Learning Theories

5 Pages 1161 Words

There are those that say that Jean Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously. Although Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist his real interest was epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which, like physics, was considered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science (2000). Children and their reasoning process fascinated Piaget. He began to suspect that observing how the child’s mind develops might discover the key to human knowledge. Piaget’s insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. Jean Piaget has made major theoretical and practical contributions to our understanding of the origins and evolution of knowledge.
Looking at Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in more detail we find that he based it on two biological tendencies. Those tendencies are organization, and adaptation. Organization as Piaget saw it said that humans are designed to organize their observations and experiences into coherent sets of meanings (Eggen, 1999). This organization of observation makes the thinking process more efficient. If a person can put the things they observe in some sort of order the easier it is to remember and apply their observations. If we did not organize our observations and experiences we would have little bits of information floating around in our brains with no connection between them. Adaptation is according to Piaget’s theory is the tendency to adjust to the environment. Adaptation is a process by which we create matches between our original observations and new ones that might not exactly fit together. Our original observations and conceptions are called our schemas. To adapt to new observations and experiences into our schemas we use one of two techniques.
We can assimilate that information by putting it together with old schemas or conceptions. If the observations don’t fit nicely into our existing schemas we use the second of the ...