Are Young Children As Limited As Piaget Claimed?
The Work of Gelman, Shantz, and Others Piaget’s work is especially important for convincingly showing that children do not think the same way as adults. He documented the differences in diverse ways and created a comprehensive theory that unified his findings and placed them in developmental perspective. Nevertheless, many modern researchers now feel that Piaget’s methods for delineating children’s cognitive capacities actually underestimate children’s capabilities and lead to a view of children as deficient rather than competent thinkers. These researchers have worked hard to demonstrate cognitive capacities in children at earlier ages than Piaget reported them to occur. Their findings suggest that Piaget’s theory must be modified. Develop this theme in a lecture that first shows how Piaget came to believe that children’s minds work differently from those of adults. Describe his early observations of systematic errors on intelligence test items, and proceed to illustrate how most of h
