It is in the context of this historical relationship between pedagogy and child development, that the current interest in the work of Jean Piaget must be seen and evaluated. No one doubts any longer that Piaget is to developmental psychology what Freud is to psychiatry, namely, the giant in the field. Indeed, it will take decades for us to assimilate and apply the vast body of information he and his colleagues have gathered in close to fifty years of studying the development of children's thinking. And here lies the danger and the reason I began my remarks with an historical allusion. Piaget's work adds to but does not supplant the insights of other child development workers. In trying to adapt educational practice according to the contributions provided by Piaget, we must not forget the lessons that innovators such as Montessori, Dewey, and Freud had to teach. Our zeal to be modern should not blind us to all that is valuable from the past.

With these few historical and cautionary remarks out of the way we can turn to the issue at hand; namely, some implications of Piaget's work and theory for science education. As I said, it will take decades to digest all of Piaget's contributions, so that all I can do here is illustrate some of the new paths along which Piaget's work will take us.

These new paths lead in the directions of:

a) the sequencing of science activities,
b) the methods of science instruction, and
c) the contents of science teaching.

Let us now take up each of these problems in turn with the reservation that I am suggesting directions only and that we have only begun to tap the wealth that lies in Piaget's books and articles.

One of the dominant themes of Piaget's developmental psychology of intelligence is that the mind develops in a sequence of stages that is related to age. While the sequence remains the same for all children, the rate at which particular children pass through the stages will depend upon genetic endowment as well as socio-cultural circumstances. Piaget has described four major stages each of which, for heuristic purposes, can be described with regard to the major cognitive task it poses for the child.

At the next stage -- pre-operations ) -- usually ages 2 to 6 or 7, the child's major task is to master the symbolic or representational function. It is during this period that the child acquires language, discovers symbolic play, and experiences his first dreams. At this stage the child might be said to be involved in "a search for representation."

At about the age of 6 or 7, the child enters the concrete operational stage, which lasts until about the age of 11 or 12. During this period the younger person has to master the interrelationship of classes, relations, and members, and he does this with respect to things and with the aid of syllogistic reasoning. The concrete operational; stage is, therefore, one in which the young person is engaged in "search for relations."

During the final stage -- formal operations -- (usually ages 12 to 15) the young adolescent's major task is to conquer thought. Formal operational structures enable him to take his own thinking as an object and think about thought, about contrary fact conditions, and about ideal situations. In a word it makes possible theoretical and philosophical speculations and might be called the stage in which the young person is engaged in a "search for comprehension. "

major tasks --
• sensori-motor stage: is to construct a world of permanent objects

• pre-operational stage, is to master the symbolic or representational function.

• concrete operational stage is a search for relations

• final operational stage is a search for comprehension

It is during concrete operational stage, which lasts until about the age of 11 or 12. During this period the younger person has to master the interrelationship of classes, relations, and members, and he does this with respect to things and with the aid of syllogistic reasoning. The concrete operational; stage is, therefore, one in which the young person is engaged in "search for relations."

What have these stages to teach us about the sequencing of science activities for children?

A great deal, it seems to me.

First of all, these stages nicely parallel the stages that characterize the development of any science, namely:

observation ( sensory-motor period or the search for conservation );

naming and labeling (pre-operational period or the search for representation);

formal classification and quantification ( concrete operational period or the search for relations ) and

controlled experimentation and theory building ( formal operational period or the search for comprehension ). While it is not necessary true that children will learn science best if it is taught on the model of the growth of thought and of science, it is at least a possibility worth exploring.

It seems to me that Piaget's work implies that science education ought to begin with teaching children the fine art of observation.
Actually children are often far better at this than we are because our concepts blind us to concrete realities. Or repeated experience has for adults taken much of the interest and curiosity out of many of natureŐs mysteries. It is not enough, however, simply to have animals in the room, or to have children look at leaves andsquirrels on nature walks. What children need to be taught is how to focus their observation, how to look for similarities and differences among natural elements, among leaves, animals, grasses, sounds, and smells.

Instruction in observation cannot be hurried and a year or two of science teaching ought to be devoted to instruction in observation.

