Piaget and Play

Jean Piaget's (1896–1980) contribution to our thinking about children's play includes the following insights: play develops in stages from pre-symbolic to symbolic (for example make-believe) play to games with rules and play functions to consolidate recently acquired knowledge and skills but does not by itself lead to new knowledge.

While Piaget is best known for his theories on cognitive development, he presented connections between intellectual development and play in his 1962 book Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. Piaget used a semi-clinical technique he developed to listen to children and view their play with objects to learn more about how they think and develop. He theorized that children construct knowledge through interactions with objects and people, building from previously developed mental structures or schemata.

Equilibrium or balance of two complementary processes—accommodation (imitation) and assimilation (play)—are central to Piaget's views on adaptation and learning. Accommodation is considered environmental actions on the child. To accommodate, the child modifies his existing schemata to fit this new schemata. In contrast, when children incorporate new information to their existing schemata in personally relevant ways through assimilation, Piaget proposed that this is true play. Children develop progressively higher levels of mental operations. Piaget categorized these as invariant and sequential stages of development and related each stage to a particular type of play.

Contemporary research findings question some of Piaget's theoretical constructs about play, such as how children of various ages may engage in each type of play, yet Piaget's basic tenants about learning are still respected as foundational for many curriculums for young children.

Schooled as a biologist, Jean Piaget preferred to be considered a genetic epistemologist because of his continuous search for the nature of how people learn. His scientific methods of study evolved during his work at the Alfred Binet Laboratory in 1919, when he began to observe children of the same ages providing similar wrong answers. He became intrigued with their thought processes. Evelyn Weber, in her book Ideas Influencing Early Childhood: A Theoretical Analysis, presents Piaget's development of a semiclinical method including listening to children's verbal interactions and use of concrete objects so he could understand children's pure thinking, not altered by adult viewpoints. According to Weber, what distinguishes Piaget's observations are his insightful interpretations of those observations. While other theorists of his lifetime postured either how learning comes from inside the child or how learning is impacted by the environment and people, Piaget concluded that neither alone is sufficient to explain children's thinking processes, how they learn, or why children play.

Like the theorist John Dewey, Piaget believed that children learn when their curiosity is piqued and not fully satisfied. He believed in questioning and problem-solving as tools for learning rather than giving children the answers. Hence, this process of learning is viewed as constructing rather than inputting knowledge. Children should be actively engaged with objects and people, so physical development was a critical aspect of intellectual growth as well for Piaget. He also fostered the use of materials with more than one way of manipulating or making something.

...