Piaget's theory of cognitive development

• qualitative differences in children's thinking

  • claimed that children do not just know less than adults, they actually think differently
  • suggest that the way children think changes through a series of stages
  • proposed that motivation plays an important role in learning and drives how learning takes place
  • we begin learning with schema
• schema (units of knowledge)

  • our knowledge of the world is represented in the mind and organised in schema
  • infants are born with a few schema but construct new ones right from the start, including the 'me-schema' in which all the child's knowledge of themselves is stored
  • cognitive development involves the construction of increasingly detailed schema for people, objects, physical actions and for more abstract ideas like justice or morality
• motivation to learn (starts with disequilibrium)

  • when a child cannot make sense of their world because existing schema are insufficient, they feel a sense of disequilibrium which is uncomfortable
  • to escape this, and adapt to the new situation, the child explores and learns more
  • the result is a state of equilibration
• equilibration

  • the preferred mental state
  • a pleasant state of balance and occurs when experiences in the world match the state of our current schema
• assimilation

  • "new experiences understood with existing schema"
  • any new experience creates disequilibrium because, as yet, it does not fit our existing schema
  • assimilation takes place when the new experiences doesn't radically change our understanding of the schema so we can incorporate the new experience into our existing schema
  • eg= when a child with a dog at home meets another dog of a different breed, the child will simply add the new dog to their dog-schema
• accommodation

  • "new experiences require major schema change"
  • an experience that is very different from our current schema cannot be assimilated
  • accommodation involves the creation of whole new schema of major changes to existing ones
  • eg= a child with a pet dog may at first think of cats as dogs (because they have 4 legs, fur and a tail) but then recognise the existence of a separate called 'cats'
  • this accommodation will involve forming a new 'cat-schema'
• strength = research support

  • Howe et al = put 9-12 year olds in groups to discuss how objects move down a slope
  • the children did not reach the same conclusions or pick up the same facts about movement down a slope
  • means that children formed their own individual mental representations of the topics - as Piaget would have predicted
• strength = ideas revolutionised teaching

  • in his activity-orientated classrooms children construct their own understanding eg, investigate physical properties of sand
  • at a level = discovery learning may be 'flipped' lessons where students read up on content, forming their own basic mental representation of the topic prior to teaching
  • shows how Piaget-inspired approaches may facilitate the development of individual mental representations of the world
  • counterpoint = no firm evidence that his teaching ideas are any more effective than others - the input from the teacher may be the key
• limitation = understated the role of other people

  • Piaget did recognise that other people can be important in learning (eg, as sources of information)
  • BUT others (eg, Vygotsky) argued that knowledge first exists between the learner and someone with more knowledge (has support from evidence)
  • => Piaget theory may be an incomplete explanation for learning because it neglects the role of other people in learning
• evaluation extra (role of motivation)

  • he believed that we are born with an innate motivation to learn in order to escape the unpleasant state of disequilibrium
  • BUT Piaget may have overestimated this motivation to learn, possibly because he studied an unrepresentative sample of children (only looked at middle class children who would've received more time/support etc)
  • suggests that children are born with a degree of intellectual curiosity, but perhaps less than proposed by Piaget