2.0 Discuss How Schemes, Assimilation and Accommodation Provide the Foundation for Cognitive Development Throughout the Life Span
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development explained how a child’s ability to think progresses through a series of distinct stages as they mature. Piaget believed that these stages were maturational. That is, development is genetic and largely unaffected by environmental factors.
Cognitive theory examines internal mental representations such as sensation, reasoning, thinking and memory. Cognition involves how children and adults go about representing, organizing, treating, and transforming information that in turn alters behaviour. Cognitive learning theorists say that the human capacity to use symbols affords us a powerful means for comprehending and dealing with our environment. Symbols allow us to represent events; analyze our conscious experience; communicate with others; plan, create, imagine; and engage in foresightful action.
Piaget believed that children are naturally curious. They constantly want to make sense of their experience and, in the process, construct their understanding of the world. For Piaget, children at all ages are like scientists in that they create theories about how the world works. Of course, children’s theories are often incomplete. Nevertheless, children’s theories are valuable to them because they make the world seem more predictable .
2.1 SCHEMAS
Cognitive learning and information-processing theorists’ findings suggest that mental schemas function as selective mechanisms that influence the information individuals attend to, how they structure information, how important it is to them, and what they do with information.
According to Piaget, children understand the world with schemes, psychological structures that organize experience. Schemes are mental categories related events, objects and knowledge. A scheme is an organized pattern of action or thought. It is a broad concept and can refer to organized patterns of physical action (such as an infant reaching to grasp an object), or mental action (such as high school student
Cognitive theory examines internal mental representations such as sensation, reasoning, thinking and memory. Cognition involves how children and adults go about representing, organizing, treating, and transforming information that in turn alters behaviour. Cognitive learning theorists say that the human capacity to use symbols affords us a powerful means for comprehending and dealing with our environment. Symbols allow us to represent events; analyze our conscious experience; communicate with others; plan, create, imagine; and engage in foresightful action.
Piaget believed that children are naturally curious. They constantly want to make sense of their experience and, in the process, construct their understanding of the world. For Piaget, children at all ages are like scientists in that they create theories about how the world works. Of course, children’s theories are often incomplete. Nevertheless, children’s theories are valuable to them because they make the world seem more predictable .
2.1 SCHEMAS
Cognitive learning and information-processing theorists’ findings suggest that mental schemas function as selective mechanisms that influence the information individuals attend to, how they structure information, how important it is to them, and what they do with information.
According to Piaget, children understand the world with schemes, psychological structures that organize experience. Schemes are mental categories related events, objects and knowledge. A scheme is an organized pattern of action or thought. It is a broad concept and can refer to organized patterns of physical action (such as an infant reaching to grasp an object), or mental action (such as high school student