Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Educational Psychology: Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

This is my very first post about education so I really hope that whoever will read this post can learn a lot and should be able to apply it in their everyday lives, whether they are teachers, educators, parents, students and the like.
Piaget is only one of modern psychologists who influenced the notion of learning most especially about how humans develop mentally. He believes that human mind has what he calls "schema" or mental/cognitive structures. In short, we humans are already born with something in our heads, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled. He also introduced the concepts of assimilation and accomodation. Assimilation is the adding of new experience or learning to an existing or already made schema. Example, if we had a schema of what a fish is, and we saw another fish of different color, then we try to add or fit in that new information to our current schema. And in the process of seeing another kind of fish, then we "accommodate" or create a new schema. As we grow, our minds pass through 4 stages: sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational. Each stage has its own characteristics which later I will discuss one by one. I will also tackle the practical applications of this theory especially in pedagogy and instruction.
This is only the introduction of my series of discussion about Piaget and the rest of other educational psychologists. I hope you find this post of mine helpful to your study. And I really hope that whoever got to read my post will tell their friends and classmates and teachers about my blog so that I could extend and share my knowledge about these topics.

1 comment:

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