Jean Piaget's Theory Essay

Psychologist Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Being the first child, Piaget’s mother, Rebecca Jackson, accredited his passion and early interest toward the sciences to his own obsessed tendencies. His father, who was a medieval literature professor named Arthur, modeled a passionate dedication towards his studies—a trait that Piaget began to imitate an early age. At just 10 years old, Piaget’s fascination with mollusks drew him to the local museum of natural history, where he gazed at specimens for long periods of time. When he was just 11 years old and attending Neuchâtel Latin High School, Piaget wrote a short scientific paper on the albino sparrow. By the time he was a teenager, his papers on mollusks were

Those ways being the following: It is apprehensive with children, rather than all learners, It focuses on development, rather than learning as such, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors, It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a steady increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc. The goal of this theory was to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses. Piaget believed that cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, and then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their

According to Piaget, schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world. Piaget (1952, p. 7) defined a schema as: "a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning." Schemas basically represented the building block of one’s intelligent behavior and a way to organizing knowledge. When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can distinguish around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, a state of cognitive and mental balance. As stated in his book “The Psychology of the child”, Piaget highlighted the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or taught. A schema can be defined as a set of related mental representations of the world, which we use to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed. There was a really good example used in this text that stated when a person having a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is