The developmental theories of Jean Piaget and William Perry: an application to the teaching of writing

Abstract

Jean Piaget's interactionist theory of the cognitive development of children and adolescents has provided background for classroom practices through the elementary grades. Seldom has it been applied to postsecondary education. When Piaget revised his theory late in his life, however, to include the possibility that some individuals may not reach the level of formal thought until the age of twenty or later, if at all, the theory took on new relevance for those who teach college students. In the 1950's and 1960's William Perry further extended research into the cognitive development of college students when he studied the evolving world view of a sample of Harvard students. Both Piaget and Perry present the adolescent and young adult as a seeker after balance whose ability to communicate with those around him depends on his growing ability to perceive multiple points of view. According to Piaget, when the individual attains the stage of formal operational thought, as at each preceding developmental stage, he must decenter out of an egocentrism that prevents his considering his own and his audience's points of view simultaneously. Growth is a process of distancing between self and others. James Moffett has based a curriculum for grades K-13 on the increasing distance between a speaker or writer and his audience and between a speaker or writer and his subject. Educators of classical Greece and Rome as well based their beginning composition exercises on the child's natural movement toward more advanced levels of abstraction. Perry's research indicates a need to train not just children, but even college students, to abstract from a variety of subject matters and for increasingly distant audiences. Some students arrive at college not yet able to place their own point of view in the context of other possible points of view. Others respond to the pluralism of the modern university by reverting to more basic levels of thought that deny relativism. In writing, however, the need for a relativistic outlook cannot long be denied. Exercises that let the student recapitulate in writing the early developmental stages may foster growth into more advanced ones.