Piaget and Cognitive Development

Piaget and Cognitive Development


According to Bhattacharya and Han, Piaget two major principles guide intellectual growth and biological development adaptation and organization. Assimilation and accommodation are both part of the adaptation process. Piaget believed that human beings possess mental structures that assimilate external events and accommodate them to fit their mental structures. According to Bhattacharya and Han, cognitive development is a complex process comprising three principal concepts affecting the development process: assimilation, accommodation and equilibration.
According to Piaget, assimilation occurs when a child perceives new objects or events in terms of existing schemas or operations. Piaget emphasized the functional quality of assimilation, where children and adults tend to apply any mental structure that is available to assimilate a new event, and actively use this newly acquired mental structure.

According to Piaget, accommodation refers to the process of changing internal mental structures to provide consistency with external reality. Piaget believed that cognitive development in children is contingent on four factors: biological maturation, experience with the physical environment, and experience with the social environment equilibration. According to Wood, Smith, and Grossniklaus, Piaget stages of cognitive development derived from his observation of children. Piaget understood that children were creating ideas. They were limited to receiving knowledge from parents or teachers. Piaget’s works provides the foundation on which constructionist theories are based. Piaget identified four major stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. Piaget believed that all children pass through these phases to advance to the next level of cognitive development. In each stage children pass through these phases to advance to the next level of cognitive development.

During each stage, children demonstrate new intellectual abilities and increasingly complex understanding of the world. Piaget first stage, sensorimotor, begins at birth and lasts until 18 months-2 years of age. This stage involves the use of motor activity without the use of symbols. Knowledge is limited in this stage, because it is based on physical interactions and experiences. Infants cannot predict reaction therefore must constantly experiment and learn through trial and error. Piaget’s second stage, preoperational usually occurs during the period between toddlerhood and early childhood (7 years). During this stage children begin to use language; memory and imagination also develop. In the preoperational stage, children engage in make believe and can understand and express relationships between the past and the future. Piaget’s third stage, concrete operational develops between the ages of 7 to eleven years.

In education, an important implication of Piaget’s theory is adaptation of
instruction to the learner’s development level of learning. The teacher’s role is to facilitate learning by providing a variety of experiences. I agree that teachers must implement learning in a variety of ways. We as educators must be aware that all students learn differently. Therefore to accommodate all students, and not leave any child behind, we must implement different ways to learning certain materials. As educators we must evaluate our students, making sure that the materiel that we introduce is not too advanced or not advanced enough for students to learn.