JEAN PIAGET’S BIOGRAPHY

Posted by: a2cristina | November 16, 2010

JEAN PIAGET’S BIOGRAPHY

Fill in the gaps with the following words:

CONSISTENTLY, DEGREES, EARNEST, FAILED, FAITH, HOLD, INTEREST, LIKEWISE, NAMED, PAPER, SIGNIFICANT, TOP, TURNED, ULTIMATELY.

JEAN PIAGET

Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland in 1896. His father was a professor of medieval literature and his mother was intelligent and energetic, but Jean found her a bit neurotic, an impression that he said led to his 1) __________ in psychology, but away from pathology! The oldest child, he was quite independent and took an early interest in nature, especially the collecting of shells. He published his first “2) __________” when he was ten, a one page account of his sighting of an albino sparrow.

He began publishing in 3) __________ in high school on his favourite subject, mollusks. His work became well known among European students of mollusks, who assumed he was an adult

Later in adolescence, he faced a bit a crisis of 4) __________: Encouraged by his mother to attend religious instruction, he found religious argument childish. Studying various philosophers and the application of logic, he dedicated himself to finding a “biological explanation of knowledge.” 5) __________, philosophy 6) __________ to assist him in his search, so he turned to psychology.

In 1918, Piaget received his Doctorate in Science from the University of Neuchâtel.

In 1919, he taught psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. He also started to do research on intelligence testing. He taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles School for Boys. The school was run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test, and Piaget assisted in the marking of Binet’s intelligence tests. It was while he was helping to mark some of these tests that Piaget noticed that young children used to give wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children’s answers being wrong, but that young children 7) __________ made types of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children’s cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults.

In 1923, he married one of his student coworkers, Valentine Châtenay. In 1925, their first daughter was born; in 1927, their second daughter was born; and in 1931, their only son was born. They immediately became the focus of intense observation by Piaget and his wife, observation which he 8) __________ into three more books!

In 1929, Piaget began work as the director of the International Bureau of Education, a post he would 9) __________ until 1967.

In 1940, He became chair of Experimental Psychology, the Director of the psychology laboratory, and the president of the Swiss Society of Psychology. In 1942, he gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France, during the Nazi occupation of France. These lectures became The Psychology of Intelligence. At the end of the war, he was 10) __________ President of the Swiss Commission of UNESCO.

Also during this period, he received a number of honorary 11) __________. He received one from the Sorbonne in 1946, the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in 1949, on 12) __________ of an earlier one from Harvard in 1936. And, in 1949 and 1950, he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology.

He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more years. 13) __________, he continued his public service through UNESCO as a Swiss delegate. By the end of his career, he had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16, 1980, one of the most 14) __________ psychologists of the twentieth century.

KEY

1. INTEREST

2. PAPER

3. EARNEST

4. FAITH

5. ULTIMATELY

6. FAILED

7. CONSISTENTLY

8. TURNED

9. HOLD

10. NAMED

11. DEGREES