Review
...an extensive review of contemporary views of intellectual development....Each research project is detailed in a scholarly manner.
—CHOICE
Robbie Case and his colleagues have devised a powerful alternative that promises to be much more effective in dealing with understanding in real children....In this book Case and his colleagues provide a powerful beginning for building this kind of exciting new framework.
—Contemporary Psychology
The Minds Staircase is a remarkable book presenting Cases attempt to take into account a thoroughly alien set of perspectives and results and generate a new model that could integrate and account for results across the entire span of consideration -- in particular, both domain-general and domain-specific aspects of development. Case ends up with a model that seems to have just the right integrations and differentiations to be able to handle both specificity and generality of development.
—American Journal of Psychology
Product Description
The shortcomings of Piaget's theory of intellectual development are well-known. Less clear is what sort of theory should be devised to replace it. This volume describes the current main contenders, including neo-Piagetian, neo-connectionist, neo-innatist and sociocultural models. Its contributors conclude that none of these models are adequate because each one implies a view of the human mind which is either too general, too particular, or too modular. A collaborative program of research -- seven years in the making -- is then described, which gives support to a newly emerging synthesis of these various positions.