2.0 Discuss How Schemes, Assimilation and Accommodation Provide the Foundation for Cognitive Development Throughout the Life Span

Piaget believed the infants and toddlers used assimilation and accommodation to adapt to their environments (Huitt). Schema is defined as a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information. Assimilation is interpreting new experiences in terms of existing schemes. Accommodation is changing current schemas to incorporate new information (Cognitive Development). An example of schema, assimilation, and accommodation

Piaget believes that we are all born with around fifty ‘action schemas’ – breathing, sucking, crying etc. And through new experiences we are in a state of disequilibrium. Through equilibration it provides motivation for us to learn more about our world. Then through actions we build on these schemas, or schemata’s and assimilate by taking in and adapting new knowledge through the use of our existing schemas and we then accommodate and modify these existing schemas to incorporate our new knowledge. For example, according to Piaget, we are born with the ability to suck, and then at a certain age we are taught how to use a Sippy cup, which takes the action of sucking and assimilates tipping the cup to get the drink inside. Therefore we have assimilated this new movement and accommodated and modified it to incorporate the new knowledge.

Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children 's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve ', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if ' something was to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational ' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility '. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and

Piaget and Binet conducted research into the role of cognitive schema and it’s involvement in the process of learning. They carried out an experiment where they conducted a series of intelligence tests on both children and adults. From this research, Piaget found that children and adults look at the world differently, which as a result causes children to build upon their own schemata on their own term. This is because their reasoning differs from that of adults, so they need to make sense of the world using their own rational.

Schema is defined as the representation of the environment, relationships, and occasions in the child’s mind (Case-Smith & O’Brien, 2010). Betty observes her surroundings and notices

Children may display these patterns in whichever toy or resource they use, they tend to learn best if they are interested in what they are playing with and how they play needs to make sense to them. Not all children are observed to be in a particular schema, some children display more than one schema at a time. There also maybe times when a child’s schema is visible and other times when it is not. The most common schemas which are observed in children are:

“Clarifying the role of shape in children’s taxonomic assumption” by Baldwin, D. A, The author explains one possible nature of children taxonomic assumption that decreases to a “similar shape rule” Perhaps children tend to choose the same kind of taxonomic subjects because they are similar in shape then the objects that are just thematically related. She explains that even when the shape is not available as a guide, children still take taxonomic kind preference to search for novel labels. The shape has some priority in children's assumptions about object preference. She examined three- to five-year-old children's observation to thematic relations, such as between a spider and its web. While the children indicated objects with novel labels,

Schemas influence what people pay attention to, how they organize information and what they later remember.” A schema is somewhat of a filing cabinet in a person’s brain. When people experience things, their brain receives the stimuli and files it away into categories within the schema (like files in a filing cabinet) and when stimuli is perceived again at a later time, all other ‘files’ within the filing cabinet are brought to the brain’s attention. Theorist Jean Piaget first introduced the term “schema”. His stage theory of cognitive development explains how children go through multiple stages of growth intellectually and, according to him, a schema is the category of knowledge as well as the process by which the knowledge is acquired.

Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) found that mental models were formed due to daily experiences of the child. Children then formed “naïve theories”

The first domain explored through the observations was cognitive development during infancy. Katherine is highly interested in animals, so when my dog walked into the room, she proceeded to point to my dog and say “dog”. She later saw a beach ball and

Meanwhile the child is exposed to new experiences creating new information, resulting in schemas developing, either being changed or modified (About 2014).

Piaget’s theory also allowed us a way to accept and understand that children's cognitive behavior is intrinsically motivated. Social and other reinforcements do influence children's cognitive explorations but children learn because of the way they are built. In Piaget’s mind cognitive adapts to the environment through assimilation. Also accommodation is a type of biological adaptation (Flavell, 1996). According to Piaget in order to characterize cognitive development in humans we need to understand co-present in cognitive activity which is cognitive structure (Flavell, 1996). Piaget was the first psychologist to try explaining describing cognitive development. His argument is that intellectual advances are made through the equilibration process that has three steps: the first step is for the cognitive equilibrium to de at a low development level; then, cognitive disequilibrium has to be induced by discrepant or inassimilable phenomena and lastly cognitive equilibration has to be at a higher developmental level.

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one the most widely accepted, his four stages of development are age based.

Jean Piaget, a cognitivist, believed children progressed through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. These four major stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, are marked by shifts in how people understand the world. Although the stages correspond with an approximate age, Piaget’s stages are flexible in that if the child is ready they can reach a stage. Jean Piaget developed the Piagetian cognitive development theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that a child’s intellect, or cognitive ability, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.