Piaget's theory of Cognitive development

• •Until Piaget,the general consensus was that children were different from adults only in the amount of knowledge that they had.

  •Piaget wanted to investigate ‘how do children think?’and Piaget successfully demonstrated that children think in entirely different ways to adults.
• •Piaget studied how knowledge develops in terms of schemas,and the processes of assimilation and accommodation,as well as what motivates learning through the process of equilibrium and disequilibrium.

  •Furthermore,children have to learn to think and he divided childhood into stages where different ways of reasoning were acquired.
• Schemas

  •Internal templates or mental representations of packages of knowledge.

  •These structures represent all the info we have about a particular topic.

  Piaget suggests that we are born with a small number of reflex-schemas such as sucking - this allows the infant to interact with the world. This interaction and activity then encourages more schemas to be built up and developed.
• •Motivation to learn

  Piaget argued infants are motivated to learn when their existing schemas or info about the world do not fit in with something they have come across.

  This leads to a feeling of disequilibrium and in order to achieve equilibrium the infant has to learn about and explore the new situation.

  In other words the infant is motivated to learn about the world to make sense of it,this is done in two ways: assimilation and accommodation.
• •Assimilation

  When an infant adds new info to existing schemas. E.g. different types of cat into their already existing cat schema.
• •Accommodation

  Infant comes across something qualitatively different and so has to change the current schema or come up with a new one. E.g. not all four legged animals with a mane are horses.
• Furthermore,the theory underplays the role of others. Piaget sees teachers and knowledgeable others as merely sources of info,however,he primarily saw that learning happened in the mind of the individual and other people were not the main focus of his theory. This suggests Piaget ignores the importance of others and how they can influence children’s learning. Therefore,Piaget’s theory of CD is incomplete.
• One strength of Piaget's theory is the real world applications. He revolutionised the classroom practices in  the 1960’s as instead of sitting silently at desks,activity oriented environments were introduced such as sand pits etc,called ‘discovery learning.’ This suggests that true understanding only occurs making one's own accommodations through trial and error. Therefore,Piaget's theory is an externally valid explanation of CD as it can be successfully applied to real world scenarios.
• However,discovery learning may be criticised as being an ineffective method across the board. Piaget stated children need to learn through discovery,through experiences that challenged and developed their schemas. However,it's been shown that children learn certain subjects like English and maths better when more formal methods are used,meaning that discovery learning is not applicable for the whole curriculum.

  Therefore,discovery learning is an incomplete application of Piaget’s theory of CD.