Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

• Piaget's great contribution to child psychology was to realise that children do not simply know less than adults do. Instead Piaget realised children think in entirely different ways from adults.
• Piaget divided childhood into stages, each of which represents the development of new ways of reasoning.
• As children develop they construct more and more detailed and complex mental representations of the world. These representations are stored in the form of schema.
• According to Piaget, children are born with a small number of schema, just enough to allow them to interact with the world and other people.
• Right from the beginning, in infancy, we construct new schema. One of these is the 'me-schema' in which all the child's knowledge about themselves is stored.
• A key element to Piaget's theory is the motivation to learn. According to Piaget, we are pushed to learn when our existing schema do not allow us to make sense of something new. This leads to the unpleasant sensation of disequilibrium.
• To escape disequilibrium we have to adapt to the new situation by exploring and developing our understanding. By doing this we achieve equilibration, the preferred mental state.
• Piaget saw the process of learning as adapting to the new situation so that we understand it. He identified two processes by which this adaptation takes place (assimilation and accommodation).
• Assimilation = takes place when we understand a new experience and equilibrate by adding new information to our existing schema. (For example, a child in a family with dogs can adapt to the existence of different dog breeds by assimilating them into their dog schema).
• Accommodation = takes place in response to dramatically new experiences. The child has to adjust to these by either radically changing current schema or forming new ones. (For example, a child with a pet dog may at first think of cats as dogs but then recognise the existence of a separate category called cats, this accommodation will; involve forming a new 'cat-schema').
• Strength of Piaget's theory is evidence for the individual formation of mental representations. Piaget's theory suggests children form individual representations of the world, even when they have similar learning experiences. Howe et al. showed this in a study in which children aged 9-12 were placed in groups of 4 to discuss the movement of objects down a slope. After, all the children were found to have increased their understanding. Crucially though, their understanding had not become more similar. Instead each child had picked up different facts and reached slightly different conclusions.
• Piaget's idea that children learn by actively exploring their environment and forming their own mental representation of the world has changed classroom teaching. The old-fashioned classroom, in which children sat silently in rows copying from the board has been replaced by activity-orientated classrooms in which children actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understandings of the curriculum. This shows how Piaget-inspired approaches may facilitate the development of individual mental representations of the world.
• Piaget's theory has certainly influenced modern practice in teaching and learning. However, there is no firm evidence showing that children learn better using discovery learning. In a recent review Lazonder and Harmsen concluded that discovery learning with considerable input from teachers was the most effective way to learn, but it seems that input from others, not discovery per se, is the crucial element of this effectiveness. This means discovery learning is less effective than we would expect if Piaget's theory of learning was correct.
• However, Piaget underestimated the role of others in learning. Piaget saw other people as useful to learning in the sense that they are potential sources of information and learning experiences. However, he saw learning itself as an individual process. This contrasts other theories in which leaning is seen as a more social process, supported by more knowledgable others. In particular Vygotsky saw knowledge as existing first between the learner and the more experienced other and only then in the mind of the learner. This means that Piaget's theory may not be a complete explanation for learning.