Background
Flavell, John Hurley was born on August 9, 1928 in Rockland, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Paul Irving and Anne (O'Brien) Flavell.
Flavell, John Hurley was born on August 9, 1928 in Rockland, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Paul Irving and Anne (O'Brien) Flavell.
John H. Flavell earned his Master of Arts from Clark University in 1952 and in 1955 he earned his Doctor of Philosophy 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.
After serving in The United States Army for two years from 1945–1947, 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. In 1955-1956 Flavell worked as a clinical psychologist at Fort Lyon Victoria and Albert hospital in Colorado.
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. In 1970 Flavell was the president of the APA"s division of Developmental Psychology.
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.
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.
National Academy of Sciences]
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.
Married Eleanor Roberts Wood, July 24, 1954. Children– Elizabeth, James.