ABSTRACT
Among developmental researchers from different French-speaking countries—in Montréal in Canada, in Belgium, or in Aix-en-Provence in France—Jean Piaget has exercised continuing influence. Piaget was one of the few theoreticians in cognitive development who not only focused on understanding the properties and transitions that characterize stages of mental development after infancy and before adolescence, but contributed to that understanding in a major way. This period—encompassing as it does schooling of the most basic and formative sort—is critical to the mental growth of the child. Normally, greater emphasis is placed on curricula and associated institutional issues, and less emphasis is given to the cognitive characteristics of the child who is learning. As a consequence, an area of considerable importance in the study of mental development, broadly conceived, is the nature of school-age cognition. These chapters on cognitive development by Ricard, Gouin Décarie, Desrochers, and Rome-Flanders, by Vyt, by Fraysse and Desprels-Fraysse, and by Vandenplas-Holper demonstrate that the application of continuing attention and vigor to the study of this important age period by developmental researchers in the Francophone tradition has yielded valuable insights into what children themselves bring to their cognitive development.
