Learning and Cognitive Development

Author: Inhelder, Sinclair
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2001-10-01
Features: This book is about learning, but not in the usual literal sense. It differs from learning and conditioning rooted in American and Russian traditions, as well as from the educational process necessary for achieving success in school education. Actually, calling this book about development might be more appropriate, though the development here aligns more closely with the structural stages of cognitive development as described in Jean Piaget's works on children's cognitive development. It explains the mechanisms that ensure an individual's cognitive development transitions from one stage to the next. The stages and transitions presented by the authors in the book are so gradual that an informed reader can break down this cognitive developmental change into finer substructures. In fact, only in very few cases does an original structure directly differentiate into substructures, as natural numbers naturally decompose into negative numbers and rational numbers. On the contrary, one of the main findings of this book is that the substructures controlled by children—during a specific period, they are relatively independent of each other but partially correspond to one another—tend to merge into a higher-level system through complex interactions to reach a new equilibrium level. The book elaborates on this in detail through a series of experiments on logical operations and sublogical operations. As one of the two most influential psychologists of the 20th century (Time magazine, the other being Freud), Piaget's genetic epistemology has had a profound impact on psychology. This book is an experimental validation of Piaget's thought by B. Inhelder, the second figure of the Piagetian school and someone considered "indispensable" to Piaget's ideas, along with two other psychologists. The content involves general theories of cognitive development and learning, including experimental work from perspectives such as continuous quantity, one-to-one correspondence, verbal training programs for continuous quantity conservation, cross-cultural conservation development, and basic number conservation. The book experimentally demonstrates Piaget's view of learning: learning requires a certain psychological structure as its foundation.