In this section, you will be introduced to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. He is well known for his work on how children think at different stages in their lives.

Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Switzerland. He first graduated in biology, and then moved on to work in the field of psychology. He based much of his work on careful observations of children, his own and their friends’. His theory is of great importance because many educators believed that children were merely miniature adults, with similar cognitive functions to adults. What Piaget showed was the qualitative differences in children’s thinking, and that this developed through a series of stages. Thus his theory is of importance to us as educators today, because many educators still do not understand the development of children’s thinking.

Piaget’s first book was published in 1923 (Language and thought of the child), and was first translated into English in 1929. (It was also translated into Russian in 1932, at Vygotsky’s request.) His work has had a major impact on educators’ and others’ understandings of cognitive development, and he died after a long and productive life in 1980, aged 84.

Comparison:

While Vygotsky’s view emerged at the interaction between the social and the psychological, Piaget’s views consider more closely the interaction between the biological and the psychological.

In his theory, Piaget combined his fascination with biology and his interest in the way humans develop knowledge.

A number of important and basic principles of the theory are raised in the following excerpt from Snowman and Biehler (2000) (some of these important and basic principles will be discussed under the bullets that follow this quote):

He postulated (claimed) that human beings inherit two basic tendencies: organisation (the tendency to systematize and combine processes into general systems) and adaptation. For Piaget, these tendencies govern both physiological and mental functioning. Just as the biological process of digestion transforms food into a form that the body can use, so intellectual processes transform experiences into a form that the child can use in dealing with new situations. And just as biological processes must be kept in a state of balance (through homeostasis), intellectual processes seek a balance through the process of equilibration.

• By using the word ‘inherit’, Piaget is referring to the genetic capacities that humans pass on from one generation to the next. He is therefore emphasising that aspects of our cognitive development (the structures which help organise our thoughts) are biological.
  
  
• According to Piaget, all humans are born with an innate (inborn, existing from birth) tendency to organise their thinking into structures. These mental structures are known as schemas.

The organisational tendencies which human have, leads to our combining ideas into some form of system. Thus when we work out that roses and daisies are part of the group of things called ‘flowers’, we are organising our thinking, and that helps to speed up thought processes. When an idea has other ideas linked to it, it forms into a schema – a group of thoughts grouped around one theme.

In infants, schemas are simple, (as in ball, fruit and flowers schemas), but as we progress towards maturity, our schemas grow more complex. For example, adults have schemas through which they understand abstract concepts such as love, peace, democracy.

• The second process that Piaget believed all humans constantly carry out is adaptation.

At birth, a human infant has a set of instinctive responses which enables it to survive. However, the infant is constantly meeting new experiences and trying to make sense of these. The simple mental schemas soon become inadequate for the ever-increasing complexity of the child’s perceptions of the world. And so constant changes to existing schemas are necessary. In other words, the structure of the internal schemas has constantly to be adapted to enable them to cope with the external environment. Adaptation, then, is the process of matching real-life experiences with the schemas which have been formed in the mind.

The two processes involved in adaptation are assimilation and accommodation.

• When one has an experience which can be linked to an existing schema, assimilation is said to occur – in other words the new is integrated into the existing thought structures / new information fits in easily with what is already known.

For example, if we were to find an unknown plant that looked very similar to a cabbage, we would easily accept it as a new kind of edible vegetable.

• However when a new experience cannot be linked to any existing schemas, accommodation occurs – where existing schema’s are adapted to incorporate the new experience. When there is a mismatch or conflict between existing schemas and new information, the learner must actually change the organisation of one or more existing schemas in order to accommodate the new information.

For example. imagine a six-year old who goes to the aquarium for the first time and calls the whales ‘big fish’. The child is assimilating – attempting to place this new experience into an existing schema (in this case, the understanding that all creatures that live in the water are fish). When the child’s parents point out that, even though whales live in the water, they are mammals, not fish, the six-year old begins to accommodate – to modify and adapt the existing schema to fit this new experience. Accommodations are made slowly over repeated experiences. So, gradually a new schema will form that contains non-fish creatures that live in the water.

• Equilibration refers to the continual processes of adjusting knowledge in order to adapt to the environment. When we encounter something that does not ‘fit’ with our existing schema’s, we try to make sense of it, in order to bring our schema’s back into a state of balance. The result is a delicate balancing act between assimilating incoming information into existing schemas and restructuring schemas to accommodate new information which does not easily fit in. This balance is known as equilibration.
  
  
• The processes of accommodation and assimilation occur at the unconscious level – a person is not aware that they are taking place.
  
  
• Most of the time, assimilation and accommodation are both required and take place together.

An example of assimilation and accommodation follows:

As a toddler, a child learns that a ball is something round and soft, used in games of learning to catch. Then, as the child grows older, he learns that a bigger, harder, white round object is also a ball – a football. So he expands his schema of ‘ball’ to include a football. This is assimilation. The child is then given an orange and calls it a ‘ball’ because it is round – but his mother tells him ‘no, this is a fruit, look you can eat it’. So the boy then develops a new schema for fruit – and an orange ‘belongs’ to that schema. This is an example of accommodation.