Decades after his death in 1980, Jean Piaget’s pioneering work in child development still reverberates in the fields of psychology, education, epistemology, and cognitive development. Over his career he published dozens of books and hundreds of articles. In 1955, he founded the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Switzerland to pursue research into the biology of cognitive development. As part of his four-stage theory of child development, he theorized three progressive stages in the development of children’s play (functional, symbolic, and rule-based) and promoted play as an important part of and indicator of children’s cognitive development, as well as a crucial contributor to the development of mature adult thought and knowledge acquisition.
Read about Jean Piaget on Wikipedia
Most Influential Work:
- Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (New York: Norton, 1962), a longitudinal study of cognitive development and the development of play behaviors, was made by observing his own children as well as through studies at the Institut J.J. Rousseau at the University of Geneva.
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