He was a major contributor to educational psychology and was a very thoughtful observer and generalizer (Mooney, 2013). Piaget's work provides an in-depth view of how children create knowledge. He thought when children interact with the environment that is what creates learning. Children build their own understanding through the real world and real life experiences (Mooney, 2013).
Being a constructivist, a constructivist classroom is child centered and learning centered. With this, he claims that the children construct their own knowledge. Jean Piaget had an expression "construction is superior to instruction" that means children learn best when they are doing the work by themselves and create their own understanding of what's being done (Mooney, 2013). He believed children should do everything by themselves because they learn best by doing and by being actively involved in learning activities. He also stressed that play was an important part for learning. If the children work hands on and they imitate what is going on around them that they begin to understand how things work and what things are for. And that this is a type of trial and error (Mooney, 2013). Each individual child develops at their own rate but Piaget believed each child passes through the same stages when developing their thinking skills. Today his work is a natural predecessor to project approach, emergent curriculum, differentiated instruction, and multiple intelligences (Mooney, 2013). It is also applicable in guiding us to the appropriate curriculum strategies for early education. Mental and physical activities are more important for cognitive development in which comes about during Piaget's four stages of cognitive development. One thing he says are that children are "little scientists" and develop their own intelligence (Morrison, 2013). The children learn from what excites them and they construct their own knowledge from real-life situations and experiences and also develop and learn at their rate.