教甄◆英文科題庫下載題庫

   Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9, 1896 and began showing an interest in the natural sciences at a very early age. By age 11, he had already started his career as a researcher by writing a short paper on an albino sparrow. 21 While his early career consisted of working in the natural sciences, it was during the 1920s that he began to move toward work as a psychologist. He married Valentine Châtenay in 1923 and the couple went on to have three children. 22 

   Piaget identified himself as a genetic epistemologist. “What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge,” he explained in his book Genetic Epistemology. 23 He was interested not only in the nature of thought, but in how it develops and understanding how genetics impact this process. 

  His early work with Binet's intelligence tests had led him to conclude that children think differently than adults. 24 It was this observation that inspired his interest in understanding how knowledge grows throughout childhood. He suggested that children sort the knowledge they acquire through their experiences and interactions into groupings known as schemas. When new information is acquired, it can either be assimilated into existing schemas or accommodated through revising existing schemas or creating an entirely new category of information. 

   25 He studied the intellectual development of his own three children and created a theory that described the stages that children pass through in the development of intelligence and formal thought processes. 

(A) His work also generated interest in cognitive and developmental psychology. 

(B) He continued to study the natural sciences and received his Ph.D. in Zoology from University of Neuchâtel in 1918. 

(C) While this is a widely accepted notion today, it was considered revolutionary at the time.

(D) Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the origin, nature, extent and limits of human knowledge. 

(AB) It was Piaget's observations of his own children that served as the basis for many of his later theories. 

(AC) Today, Piaget is best known for his research on children's cognitive development.