1st Edition

Introducing Piaget A guide for practitioners and students in early years education

By Ann Marie Halpenny, Jan Pettersen Copyright 2014
    184 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    184 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Jean Piaget was one of the most significant contributors to our current understanding of how children think and learn, from birth through to adolescence. In this comprehensive and accessible new book, Ann Marie Halpenny and Jan Pettersen capture the key concepts and principles of Piaget’s fascinating work on children’s thinking, and explore how thinking evolves and develops from infancy through the early years and beyond.

    Areas covered in Introducing Piaget include:

    • key milestones and achievements in children’s thinking;
    • understanding the physical world through senses and movement in infancy;
    • supporting the emergence of symbolic thought and language in the early years;
    • understanding object permanence;
    • implications of egocentric thinking in early childhood learning and development.

    Throughout the book, the consequences of these developments for children’s social, emotional and intellectual development are discussed. Updates on Piaget’s theory are also outlined with reference to more recent work on cognitive development in childhood. Each chapter provides a concise summary of material presented through a consideration of the implications for practice in working with children. A glossary of key Piagetian terms is also included. With a particular focus on how Piaget’s principles and concepts can be applied to children in early childhood, this exciting new book is an invaluable resource for teachers, practitioners and students with an interest in learning and development in the early years.

    1. Constructivism: Children as Active Creators of Knowledge and Learning  2. The Landscape of Cognitive Development in Childhood  3. The Building Blocks of Cognitive Development in Childhood  4. The Sensorimotor World  5. Object Permanence: Out of sight, out of mind?  6. The Preoperational World – Symbolic Function Substage  7. Egocentrism and the Preschooler  8. The Preoperational World – Intuitive Thought Substage  9. The Concrete Operational World  10. The Formal Operational World  11. Drawing It All Together  References  Glossary

    Biography

    Ann Marie Halpenny is Lecturer in Psychology and Child Development at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

    Jan Pettersen is Programme Chair for the Early Childhood Education programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology.