Piaget's theory of cognitive development
4 stages of learning according to Piaget:
- infants/children learn about the world via interacting with others/environment.
Depending on their age and biological maturation, they interact with the world
utilising different and more complex mental skills
- They build up a knowledge of the world by developing schema
- These changes over time. When faced with new information, children either
assimilate or accommodate this information into their existing schemas.
- This need for new knowledge is driven by motivation
1. Outline what Piaget meant by the word schema (3 marks)
A schema is a mental structure containing all the information we have about one aspect of
the world. As children develop, they construct more detailed and more complex mental
representations. 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 these is the “me-schema” in which all the child’s knowledge about themselves is
stored.
2. Distinguish between assimilation and accommodation (4 marks)
Assimilation is when we understand a new experience and equilibrate by adding new
information to our existing schemas. E.g. A child in a family with dogs can adapt to the
existence of different dog breeds by assimilating them into their dog schema.
Accommodation takes place in dramatically new experiences. The child has to adjust to
these by either radically changing current schemas or forming new ones. Soa child with a
pet dog may at first think of cats as dogs (because they have 4 legs, fur and a tail) but then
accomodate to the existence of a separate species called cats. This involves altering
animal/pet schemas to include cats and forming a “cat-schema”.
3. Outline and discuss Piaget’s idea of equilibration ( (8 marks)
Equilibration takes place when we have encountered new information and built it into our
understanding of a topic, either by assimilating it into an existing schema or accommodating
it by forming a new one. Everything is again balanced and we have escaped the unpleasant
experience of a lack of balance - disequilibrium.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 an unpleasant sensation of disequilibrium. We solve this by assimilating or
accommodating.
However, 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. The children he studied were mainly from
the nursery attached to his university and this was a sample of clever middle-class children.
The fact that Piaget overestimated how motivated children are to learn means that his theory
may lack validity. Piaget only tested participants that were of a similar background to himself,
educated children from a middle-class European background. Such children may be more
,highly motivated than children from less educated backgrounds and from different cultures.
Therefore the way this group of children acquired knowledge may be different. Abstract and
formal operational thinking may be much less common in other social and cultural groups. It
may be inappropriate to generalise his findings to be true of people from different cultures
and different
classes who may feel differently towards education.
4. Describe and evaluate Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (16 marks)
Piaget believed that schemas (an evolving unit of knowledge which we use to understand
situations) are key to cognitive development. He believed that children were born with a
small number of schemas, just enough to allow them to interact with other people. According
to Paiget, we are motivated to learn when our existing schemas do not allow us to make
sense of something new. This leads to the unpleasant sensation of disequilibrium. To
escape disequilibrium we have to adapt to the new situation by exploring and learning what
we need to know. By doing this, we achieve equilibrium, the preferred mental state. Piaget
saw the process of learning as adapting to the new situation so that we understand it. He
identified two processes by which this adaptation takes place; assimilation and
accomodation, depending on the current schema.
Assimilation is where new elements are added to existing schemas by applying a schema to
a new situation, such as applying the pull along schema to a wooden dog on wheels with pull
rope or by adding new information to an existing schema. Accommodation is where a
schema has been changed in order to deal with a new situation, for example the pull along
schema can’t be used for a wind up tractor, so the wind up schema needs to be developed
to understand how the wind up tractor.
EVALUATION:
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has been useful as it has been applied to the
education system in the UK. There is an emphasis on learning by discovery for children as
they actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understandings of the
curriculum. For example, in the early years children may investigate the physical properties
of sand and water and in A-level study, discovery may take place in the form of “flipped”
lessons. Piaget’s idea that children learn by actively exploring the environment and forming
their own individual mental representations had revolutionised classroom teaching. “Flipped”
learning allows children to learn the basics before the lessons, so that lesson time can be
focused on higher education. This will have a positive impact on the student’s education and
in the long run be beneficial for the economy as employment will rise and taxes will rise.
Howe et al studied children aged 9-12 in groups of 4 to study and discuss movement of
objects down a slope. After working together, the children were found to have an increased
level of knowledge and understanding. However, the children had not come to the same
conclusions or picked up the same facts about movement down a slope. This supports
Piaget’s theory that learning occurs on an individual basis and is personalised as their
learning occurs through interaction with the environment and discovery
However, there is research conducted by Vygotsky that suggests children do not learn best
on their own. Piaget focused on individual learning and saw learning in terms of what
happens in the mind of the individual. However, other research findings suggest that other
people are absolutely central to the processes of learning. 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. His theory limits the validity of
Piaget’s theory because they focus on different aspects of learning.
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. The children he studied were mainly from the nursery
attached to his university and this was a sample of clever middle-class children. The fact that
Piaget overestimated how motivated children are to learn means that his theory may lack
validity. Piaget only tested participants that were of a similar background to himself,
educated children from a middle-class European background. Such children may be more
highly motivated than children from less educated backgrounds and from different cultures.
Therefore the way this group of children acquired knowledge may be different. Abstract and
formal operational thinking may be much less common in other social and cultural groups. It
may be inappropriate to generalise his findings to be true of people from different cultures
and different classes who may feel differently towards education.
Carmichael et al. (1932) showed ppts kidney shape, and were either told it was a kidney
bean, or a canoe. When asked to draw the shape after, it differed according to which label
they had been given. This research supports Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development
rather than Piaget’s which again limits the validity of his theory. Carmichael’s research
demonstrates how important
Piaget’s stages of intellectual development
1. Identify one of Piaget’s stages of intellectual development and outline the
features at this stage (4 marks)
The Sensorimotor stage develops from 0-2 years. According to Paiget, a baby’s early focus
is on physical sensations and on developing some basic physical coordination. The baby
develops an understanding that other people are separate objects and acquires some basic
language. At around 8 months, the baby begins to understand that objects still exist when
they are out of sight - this is known as object permanence. Piaget observed babies looking
at objects as they were removed from out of sight throughout the first year. He noted that
before 8 months, children immediately switched their attention away from the object once it
was out of sight. However, from around 8 months they would continue to look for it. This led
Piaget to believe that it was from this age that children understood that objects continue to
exist when removed from view.
By the age of 2, a toddler is mobile and can use language but lacks reasoning ability,
this means they display some errors in reasoning.
Conservation is the basic mathematical understanding that quantity remains constant even
when the appearance of objects changes. Piaget used 2 conservation experiments to
demonstrate how toddlers usually struggle to conserve. In the first experiment, he placed
two identical rows of counters side by side, each child correctly stating that the two rows
were the same. However, when the counters on one row were pushed closer together, pre-
operational children struggled to conserve and usually said there were fewer counters.In the
liquid conservation experiment, Piaget found that when two containers are placed side by