Thereafter children might proceed to collect specimens that they can sort, label, and classify. The nature of physical and biological classification might well be described and discussed. My impression is that we often take the child's ability to classify for granted and do not spend enough time talking about the criteria of classification, multiple classification of a single specimen, and so on. Quantification can be introduced at the same time as children weigh, measure, and sort the specimens that they work with. In general the wider the range of materials children have to work with, the more interested they will be, and the more solid will be their grounding in the rudiments of science.

From the standpoint of mental development, instruction in controlled experimentation probably should generally not be introduced until adolescence when young people can deal with multiple simultaneous variations. By and large the concrete operations of children are not sufficient to grasp the intricacies of multiple variable experiments. Obviously this is not a hard and fast rule; bright children may be able to appreciate experimental procedures by the age of ten. For the average child, however, experimental science might well be delayed until adolescence when the young person's mental abilities are sufficiently mature to cope with holding some factors constant while others are systematically varied.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to stress to science teachers the importance of training children in observation and classification before they are introduced to experimentation. At the college level, however, I am impressed at how few students are trained to be good observers before they are trained to be good experimenters. Experimentation is a precision tool, but its effectiveness depends upon the skill, experience, and openness of the experimenter. If a youngster is so set on the experimental variables that he misses some of the novel and significant side effects of his experiment, then he is not a good experimenter in the best and most general sense of the term.

I have probably stepped on some people's toes by now and I am probably about to step on some more. That is inevitable, I suppose, when one presumes to discuss subjects outside his own field of expertise. What I have to say about methods of science instruction may therefore sound quite naive! My only defense is that sometimes naivetŽ can be refreshing and strike at a problem that the experts have been bypassing as too touchy and sensitive. Let me plunge in again.

What impresses me about American education, at all levels, is its extreme verbalism. Enter any classroom above the kindergarten level and most of what you see are books and more books. Our national preoccupation with reading, currently embodied in the Office of Education's right to read program, practically amounts to an obsession.

So, preoccupied are we with reading that any youngster who has a reading problem soon develops an emotional problem about it which ends up being far worse than the reading handicap itself.

In this connection Piaget's work suggests that language and thought are different systems that develop at different rates.

The linguistics system appears to be relatively complete by the age of seven or eight when all the major elements of generative grammar are present. Growth in language thereafter appears largely in vocabulary and proficiency in such skills as reading, writing, and spelling. Thought, on the other hand, is much more gradual in its development, as I described earlier, and the mental systems for thinking are not complete until the middle of adolescence when mental ability at last catches up with verbal facility.

From an educational standpoint it seems to me that these considerations support Dewey's contention that there should be more emphasis on doing and less on talking during the elementary school years, particularly in the teaching of science. I hope I don't offend anyone if I say that teachers, including college professors like myself, simply talk too much. If we spent less time talking and more time showing children how to observe, classify, measure, then young people would get more out of it. We also put too much reliance on books and published materials and too little faith on our own resources and in our own ingenuity.

Leyden note:
see ??? my "soapbox" statements all say that teachers have to have HUGE inventories of unique experiences with LIFE. You can't be an exciting teacher if you are not living an exciting life. Take the teachers' guide away from the teachers and say -- "teach only on the basis of your life experiences." What would happen ? We teachers are very, very vanilla.

Science can be taught with such a wide variety of readily available materials that we really don't need prepackaged programs in order to teach science well. Science is first and foremost an attitude of curiosity and that is what the use of everyday materials promotes. Packaged materials lead children to believe that science always comes Christmas wrapped.

Please understand, I am not pooh-poohing all pre-packaged science programs. I am, for example, particularly impressed with the work of Robert Karplus at Berkeley (the Science Curriculum Improvement Study = SCIS was the origin of The Learning Cycle teaching model) who is trying to get away from the empty verbalism that is present in so much of our teaching. Many of the Karplus programs are first rate.

Now I suppose I should say something about the so-called discovery method. To the extent that the discovery method suggests that children should be active in learning, then certainly one can endorse it. If it means that a child must discover by himself that which others have discovered for him, it may be a futile and unrewarding enterprise. The whole point of discoveries is that once they are made everyone can share in them without having to repeat the process of discovery. Life is too short for each child to rediscover all of science.

Likewise, to argue that children should be active does not mean that they should be active all the time.

First, with respect to number, Piaget undertook his investigations in order to resolve a long-standing controversy between mathematicians and logicians.

