The Child's Conception of Number

by Jean Piaget

Book Overview

Professor Piaget discusses a set of investigations he and a team of co-workers carried out on the genesis of the notion of number in the child's mind. By asking questions freely, they were able to gather valuable statements from children about the actions they were asked to perform with experimental objects. Beginning with the hypothesis that the construction of number goes hand-in-hand with the development of logic, the research team set out to diagnose...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393003248
• ISBN13: 9780393003246
• Release Date: October 1965
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

ANOTHER EARLY VOLUME OF PIAGET'S RESEARCH AND IDEAS

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are known as "genetic epistemology". This book continues the research of his earlier books, The Language And Thought Of The Child, Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (Quality Paperback: No. 205) and The Child's Conception of the World: A 20th-Century Classic of Child Psychology. He states in the Foreword, "It now remains, in order to discover the mechanisms that determine thought, to investigate how the sensory-motor schemata of assimilating intelligence are organized in operational systems on the plane of thought. Beyond the child's verbal constructions, and in line with his practical activity, we now have to trace the development of the operations which give rise to number and continuous quantities, to space, time, speed, etc., operations which, in these essential fields, lead from intuitive and egocentric pre-logic to rational co-ordination that is both deductive and inductive." Here are some representative quotations from the book: (After conducting his famous experiment of having children pour liquid from one container to another of different size) "The results obtained seem to prove that continuous quantitites are not at once considered to be constant, and that the notion of conservation is gradually constructed by means of an intellectual mechanism which is our purpose to explain." (Pg. 4-5) "If the child has not yet reached a certain level of understanding which characterizes the beginning of the third stages, counting aloud has no effect on the mechanism of numerical thought." (Pg. 63) "It is obvious that if number is the fusion of class and assymetrical relation into a single operational whole, this synchronism has its logical explanation, but it can also be explained psychologically. Since each number is a whole, born of the union of equivalent and distinct terms, it cannot be constituted without inclusion and seriation." (Pg. 184) "There is not one stage of logical multiplication and another stage of arithmetical multiplication. During the first stage of development, neither of these compositions is possible; during the second, there is a beginning of both on the intuitive plane, and during the third, both of them become operational in the true sense." (Pg. 220)