You need to know about him - Jean Piaget

Theory of Constructivism – Jean Piaget

 

There’s a Chinese proverb goes like this:

I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand

Yes! Children need to work on themselves to understand the world around them. This is what I understand from the constructivism theory. Children need to construct their own knowledge rather than just seeing the adults in the making and teaching. In this theory, children learn actively by doing, trial and error, questioning, discussing with friend while the teacher play the role of facilitator and co-learner which mean the children find the answer on their own. The knowledge that the gain has to be meaningful to them in order to help them “key in” into their mind.

Some of the examples of a constructivist classroom are hand-on activities, experiments for Science discovery subject, making model or project, discussions.

Piaget stated that children do not just learn passively but actively try to MAKE SENSE of their world. As they learn and mature, children develop schemas (Patterns of knowledge in long term memory). The schemas help children to remember, organize and respond to information. Furthermore, Piaget thought that when children experience new things, they attempt to reconcile (merge) the new knowledge with existing schemas. Piaget believes that the children use 2 distinct methods in doing so, methods that he called assimilation and accommodation as shown below.

 

When children employ assimilation, they use already developed schemas to understand new information. If children have learned a schema for horses, then they may call the striped animal they see at the zoo a horse rather than a zebra. In this case, children fit the existing schema to the new information and label the new information with the existing knowledge. Accommodation, on the other hand, involves learning new information, and thus changing the schema . When a mother says, “No, honey, that's a zebra, not a horse,” the child may adapt the schema to fit the new stimulus, learning that there are different types of four-legged animals, only one of which is a horse.

Piaget's most important contribution to understanding cognitive development, and the fundamental aspect of his theory, was the idea that development occurs in unique and distinct stages, with each stage occurring at a specific time, in a sequential manner, and in a way that allows the child to think about the world using new capacities.

Schema -- Assimilation -- Accommodation