Implications of Piaget for the Everyday Laboratory Experiences of Children

In recent years, we have seen a great increase of interest in the work of Jean Piaget. Educational psychology courses and magazines for teachers feature frequent discussions about the Swiss psychologist and his research. Such discussions, however, often dwell on his descriptions of the stages of intellectual development and the cognitive abilities characteristic of each stage. Such an emphasis on classification is unfortunate because it encourages categorization of children while diverting our attention from the more important aspects of Piaget\u27s discoveries - Piaget has analyzed the learning difficulties of many children and how children learn and, by implication, has shown how one might teach to overcome these difficulties