Cognitive Developmental Theory - Assimilation, Accommodation, and Equilibrium (Piaget, 1952)

One of the most fundamental questions about schemata is how does change in relationship to newly discovered patterns in the environment actually occur in the cognitive structure of children. Piaget was a biologist by academic training. He was very comfortable with the concept of adaptation to environmental stimuli. For example, the human body is structured to be constantly in a state of equilibrium in regard to its temperature. When the body temperature is raised by a few degrees during, say exercise, the entire system goes into a state of disequilibrium. The feedback mechanism senses such a state of disequilibrium and responds by producing sweat and sending more blood near the skin to cool the body down, thus, restoring a state of equilibrium for the body. Piaget used the same concept of biological equilibrium-disequilibrium states to explain the causes of cognitive reorganization in response to new learning experiences.

When the child encounters a new learning environment or a new situation with which the pattern he or she is not familiar, a state of disequilibrium is created within the child’s brain that must be internally managed. In order to create a comfortable state of equilibrium in the mental schemata, the child has to modify or restructure his or her schemata to account for the new situation. The internal mental mechanism or processes that are responsible for the restructuring of the child’s schemata are assimilation and accommodation (Piaget, 1952, 1964). Integrating new information with existing knowledge is a cognitive process that Piaget calls assimilation. As children are faced with new learning situations, they use their prior knowledge to make the new experience understandable. Prior knowledge is subsequently restructured to make a new experience fit in the newly formed schema. The change that occurs in the mental structure of the child is referred to as accommodation by Piaget (1952).

Piaget argued that, as learners assimilate input from the environment, the new information is not simply stored in the mind like information in files in a filing cabinet. Rather new information is integrated and interrelated with the knowledge structure that already exists in the mind of the child. “Every schema is … . coordinated with other schemata and itself constitutes a totality with differentiation parts (Piaget, 1952. P. 7.) For example, in teaching geometry, when a pentagon is introduced to children, the salient features of this geometric shape such as sides and angles are not simply memorized. Rather, it is contrasted and integrated with what is already known about other geometric shapes like rectangles, triangles and squares. In other words, the schemata for a pentagon includes, in addition to its shape, sides, and angles, such related concepts as how its shape compares with other geometric shapes, how its angles compare with other geometric shapes, or how its area and perimeter differ from other geometric shapes. Learning in this manner of relating prior knowledge to new information is said to be meaningful because new schemata in the child’s mental capacity have been formed. It is interesting to note how Piaget’s explanation of schema, assimilation and accommodation correlates with synaptic connections that Bransford (1999) calls

refinement and addition.

The process of cognitive development is the result of a series of related assimilations and accommodations. Conceptually, cognitive development and growth proceeds in this fashion at all levels of development from birth to adulthood (Piaget, 1960). However, because of biological maturation, major and distinctive cognitive development occurs over a lifetime. Piaget posited four major stages of cognitive development. These stages are sequential, and successive stages are attained through changes in one’s ability to internalize or mentally to organize prior knowledge with new information. Note that the process is still that of reorganizing cognitive abilities.

According to Piaget, these stages are:

1. Sensorimotor: Birth to 2 years old

2. Pre-operational: 2 to 7 years old

3. Concrete operation: 7 years old to adolescence

4. Formal operation: Adolescence to adult

Sensorimotor refers to the stage that begins with the reflex actions of infants and proceeds through the development of basic concepts such as time, space, and causality. The end of the sensorimotor stage is characterized by the development of eye-hand coordination and spatial relationships, an understanding that objects still exist even when out of sight (object permanence), and the beginning of symbolic thought. At this point of development, children see themselves at the center of all actions in the world (egocentric). The effective coordination of these activity-dependent skills culminates in a concrete understanding of cause and effect and the internalization of sequences of actions that stand for or symbolize objects (e.g., seeing the table being set means dinner is on the

way). This behavior marks the transition to the next stage of development. The pre-operational stage is characterized by the development of symbolic thinking. Objects and events in the child’s environment become represented by symbols. Language development is one of the major cognitive developments during this stage

The concrete operational stage is marked by a significant increase in a child’s ability to analyze and to classify patterns according to the attributes of objects or events. Piaget’s extensive research shows that children in this stage learn to reverse procedure, and to generalize the outcome of certain experiments. Reversal and generalization are the two essential cognitive abilities that enable children to learn the classification of objects, events and other concepts. The difficulty that children have at this stage relates to their inability to deal with abstraction. Children, however, gradually learn to deal with abstraction, which leads their development to the next stage.

The formal operational stage of development generally begins in early adolescence, and continues through adulthood. Formal reasoning is characterized by the ability to carry out mental activity using imagined and conditional actions and symbols, divorced from their physical representation. Individuals at this stage are able to control variables systematically, test hypotheses, and generalize results to future occurrences. This stage, which continues to develop well into adulthood, is characterized by the ability to reason and solve problems. I shall discuss this stage more in detail later when the implications of cognitive theories to models of teaching in reference to the inquiry training model is presented.