SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY AND SPECIAL EDUCATION
NAME: SIMWINGA PETER
COMPUTER NUMBER: 14150611
COURSE CODE: EPS 1010
COURSE COORDINATOR: MR G. WALUBITA
TUTOR: MRS MATAFWALI
GROUP NO:
TUTORIAL HOUR: MONDAY (13HRS-14HRS)
QUESTION 23: Explain Jean Piaget’s concepts of assimilation, accommodation and equibration as learning processes in child cognitive development.
Children portray certain behaviours, such sucking, looking and grasping to almost anything that comes their way, one may not understand and even fail to explain this they behave this way, but it’s one way that children discover or explore the world around them. Through these behaviorial actions which mostly are …show more content…
Once formed, schemas can be used to identify and understand new information based on past stored experiences (Moreno, 2010). A baby’s schemes are structured by simple actions that can be performed on objects. According to Shaffer and Kipp (2010) the earliest schemes, formed in infancy, are motor habits such as rocking, grasping, and lifting, which prove to be adaptive indeed. For example, a curious infant who combines the responses of extending an arm (reaching) and grasping with the hand is suddenly capable of satisfying her curiosity by exploring almost any interesting object that is no more than an arm’s length away. Simple as these behavioural schemes may be, they permit infants to operate toys, to turn dials, to open cabinets, and to otherwise master their environments. Older children on the other hand have schemas that include strategies and plans for solving problems. For example, a 6-year-old might have a schema that involves the strategy of classifying objects by size, shape, or colour (Santrock, …show more content…
Equibration is a mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next. The shift occurs as children experience cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium, in trying to understand the world. Eventually, they resolve the conflict and reach a balance, or equilibrium, of thought (Santrock 2011). Moreno, (2010) equibration is the balance between assimilation and accommodation that is responsible for the growth of thought. For example, if a child believes that the amount of a liquid changes simply because the liquid is poured into a container with a different shape—for instance, from a container that is short and wide into a container that is tall and narrow—she might be puzzled by such issues as where the “extra” liquid came from and whether there is actually more liquid to drink. The child will eventually resolve these puzzles as her thought becomes more advanced. In the everyday world, the child is constantly faced with such counterexamples and inconsistencies (Santrock, 2011). According to Piaget, the processes of assimilation and accommodation are motivated by the need to find equilibrium, and for us to remain in equilibrium with the environment assimilation and accommodation must be