Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

• Qualitative differences in children's thinking

  Piaget asserted that children do not just know less than adults, they actually think differently. Piaget suggested that the way children think changes through a series of stages. He also proposed that motivation plays an important role in learning and drives how learning takes place. We begin with the key concept of schema.
• 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 about themselves is stored. Cognitive development involves the construction of increasingly detailed schema for people, objects, physical actions and also 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 is a pleasant state of balance and occurs when experiences in the world match the state of our current schema.
• Any new experience creates disequilibrium because it does not fit our existing schema. Assimilation takes place when the new experience does not radically change our understanding of the schema so we can incorporate the new experience into our existing schema. For example, when a child with dogs at home meets another dog of a different breed, the child will simply add the new dog to their dog-schema (assimilation).
• An experience that is very different from our current schema cannot be assimilated. Accommodation involves the creation of whole new schema or major changes to existing ones. For example, a child with a pet dog may at first think of cats as dogs (because they have four legs, fur and a tail) but then recognise the existence of a separate category called 'cats' This accommodation will involve forming a new cat-schema.
• Children are little scientists - discovery learning.