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Piaget. Basic Tendencies in thinking. All species inherit two basic tendencies: Organization: ongoing process of combining, arranging, recombining, and rearranging experiences into mental systems or categories Adaptation: adjustment to the environment. Organization.
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Basic Tendencies in thinking • All species inherit two basic tendencies: • Organization: ongoing process of combining, arranging, recombining, and rearranging experiences into mental systems or categories • Adaptation: adjustment to the environment
Organization • People organize their thinking process in to psychological structures • These structures are our system for understanding and interacting with the world • Simple structures Sophisticated structures • Piaget named this structure as Schemes
Schemes • Mental system of an associated set of perceptions, experience, ideas, and/or actions • Basic building blocks of thinking • A scheme can be either physical or mental and may be described as actions or processes that are used repeatedly by a child to attain goals or solve problems • An example of a physical scheme would be the "grasping" scheme that infants use to pick up and familiarize themselves with the physical properties of objects (e.g., Is it hard? Does it make noise? etc.). • An example of a mental scheme would be the "isolation of variables" scheme that adolescents use to figure out such things as what factors cause a pendulum to swing fast or slow (e.g., Is it the length of the string? Is it how hard I push?).
Diagram of a sample schema Here is a diagram that describes how a person's schema of "egg" might include the components shown:
Characteristics of schemata • Schemata are always organized meaningfully, can be added to, and, as an individual gains experience, develop to include more variables and more specificity. • Each schema is embedded in other schemata and itself contains subschema. • Schemata change moment by moment as information is received. • They may also be reorganized when incoming data reveals a need to restructure the concept. • The mental representations used during perception and comprehension, and which evolve as a result of these processes, combine to form a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Adaptation • Assimilation: takes place when people use their existing schemes to make sense of events in the world • Fitting new information into existing schemes • Accommodation: altering existing schemes or creating new ones in response to new information
Assimilation • In Assimilation, what is perceived in the outside world is incorporated into the internal world without changing the structure of that internal world, but potentially at the cost of "squeezing" the external perceptions to fit
Equilibration • Organizing, assimilating, and accommodating can be viewed as a kind of complex balancing act • Equilibration: Search for mental balance between cognitive schemes and information from the environment • If the schemes does not produce a satisfying result, then disequilibrium exists
Equilibration: Is the complex act of searching for the balance in organizing, assimilating, and accommodating. It is the state of Disequilibrium that motivates us to search for a solution through assimilation or accommodation
Understanding some principles from schema theory can help in your work. Here are some principles to apply: • It is important to teach general knowledge and generic concepts. A large proportion of learner difficulties can be traced to insufficient general knowledge, especially in cross-cultural situations. • Teachers must help learners build schemata and make connections between ideas. Discussion, songs, role play, illustrations, visual aids, and explanations of how a piece of knowledge applies are some of the techniques used to strengthen connections.
Since prior knowledge is essential for the comprehension of new information, teachers either need to • help students build the prerequisite knowledge, or • remind them of what they already know before introducing new material. • Schemata grow and change as new information is acquired. • Learners feel internal conflict if they are trying to assimilate schemata which contradict their previous suppositions. Teachers need to understand and be sympathetic to this tension. • Deep-seated schemata are hard to change. An individual will often prefer to live with inconsistencies rather than to change a deeply-held value or belief.
Schemata • Piaget defined a schema as the mental representation of an associated set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions. Piaget considered schemata to be the basic building blocks of thinking (Woolfolk, 1987). A schema can be discrete and specific, or sequential and elaborate. For example, a schema may be as specific as recognizing a dog, or as elaborate as categorizing different types of dogs. As cognitive development proceeds, new schemata are developed, and existing schemata are more efficiently organized to better adapt to the environment. Cognitive development becomes evident through changes in behavior as this adaptation takes place. The process of assimilation involves attempts to organize existing schemata for better understanding events in .the external world, whereas accommodation involves changing pre-existing schemata to adapt to a new situation.
