Critiques of Piaget

"Constructivist theories tend to be rather vague. This has been a problem since Kant himself, who was notably obscure about key aspects [of his view that human knowledge and its development are subject to logical constraints]. Many who acknowledge the 'richness' of Piaget's theory also complain that the logical structures are abstract and difficult to operationalize." ~ K. Richardson "There is a growing feeling that Piaget's stage model of cognitive development is in serious trouble. It is proving less credible to developmentalists and less useful to educators. However we may wish it otherwise, human cognitive growth may simply be too contingent, multiform, and heterogeneoustoo variegated in developmental mechanisms, routes and ratesto be accurately characterizable by any stage theory of the Piagetian kind." ~ J. Flavell "There is no compelling support for Piaget's hypothesis that his cognitive stages do more than re-describe age-related changes in behavior." ~ C. J. Brainerd "The criticism of Piagetian theory is that different behaviors belonging to the same stage are acquired at very different times. When empirical research demonstrated the validity of this criticism, some Piagetians suggested that simultaneous acquisition of different stage-defining behaviors was not crucial to the theory. However, if the hypothesis is abandoned, other evidence must be found to support the claim that stages are general descriptions of cognitive functioning at some period in development. In short, a Piagetian who eats his cake must be taught (with the help of rote learning if necessary) that he no longer has it." T. J. Berndt "One of the basic predictions of Piaget's theory is that children's performance will be consistent across a wide range of tasks. An 8-year-old should be able to pass all concrete-operations-level tasks (conservation, class inclusion, seriation, transitivity, etc.) but should fail all formal-operations-level tasks (balance scale, projection of shadows, probability, pendulum, etc.). It has become increasingly apparent that the concurrence assumption is at best overstated." ~ R. S. Siegler and D. D. Richards "Piaget and his co-workers produced evidence of their stage theory and of the presence or absence of certain logical structures at specific ages. But then researchers started to modify their procedures slightly, revealing abilities in children which were simply not brought out, or were inhibited, in the previous procedures, and the 'evidence' of Piaget started to crumble." ~ K. Richardson

"In Piaget's experiment on conservation of volume, the experimenter shows the child two tumblers, one short and squat, the other tall and thin. He fills the short, squat one with water, and then pours the water from that tumbler into the other. He asks the child, who has watched this whole procedure, if there is the same amount of water in both tumblers. Because of the difference in shapes, the water is closer to the top of the long, thin tumbler. It appears to be full, unlike the short, squat one. Because of this, the young child will usually say 'No.' Jerome Bruner performed this experiment in exactly the same manner, with one difference: before he emptied the liquid from one tumbler into the other, he placed a screen between the tumblers and the child. When he asked the question, 'Is there the same amount of water now?' the 4-year-olds, unable to see the pouring of water into the tumblers, answered 'Yes.' Thus, it appears that when there is no information overload, constancy can be achieved even at this early age." ~ R. Ornstein "Assimilation and accommodation are interesting ideas, but very general, and as such difficult to pin down to any experiment. Nor surprisingly, Piaget does not offer any direct experimental evidence for assimilation and accommodation." P. Bryant "Contrary to Piaget's formulation that cognitive development is unidirectional and that little cognitive change occurs during adulthood, the elderly display lower levels of cognitive ability than younger adults (and sometimes as low as children) on measures of moral judgement and egocentrism, and certain logical operations tasks, such as those requiring conservation ability." ~ H. L. Minton and F. W. Schneider "The expectation that constructions of sensory-motor intelligence determine the character of a mental organ such as language seems to me to be hardly more plausible than a proposal that the fundamental properties of the eye or the visual cortex or the heart develop on that basis." ~ N. Chomsky "In our view, those who propose that genotype-environment interactions are major determinants of intellectual variation in populations are more interested in putting roadblocks in the way of studies of normal human variation than in clarifying the scientific issues." ~ S. Scarr and L. Carter-Saltzman "Piaget spent his whole working life trying to prove the startling inadequacies of childhood. There is now plenty of evidence that Piaget's gloomy stance was, to say the least, exaggerated." ~ P. Bryant "Piaget was apt to mock the American question of how to speed up development. That was transatlantic frivolity." ~ D. Cohen "The work of Piaget was at first unjustifiably neglected in the English-speaking countries, and then equally unjustifiably elevated to the status of sacred doctrine." ~ H. J. Eysenck