Test 1
Parts
You are going to read an article about a famous psychologist. For questions 31-36, choose the
answer (A, 8, C or 0) which you think fits best according to the text.
Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist, became famous for his theories
on child development. A child prodigy, he became interested in the scientific study of nature at
an early age. He developed a special fascination for biology, having some of his work published
before graduating from high school. When, aged 10, his observations led to questions that could
be answered only by access to the university library, Piaget wrote and published some notes on
the sighting of an albino sparrow in the hope that this would persuade the librarian to stop treating
him like a child. It worked. Piaget was launched on a path that led to his doctorate in zoology and a
lifelong conviction that the way to understand anything is to know how it evolves.
Piaget went on to spend much of his professional life listening to and watching children, and poring
over reports of researchers who were doing the same. He found, to put it succinctly, that children
don't think like adults. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to
talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought
processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Albert Einstein, the renowned
physicist, deemed this a discovery 'so simple that only a genius could have thought of it'.
Piaget's insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. Several new fields of
science, among them developmental psychology and cognitive theory, came into being as a result of
his research . Although not an educational reformer, he championed a way of thinking about children
that provided the foundation for today's education reform movements. One might say that Piaget was
the first to take children's thinking seriously. Others who shared this respect for children may have
fought harder for immediate change in schools, but Piaget's influence on education remains deeper
and more pervasive.
Piaget has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty
vessels to be filled with knowledge, as traditional academic thinking had it, but active builders of
knowledge - little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world.
And while he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud, Piaget's contribution to psychology may be
longer lasting. As computers and the Internet give children greater autonomy to explore ever larger
digital worlds, the ideas he pioneered become ever more relevant.
In the 1940s, working in Alfred Binet's child-psychology lab in Paris, Piaget noticed that children
of the same age, regardless of their background or gender, made comparable errors on true-false
intelligence tests. Back in Switzerland, the young scientist began watching children play, scrupulously
recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way
they are. Piaget recognised that a five-year-old's beliefs, while not correct by any adult criterion, are
not 'incorrect' either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child's 'way
of knowing'. In Piaget's view, classifying them as 'true' or 'false' misses the point and shows a lack
of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that could find coherence and ingenuity
in the child's justification, and evidence of a kind of explanatory principle that stands young children
in very good stead when they don't know enough or don't have enough skill to handle the kind of
explanation that grown-ups prefer.
The core of Piaget's work is his belief that looking carefully at how children acquire knowledge
sheds light on how adults think and understand the world. Whether this has, in fact, led to deeper
understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, contentious. In recent years, Piaget has been
vigorously challenged by the current emphasis on viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the
brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the
knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those of us who still see Piaget as the
giant in the field of cognitive theory, the disparity between what the baby brings and what the adult has
is so immense that the new discoveries do not significantly reduce the gap, only increase the mystery.
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