Blog C: Influential Educators-Jean Piaget and B. F. Skinner

Jean Piaget-

He was born on August 9, 1896 in Switzerland. He was a precocious child and became very interested in Biology (Indiana, 2007, para. 6). He earned his Ph.D. in Natural Sciences at the University of Neuchatel in 1918. He was best known for his development of his theory of cognitive development and his “genetic epistemology”. We became a school teacher, and realized on test most children seemed to get the same questions wrong. Each child seemed to making the same sorts of mistakes. This caught Piaget’s attention, and he began his theory that a young child’s thought process is essentially different from adults’. He believed there to be four development stages: 1) Sensorimotor stage- from birth to age 2 children would experience the world through movement and senses and learn object stability, 2) Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7- gaining of motor skills, 3) Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11, children begin to think logically about concrete events, 4) Formal operational stage: from the age of 11 on: the development of abstract reasoning (Wikipedia, 2007, para. 5). His theory actually changed the education of Europe and America; it became a more “child-centered” approach.

Resources on Jean Piaget:

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/piaget.shtml
http://www.crystalinks.com/piaget.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
Piaget & Education by David W. Jardine

B. F. Skinner-

B. F. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in a small town in Pennsylvania. He was energetic, explorative, and loved school as a child. His brother died when he was 16 from a cerebral aneurysm (Webspace, 2006, para. 1-2). He went to school at Hamilton College in NY wanting to become a writer. After graduating, he stayed at his parents’ house and tried to become a fiction writer, but that only showed him how little experience he had. He noticed himself becoming more interested I the people around him and what they were doing, so he decided to go to Harvard University to study psychology. While in college he was very successful: invented the operant conditioning chamber and cumulative recorder, developed the rate of response as a critical dependant variable in psychological research, and developed a method of experimental research bases on data. He received him Ph.D. in psychology in 1931 and began teaching at University of Minnesota and later at Indiana University where he was the chair of the psychology department.

Resources on B. F. Skinner:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhskin.html http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
B. F. Skinner- A Life By Daniel W. Bjork