Piaget V Erikson

dolescence is considered a difficult time of life and one in which a number of changes occur as the individual achieves a certain integration of different aspects of personality. One approach to the cognitive and emotional transitions made at different times of life is to consider how the changes in, say, adolescence are linked to a continuum of change beginning in childhood and continuing throughout life. Some theorists, such as Piaget, were interested primarily in the transitions of childhood and youth, while others, such as Erikson, saw all of life as a series of transitions and offered a continuum of stages covering all of life.

Piaget became fascinated in his early studies with his discovery that children of the same age often gave the same incorrect answers to questions, suggesting that there were consistent, qualitative differences in the nature of reasoning at different ages, not simply a quantitative increase in the amount of intelligence or knowledge. This discovery marked the beginning of Piaget's continuing effort to identify changes in the way children thinkhow they perceive their world in different ways at different points in development. Piaget's contributions can be summarized by grouping them into four main areas. First, he produced literature on the general stages of intellectual development from infancy through adulthood. This concern occupied him from 1925 to 1940, and after 1940 he began to describe some of the developmental stages in formal, structural terms using models from symbolic logic (Flavell, 1963, 1-9).

The different stages postulated by Piaget help to explain different rats of learning at different ages as well as the types of learning possible at different ages for the majority of the population. Learning itself is seen by Piaget as a process of discovery on the part of the individual, and learning as a formal activity becomes a system of organization by which instruction is enhanced by the way the teacher arranges experience. Learning is thus experiential, and Piaget suggests that experiences have meaning to the extent that they can be assimilated. Such assimilation does not take place without accommodation, an aspect of considerable importance from the point of view of adaptation and possible development:

One of the principal aims of the teacher will be to present situations to the child which require him to adapt his past experience. The teacher is concerned with facilitating adaptation and assisting the child along the developmental path (Flavell, 1963, 91).

The learning situation thus becomes a means of discovery as the child encounters something that is unknown, new, or problematical for the child. The achievement of understanding of this experiences produces an adaptation, and each adaptation made by the child is a discovery for him or her, an insight made through experience. Such a discovery process is ongoing and is not to be seen as a series of leaps from one insight to another. The process of discovery continues and builds on experiences already assimilated and adapted. The process "is marked out by minute consolidations and extensions of past experience, with perhaps an occasional flash of insight" (Flavell, 1963, 91-92).

There are two principal learning theories in psychology, one of which focuses on the learning process while the other focuses on the capacity to learn. Piaget offered a biological theory of intelligence that was quite different and that he presented as a unified approach to intelligence and learning. Piaget restricted the ideal of learning to an acquisition of new knowledge that derives primarily from contact with the physical or social environment:

He opposes it on the one hand to maturation which is based on physiological processes; on the other hand and most importantly he differentiates it from the acquisition of general knowledge or intelligence which he defines as the slowly developing sum total of action coordinations available to an organism at a given stage (Furth, 1969, 221).

Piaget contends that this general knowledge is actively constructed by the individual who, in constructing this knowledge, lives the process of his or her development.

Piaget had actually started out to analyze the meaning and origin of intelligence, and he defined intelligence as the totality of behavioral coordinations that characterize behavior at a certain stage of development. For Piaget, intelligence was the behavioral analogue of a biological organ which regulates the organism's behavioral exchange with the environment, an interaction that constitutes behavior and that involves the process of discovery discussed previously. All adaptive behavior in this conception implies some knowing in the form of at least minimal knowledge of the environment. Another way of phrasing this is offered by Furth:

Evolutionary development proceeds in a manner of an organizing totality, not in the sense of an outside influence or purpose that pulls from ahead, or a drive that pushes from behind, but as a regulating factor that is intrinsic to the unfolding of evolutionary organizations (Furth, 1969, 246).

Erikson's approach is a pscyhosocial theory of development which describes a series of eight stages in the development of the individual throughout life. This is based on the interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes, and it is the interaction of these processes that accounts for the "psycho" (inner) "social" (external) character of development. The stages are described by Erikson as psychosocial "crises," and the reason for this is that they are intended to represent periods when the individual is particularly sensitive or vulnerable to certain developmental issues. Each of the crisis stages is described by Erikson in terms of its positive outcome or strength "versus" its negative outcome or weakness, and the relative degree to which the resolution of each crisis can be considered favorable or unfavorable serves as one factor