Piaget spent his career attempting to explain the cognitive development of children. That is, how their intellectual level changes over time. He defined intelligence as a basic life process that is expressed by an animal's ability to adapt to its environment. The impetus for this cognitive development is a need to adapt to one's environment in order to survive, reproduce, live comfortably, etc. Piaget proposed that in order to grow intellectually, children develop increasingly more complex schemes, i.e. organized patterns of thought used to cope with or explain an experience (Shaffer,…
