John H. Flavell, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetJohn H. Flavell
American psychologist
Date of Birth: 09-Aug-1928
Place of Birth: Rockland, Massachusetts, United States
Profession: psychologist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Leo 
About John H. Flavell
- John H.
- Flavell (born August 9, 1928 in Rockland, Massachusetts) is an American developmental psychologist specializing in children's cognitive development.
- After serving in The United States Army for two years from 1945–1947, John H.
- Flavell enrolled at Northeastern University where he earned his bachelor's degree in psychology.
- After graduation, he was admitted into the clinical psychology program at Clark University and Harvard University.
- John H.
- Flavell earned his MA from Clark University in 1952 and in 1955 he earned his Ph.D.
- Through the discovery of new developmental phenomena and analysis of the theories of Jean Piaget, Flavell shifted the direction of developmental psychology in the United States. In 1955-1956 Flavell worked as a clinical psychologist at Fort Lyon V.A.
- hospital in Colorado.
- After leaving Fort Lyon he accepted a position at the University of Rochester New York as a clinical associate and then as an assistant professor of psychology.
- In 1965 Flavell was asked to become a full-time professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development.
- Flavell left after 10 years to join Stanford University in 1976 where he became one of their professors. Some of Flavell's accomplishments include writing a book on children's cognitive development titled The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget in 1963.
- In 1970 Flavell was the president of the APA's division of Developmental Psychology.
- Flavell served for eight years on the SRCD's (Society for Research in Child Development) Governing Council and is a charter member of the editorial board of Cognitive Psychology.
- Flavell has written more than 120 books and in 1984 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (APA).
- He was recognized with an Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Society in 1984, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1994.
- He is currently an emeritus professor of developmental psychology at Stanford. Flavell has conducted extensive research into metacognition and the child's theory of mind.
- One of his most famous contributions to the field is his work on children's developing understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality.
- These studies assessed young children's ability to acknowledge that a given object is really one kind of thing, yet appears to be another kind of thing, or that a given piece of material is really one color, yet appears to be another color under particular circumstances.
- Flavell and his colleagues have found that whereas most three-year-olds fail these tasks, five-year-olds and older four-year-olds succeed on them.
- Flavell interprets this developmental difference as suggesting that children acquire the notion of mental representation of reality as distinct from reality itself.
- The appearance-reality paradigm, along with the false-belief task, is widely used as diagnostic of theory of mind development during early childhood.
- Flavell's other work has addressed children's developing understanding of perception, perspective-taking, and their introspective insight into their own subjective experiences.
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