piaget's theory of cognitive development

Question 1

schema

Answer 1

• as children develop, construct more and more detailed mental representations of the world
• Piaget said that children are born with a small amount of schema, enough to interact with the world and other people
• right from the beginning in infancy, we construct new schema
• cognitive development involves construction of progressively more detailed schema for people, objects, physical actions, and later more abstract ideas like justice and morality
• innate schemas in babies for grabbing and sucking
• Piaget viewed children as mini scientists because they learn through trial and error

Question 2

the motivation to learn - disequilibrium and equilibration

Answer 2

• according to Piaget, we are pushed to learn when existing schema do not allow us to make sense of something new, this leads to disequilibrium
• to escape this we have to adapt to the situation by exploring and developing our understanding
• by doing this we achieve equilibration, the preferred mental state

Question 3

how learning takes place - assimilation and accommodation (abstract concepts)

Answer 3

• Piaget saw process of learning as adapting to the new situation so that we understand it

assimilation - when we understand a new experience and equilibrate by adding new info to existing schema, for example a child adapting to learning new dog breeds by assimilating them into their dog schema

accommodation - response to dramatically new experiences, by either radically changing schema or forming new ones, for example a child may think of cats and dogs as the same thing, but then needing to form a new schema for cats when realising the difference

Question 4

Piaget’s methods

Answer 4

• experiments
• observations
• inferences
• self report (older children)

Question 5

evaluation strength - research support

Answer 5

• evidence for individual formation of mental representations
• theory suggests that children form quite different representations of the world, even when they have similar learning experiences
• Christine Howe demonstrated this when children aged 9-12 were placed in groups of 4 to investigate and discuss the movement of objects down a slope
• all children were found to have increased understanding after the study, however their understanding had not become more similar, instead each child had picked up different facts and come to different conclusions

Question 6

evaluation strength - real-world application

Answer 6

• has been applied in teaching
• idea that children learn by actively exploring the environment and forming their own mental representations has changed classroom teaching
• the old-fashioned classroom, where children sat and silently copied from the board, has been replaced with activity-oriented classrooms where children actively engage with with tasks that allow them to construct their own understandings of the curriculum

Question 7

evaluation limitation - the role of others in learning

Answer 7

• he underestimated the role of others in learning
• saw other people as useful because they can be sources of information and learning experiences
• however he saw learning itself as an individual process, contrasts other theories where learning is seen as a social process, supported by knowledgeable others
• strong evidence to support the idea that learning is enhanced by interaction with others
• Piaget’s theory may be incomplete

Question 8

evaluation limitation - measuring cognitions

Answer 8

• hard to objectively measure cognitions of thought process
• most children can’t verbalise their understanding
• relying on making inferences
• can’t validate assimilation and accommodation or how schemas change