Monday, February 21, 2011

Jean Piaget's Key Ideas

Adaptation - What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation

Assimilation - The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.

Accommodation - The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation. Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.

Classification - The ability to group objects together on the basis of common features.

Class Inclusion - The understanding, more advanced than simple classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)

Conservation - The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.

Decentration - The ability to move away from one system of classification to another one as appropriate.

Egocentrism - The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development.

Operation - The process of working something out in your head. Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their heads.

Schema (or scheme) - The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together.

Stage - A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of understanding some things but not others

Read more: Piaget's developmental theory http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm#ixzz1EbD2LzjB
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