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Jean Piaget: His Theories and their Applications in Teaching Having an understanding of cognitive theories is of immense importance especially as a beginning teacher. With an understanding of how and when children learn is of paramount to the way a teacher plans and implements learning situations. Perhaps the most effective way to examine cognitive theories and possible practical applications of them is to explore the most famous cognitive theorist of them all; Jean Piaget. As will become apparent, Piaget’s theory and in fact his findings have been widely challenged. Nevertheless, Piaget’s ideas still maintain a vital influence in both general psychology and contemporary education. Jean Piaget’s theories were developed from many years of observation of children, especially his own, in natural environments as opposed to the laboratory experiments which were carried out by the behaviourists. Piaget was interested in the way children interacted with their environment; he wanted to see children assuming a more active role contrary to learning theory of the time. (Gale, 2003) One of the most important contributions that Piaget made was to establish that the cognitive processes of young children are not simply immature versions of that of an adult, but that they have their very own rules (Gale, 2003). Piaget postulated that the fundamental principles of human cognition, specifically children’s cognition, are organisation and adaptation (Santrock & Yussen, 1989). Organisation, according to Piaget, is the predisposition to combine simple mental structures into more complex situations (Hetherington, 1986), whereas adaptation is a child’s effective interaction with the environment via the complementary sub-processes of assimilation and accommodation (Santrock & Yussen, 1989). Thus through these proposed innate cognitive processing principles of organisation and adaptation, new stimuli can be adjusted to in terms of previous learning, or modified in structure in response to the environment. Piaget saw children knowledge as being made up of schemas which were ‘basic units of knowledge used to organise past experience and serve as a basis for understanding new ones’ (Gale, 2003, p.1). Piaget arrived at the terms assimilation and accommodation for the two processes that are continually being modified; Assimilation is the act of incorporating, integrating and adapting schemas into an existing knowledge scheme. Accommodation occurs when a knowledge scheme is adjusted or altered to accommodate the knowledge item that has just been assimilated. (Wiles, 2003, p.1) Schemas, Piaget believes, are the primary component of intelligent behaviour. These schemas adapt through a continuous process of ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation,’ in an endeavour to attain ‘equilibrium’ or ‘equilibration’ which is essentially balance between the two (Wiles, 2003). Therefore Assimilation is the process of adapting new experiences to fit into existing schemas. Accommodation is the process of adapting existing schemas to fit new experiences (Wiles, 2003). A child may have difficulty assimilating certain situations so thus their cognitive structures accommodate the new situation to allow more effective assimilation in the future. Assimilation and accommodation compliment each other and work together when dealing with different situations. Piaget believed that cognitive development was about trying to find a middle point between assimilation and accommodation that he termed equilibration. Equilibration is a regulatory process that maintains a balance between assimilation and accommodation to facilitate cognitive growth (Wiles, 2003). One way of considering this theory is that we cannot merely assimilate all the time; if we did, we would not learn any new concepts or understandings. Everything new we encountered would be placed in the same few slots we already had. We cannot just accommodate all the time either; if we did, everything we came across would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We would be exhausted by the mental effort! (Wiles, 2003). Piaget, through close observation, began to ask whether children see the world in the same way that adults do. Piaget divided cognitive development into four major sequential stages: the sensorimotor, the preoperational (sometimes viewed as being part of the concrete operational stage), the concrete operational, and the formal operational (Hetherington and Parke, 1986). The sensorimotor stage (birth - two years) is concerned with an infant’s ability to coordinate sensory perception with motor behaviour. This stage, consisting of six sub-stages, is where the child coordinates his or her sensory perception with physical movement and developing representations mentally (Hetherington and Parke, 1986). Thus, for the child to think about the object the child had to act upon it with his or her senses. Perhaps the major development in this stage is ‘object permanence.’ Object permanence is where the child begins to understand that that even though an object is out of sight or outside of their sensory awareness it still exists (Hetherington and Parke, 1986). The preoperational stage (two – six years) which is sometimes considered a part of the concrete operational stage, primarily involves the ability of a child to think symbolically such as developing the use of language and representing the world mentally. Children of this age are egocentric, only seeing the world from their perspective and their reasoning is considered idiosyncratic (Hetherington and Parke, 1986). A child may assume that everyone else has the same knowledge, experience and perspective as she or he does (Hetherington and Parke, 1986). At this stage the child has vivid fantasies and it is not uncommon for the child to personify objects (Ginsberg and Opper, 1988). This is seen when a child turns a broom into a ‘horsey’. This progresses into playing pretend games. The concrete operational stage (six - twelve years) relates to the beginning of logical consistency in reason. Children start to process abstract ideas such as number and relationships but are in need of concrete examples to be able to understand these concepts (Ginsberg and Opper, 1988). Logic is developed in areas such as length, mass, area, weight, time and volume. Logic also starts to dominate in areas such as conservation where, for example, a child can see that the size of shape of substance (a piece of clay) does not change its mass when manipulated or the number of blocks does not change even when they are rearranged (Hetherington and Parke, 1986).
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