Jean Piaget

• Intelligence


  A process that helps an organism adapt to its environment
• Children are not born with innate ideas of reality
• Constructivism


  Children actively construct new understandings of the world based on their experiences
• Development


  The product of children's attempts to understand and act upon their world
• Development begins with an inborn ability to adapt to the environment
• Cognitive Growth


  1. Organization

  2. Adaptation

  3. Equilibration
• Organization


  Tendency to create categories
• Schemes


  Ways of organizing information about the world that govern the way the child thinks and behaves in a particular situation
• Adaptation


  How children handle new information in light of what they already know
• Assimilation


  Incorporating new information into existing cognitive structures
• Accommodation


  Adjusting one's cognitive structures to fit the new information
• Equilibration


  Children want what they understand of the world to match what they observe around them
• Piaget's theory provided rough benchmarks for what to expect of children at various ages and has helped educators design curricula appropriate to varying levels of development
• Piaget's theory is stage-oriented
• Piaget's theory is active