Jean Piaget Assimilation And Accommodation

Jean Piaget was an influential researcher in developmental psychology during the 20th century. Piaget began his work in the fields of philosophy and biology, exploring biological influences and self-acquired knowledge. Piaget theorized what separated humans from out animal counterparts was the human abstract learning ability.
At the early age of 1o, Piaget published his first 100 word scientific research paper on the subject of an albino sparrow. After his in initial piece, Piaget went on to public numerous researcher papers on mollusks which lead into a desire to understand how people come to know the world around them. Piaget officially launched his career into psychology and education after receiving his doctoral degree from the University of Neuchatel.
Piaget described two dynamic processes used by humans in an attempt to adapt: assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation and accommodation are used independently and simultaneously all throughout life. Assimilation is a mental process using an environment so that it can placed in preexisting cognitive structures or an idea that incorporates new information into existing structures. An example of assimilation is an infant using a sucking schema from nursing to drink from a bottle. Accommodation is a mental process of changing cognitive structures in order to receive something from the environment. In other words, when new information does not fit into an existing schema; it must be modified or adapted to accommodate the new information. In this instance, a child sucking from a bottle would need to modify a known schema to suck different type or larger
bottle.