can development be speeded up?
"....well-meaning learning theorists who train small
children to ignore perceptual cues, to side-step misconceptions
be reciting verbal rules, and so forth, are doing....children
a grave disservice."
Annette KARMILOFF-SMITH, 1978.
"Piaget was apt to mock 'the American question' of how to
speed up development. That was transatlantic frivolity."
D.COHEN, 1983, Piaget. London : Croom Helm.
(v) Moral development
"....there exists in European thought a law in the evolution
of moral judgments which is analagous to the law of which psychology
watches the effects throughout the development of the individual....bringing
to light in the evolution of Western philosophic thought the gradual
victory of the norms of reciprocity over those of social conformism."
PIAGET, 1932. The Moral Judgment of the Child.
New York : Free Press, 1965.
"There are....serious difficulties with the very idea
of progressive development, aside from it being discredited in
biology. In historiography, the belief in human progress has become
problematic in the face of two world wars, nuclear brinkmanship
and the collapse of the Marxist state, which was founded on a
messianic, progressive history."
B.VANDENBERG, 1993, Theory & Psychology 3.
Epilogue
"The work of Piaget was at first unjustifiably neglected
in the English-speaking countries, and then equally unjustifiably
elevated to the status of sacred doctrine."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1979.
"....in 1978, John Flavell-the psychologist who had first
introduced Piaget to the English-speaking world-noted with sympathy
'a growing feeling in the field that Piaget's stage model of cognitive
development is in serious trouble'. For matters had transpired
as follows. (1) The 'new' tests of development correlated extremely
well with the old - except that the new ones were less reliable
and yielded a male advantage and a larger White-Black difference.
(2) Because the mental developments of childhood failed to covary
as predicted, the hypothesized stages of development did not demonstrably
exist, and had to be condemned as 'simplistic' by Piagetians themselves.
(3) Those intriguing putative explicators of stage-transitions,
assimilation and accommodation, were incapable of
empirical demonstration."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, Psychology News 1, No. 38.
"Piagetian theory was once considered capable of describing
the structure of development of human thought. However, disillusionment
with Piagetian theory came rather quickly because many of its
structural and developmental assumptions appeared incongruent
with empirical evidence.
In recent years, several neo-Piagetian theories have been proposed
which try to preserve the strengths of Piaget's theory while eliminating
its weaknesses. At the same time several other models have been
advanced originating from different epistemological traditions,
such as cognitive/differential psychology or socio-historical
approaches."
Publisher's announcement, 1992, for A.Demetriou, M.Shayer &
A.Efkildes (eds.), Neo-Piagetian Theories of Cognitive
Development, International Library of Psychology.
"There are....serious difficulties with the very idea of
progressive development, aside from it being discredited in biology.
In historiography, the belief in human progress has become problematic
in the face of two world wars, nuclear brinkmanship and the collapse
of the Marxist state, which was founded on a messianic, progressive
history.... The identity of the field of developmental psychology
is closely tied to a vision of human life as progressive, and
therefore it suffers from similar problems."
B.VANDENBERG, 1993, Theory & Psychology 3.
"By the end of the 1980's, the force of data, theory and
cultural commitment had led to The Rational Infant, in
which [Edinburgh University's Tom] Bower announced, after a review
of the evidence, that "[what] we will accomplish in theory
and practice will, I am certain, depend on what we can bring ourselves
to accept of the idea that the infant we know so well, the beautiful
baby we all adore, is, as well as all that, a rational infant."
Merely as witnesses to a historical moment , we should be struck
in awe: the psychology of the early 20th century that denied rationality
to 'primitive' adults of Africa and Asia, to most females (whatever
their age) of our own culture, and unambiguously to male babies,
is now willing to grant this ultimate accolade to all human children
in their first months of life. ....With no perceptible organizing
theory, research studies of young human beings have found mental
abilities in babies that no professional observer had seen prior
to 1970. ....There is of course the often touted end of theory:
the deaths of Piaget and Skinner took away the most recent persistent
claimants to conceptual hegemony and the late Vygotskian flurry
already seems pale."
W.KESSEN, 1993, 'Avoiding the emptiness: the full infant.'
Theory & Psychology 3.
"For the developmental theorist," [writes Esther Thelen,
of Indiana University], "individual differences pose an enormous
challenge....Developmental theory has not met this challenge with
much success." And this is, in part, because individual differences
are seen as extraneous, whereas Thelen argues that it is precisely
such differences, the huge variation between individuals, that
allow the evolution of unique motor patterns.... [Thelen found]
there is great variability among infants at first, with many patterns
of reaching for objects; but there then occurs, over the course
of several months, a competition among these patterns, a discovery
or selection of workable patterns, or workable motor solutions.
The solutions....are always different and individual, adapted
to the particular dynamics of each child...."
Oliver SACKS, 1993, 'Making up the mind',
The New York Review, 8 iv.
"Piaget and the Piagetians could not hide, circumvent or
explain lasting individual differences in g; and they could
not demonstrate that ceaseless, 'constructive' developmental interaction
was in fact necessary to normal intelligence - though none would
doubt that interaction with the environment is often a result
of intelligence. Nor could any particular differences between
children in Piagetian 'interaction with the environment' be shown
to yield the lasting individual differences in IQ that required
explanation; and even Piaget's claims as to what were the main
'stages' of development came to be so qualified by the researches
of his English-speaking followers as to leave little but Binet's
premise that children's intelligence increases with age."
C.R.BRAND, 1996, The g Factor.
Chichester, UK : Wiley DePublisher.
FINIS
(Compiled by Chris Brand, Department of Psychology, University
of Edinburgh.)
For more coverage of Piagetian views of the nature
and development of intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of
'P, B & S.'
Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group
differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh
University Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in
each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements
in the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to
human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology
of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature
and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics
of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing - especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they
exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles'
and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political
aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political
aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage
out'?
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