As you know, the mathematicians, following Peano, argued that mathematics was built upon several simple postulates which were relational in character. The whole number system could, in Peano's view, be derived from the notions of a number and its successor (n+1). Logicians, following Russell and Whitehead, argued thatnumber was not derived from a relation but rather that it constituted a class, namely, the class of all classes. The number six, for example, is the class of all classes of things taken six at a time.

Piaget sought to resolve this controversy by determining how number concepts are arrived at by children. He undertook a series of novel investigations into children's ideas about number, classes, and relations. What he discovered wasthe child's understanding of classes, of relations, and of numbers all appear at the same time. Indeed, Piaget found that it was the childŐs ability to coordinate the idea of classes with the idea of relations that led to a true conception of number.

To make Piaget's discovery concrete let me describe two of the studies concerned with classification and with seriation. In the classification study, Piaget presented children (aged 4-7) with a box in which there were 20 white and 7 brown wooden beads. He asked the child whether there were more white beads and then whether there were more white than wooden beads. It was not until the age of six or seven that most children could solve the latter problem and could recognize that there were more wooden beads because only some of the beads were white while all of the beads were wooden.

In the domain of relations, Piaget presented 4 to 7 year-old children with a set of size graded sticks. The child's task was to arrange the set to form a sort of staircase with the shortest to the longest stick arranged in a regular order. Piaget found that many five-year-old children could construct such a series. When, however, he presented the children with a second set of sticks, intermediary in size to the first, and asked the children to insert this new set into the staircase formed with the other set, children of five years for the most part could not solve the problem. It was only at the age of 6-7 that children could place the second set correctly within the ready-made series; i. e. , place an element 'b' between A which was smaller and B which was bigger than 'b'.

In both the class and the relation studies, the crucial task for the child was the discovery that one and the same element could be in two classes or in two relations at once. In the class concept study the children had to discover that a particular bead could be both white and wooden at the same time. Likewise in theseriation task, the solution rested upon the child's discovery that a particular element could, at one and the same time, be both longer and shorter than the elements on wither side of it. In both instances the child resolved the problems by moving to a new level of abstraction wherein one and the same element could be doubly represented without conflict.

In Piaget's view, this is just what is required to attain the adult or true conception of number. The true conception of number is founded upon the concept of a unit. Now the unit concept is one which presupposes that the unit is both like every other unit and different from every other unit in its order of enumeration. Every penny in a row of six is like every other as they are interchangeable. Their difference lies in the order in which they are counted or enumerated. In short, for the child, the concept of a unit or a number presupposes the same mental ability as that required to nest classes or to seriate relationships, namely, the ability to grasp that one and the same element can be represented in two different ways at the same time.

From and educational perspective this finding has important implications. It means that the understanding of number develops hand-in-hand with the understanding of classification and seriation. Accordingly, practice in classification and in seriation might play a more dominant role than heretofore in children's preparation for instruction in mathematics. This is already being done in some nursery schools and kindergartens but much more could be done if the materials for classification and seriation were available in greater quantity and in greater variety.

A second example of how Piaget's work might influence educational content comes from Piaget's work on identity. Actually, some of Piaget's earliest studies dealt with this issue, to which he has recently returned after some forty years of concern with other matters. In the original studies Piaget had children arrange a series of pictures (which resemble a set of frames from a comic strip) into the right order so that they would tell a story. Piaget found that young children had great difficulty with this task. One of the reasons was that they did not seem to recognize that it was the same character in each successive frame. The child's failure to understand the continuity of a sequence thus seemed to reflect his inability to detect the identity of the characters who participated in the sequence.

In more recent years Piaget has pursued this issue with material related to growth and aging. He and his colleagues ( notably Gilbert Voyat ) presented children with photographs of a plant at various stages of growth. Although the children could recognize that adjacent photos were of the same plant they had trouble believing that the early photos in the series were of the same plant as that depicted in the last photos in the series. Again, the child's concept of growth was affected by his difficulty in grasping the notion of the plantŐs identity across transformations. Clearly this finding has implications for biology teaching and suggests that, as a bare minimum, we know whether or not children understand the identity of plants or organisms across various transformations before we proceed to more complex topics.

These are but two fairly simple examples of the significance of Piaget's research for the content science teaching. Many more could be easily cited. As in the case of sequencing and methods discussed earlier, these are merely examples of the treasures Piaget has uncovered for us. Much of the treasure remains to be mined.