What is assimilation?
- a form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information that changes our understanding of an object, person or idea
- when new information does not radically change our understanding of the topic we can incorporate it into an existing schema
What is accommodation?
-a form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information that changes our understanding of a topic to the extent that we need to form one or more new schemas and/or radically change existing schemas in order to deal with the new understanding
What is cognitive development?
- describes the development of all mental processes, in particular thinking, reasoning and understanding
- it continues throughout the lifespan particularly during childhood
What did Piaget do?
- the Swiss biologist and psychologist Piaget was weighting from the 1930s until the 1970s
- Piaget introduced the idea of cognitive development when he realised that children don’t just know less than adults but they think in an entirely different way
- Piaget divided childhood into stages each of which represents the development of new ways of reasoning
- Piaget also looked at children learning particularly the role of motivation in development and the question of how knowledge develops
What is equilibrium?
-the pleasant state when When existing schemas are capable of explaining what we can m perceive.
What are schemas?
- a schema is a mental structure containing all the information we have about one aspect of the world
- as adults we have schemas for people, objects, physical actions and also for more abstract ideas like justice and morality
- according to Piaget, children are born with a small number of schemas, just enough to allow them to interact with other people
- in infancy we construct new schemas, one of them is to interact these is the me-schema in which all the Childs knowledge about themselves is stored
What are the evaluation points of cognitive development?
+children form individual mental representations by discovery
+Applications in education
-Piaget may have underplayed the role of other people in learning
-Piaget may have overplayed the importance of equilibrium but children vary in intellectual curiosity
How does the fact that children form individual mental representations by discovery support Piaget theory?
- Piaget believed that children learn by forming their own mental representations of the world
- this was reviewed by Howe et al put children aged between 9 and 12 years in groups of four to study and discuss movement of objects down a slope, there understanding of the topic was assessed before and after this discussion
- following their experience of working together and discussing the topic the children were found to have increased their level of knowledge and understanding
- however facts about movement down a slope
- this supports Piaget idea that children learn by forming their own personal representations
How do applications in education support Piaget theory?
- Piagets ideas become popular in the 1960’s, the old-fashioned classroom, in which children sat silently in rows copying from the board, has been replaced by activity-orientated classrooms in which children actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understandings of the curriculum
- learning by discovery can take different forms. In the early years classroom children may, for example, investigate the physical properties of sand and water
- by the time you are studying for alevels, discovery may take the form of flipped lessons where students read up on the material independently before lessons so that lesson time can be focused on higher level education skills and practicing exam questions
How does the fact that Piaget may have underplayed the role of other people in learning disprove Piaget’s theory?
- Piaget did not believe children learn best on their own
- he saw other people-both adults and peers - as important sources of information during discovery learning and of course, the adults that set up situations in which discovery learning can take place
- however, other people were not the main focus of Piaget’s theory, and he saw learning in terms of what happens in the mind of the individual
- however, other theories of learning and cognitive development and a range of research findings suggest that other people are absolutely central to the process of learning
- in particular Lev Vygotsky proposed that learning is essentially a social process, and that children are capable of much more advanced learning if this is supported by peers or an expert adult
what is the cat schema?
-A child may initially try to assimilate their cat into an existing dog schema but will eventually form a new cat schema to accommodate the existence of cats
what are the 6 building blocks?
- schemas
- operations
- assimilation
- accommodation
- equilibrium
- disequilibrium
what is disequilibrium?
- a period of instability when an existing schema cant be assimilated
- according to Piaget we are motivated to learn when our existing schemas do not allow us to make sense of something new
- this leads to the-panic when assimilation cant take place but you calm down after accommodation is completed
what is operations?
- a combination (group of schemas)
- you can hold a similar pen to your as it matches the schema for holding your pen
how is the fact that Piaget may have overplayed the importance of equilibrium a weakness?
- Piaget saw learning as very much a motivated process in which children learn in order to equilibrate because disequilibrium is such an unpleasant experience
- actually children vary greatly in their intellectual curiosity
- it may be that Piaget over estimated just how motivated children are to learn the children he studies were mainly from the nursery attached to his university and this was a biased sample of clever middle class children
