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Piaget

It would be hard to underestimate the influence on child development and learning stemming from the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget spent more than five decades observing the behavior of his own and other children as they grew from infancy to adolescence. Based on these observations he recorded in his diaries, Piaget constructed a theory of cognitive development that is based upon the assertion that mental growth is primarily an increased ability to adapt to new situations. Nathan Isaacs (1985) argues that Piaget identified two main elements to a child’s mental growth:

The paramount part played from the start by his own action; and,

The way this turns into a process of inward building-up, that is, of forming within his mind a continually extending structure corresponding to the world outside.

From the first moments outside the womb, the infant itself takes a controlling hand in obtaining and then organizing all his experiences and interactions with the outside world. This process of absorbing and organizing experiences around the activities that produce them was called assimilation by Piaget (Isaacs, 1985, 19). Within the nature vs. nurture debate, Piaget adopts the view that both of these forces – genetics and environmental interaction – play a profound role in development and learning. Piaget argued that two fundamental processes – assimilation and accommodation – are responsible for cognitive development in children. With respect to assimilation, Piaget was referring to the process whereby the child interprets reality in terms of his or her own internal model of the world built on previous knowledge. With respect to accommodation, Piaget was referring to the complementary process of improving one’s model of the world by adjusting to its external reality.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a stage theory. Piaget based his stage theory on four schemes or stages of development...

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Piaget. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:36, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1686103.html