Developmental Models: Piaget and Jensen

Abstract

The work of Piaget (1950, 1956, 1958) was at first unjustifiably neglected in the English-speaking countries, and then equally unjustifiably elevated to the status of sacred doctrine (Phillips, 1975). Piaget is fundamentally concerned with the stages through which intellectual development passes, and not at all concerned with individual differences, or intelligence as measured by I. Q. tests. This might seen to suggest that this work could not be very relevant to this book, but such a view would be mistaken. If the child, in growing up, passes from stage A, through B and C, to stages D, E, F etc., then clearly these stages fulfil the same function for anyone interested in the measurement of intelligence as did the agerelated test items in Binet’s work. We might classify a child’s mental age in terms of the stage which he had reached, and then obtain something like on I. Q. by relating this stage to his actual chronological age. Piaget himself would not be interested in this and would consider it an abuse of his theoretical work, but the question of whether such a scheme would be workable, and how it would relate to ordinary measures of I. Q., is an important one. Piaget’s work is sometimes suggested as an alternative to orthodox psychometric intelligence testing. As we shall see, his tests and test items behave very much in the same way as do those customarily used by psychometrists interested in intelligence testing, and so far as they do they suggest that they belong to the same paradigm.

Non que les idées que nous formons ne puissent être just logiquement, mais nous ne savons pas si elles sont vraies. M. Proust