ECDV 110 - Child Development

Running head: CHILD DEVELOPMENT
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

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CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Piaget and his cognitive developmental theory
Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, Neuchatel, Switzerland. He was a Swiss
psychologist who was the first person to make a systematic study about the acquisition of
understanding in the children. He had been one of the major figures in the 20th century in the
field of development biology.
Theory of how children think and learn
Piaget proposed the theory of cognitive development having studied about how human
beings interact with the world. His theory traces the child development through various stages till
a child becomes an adult. Based on the research Piaget has conferred that every human beings
have tendency towards organization and adaptation (Galotti, 2015). Organization can be
referred to as “combining, rearranging of behaviors and thoughts in to a system that is coherent.
Piaget had witnessed a child constantly creating and recreating his own model of reality,
achieving the mental growth by the integration of the simpler contexts in to higher levels of
concepts at each of the stages (Galotti, 2015).. While discussing about the developmental
concepts, Piaget developed the concept of schema, which is actually a sensory motor map
helping the learner to construct their knowledge (Mooney, 2013). Gradually a child learns to
develop the ability to represent the outer world in the internal images and thoughts. The schema
of a child is normally constructed by the process of assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation can be defined as a way of bringing new objects or information in to a scheme that
already exists (Mooney, 2013). Some misunderstandings are common when it is tried to force
new objects in an ill fitting schemes, hence in order to resolve this conflict, a child has to adjust

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CHILD DEVELOPMENT
the understanding by adding new information. These adjustments are the examples of
accommodation, that is the process of modifying the old skills, or by creating the new ones for
fitting better with the assimilate information (Mooney, 2013). According to Piaget, children try
to understand new experience by assimilating in to the scheme or the cognitive structures that
already existed. If the assimilation does not work perfectly, there becomes an imbalance of the
old and the new experiences. This state of imbalance Piaget described as cognitive
disequilibrium (Mooney, 2013). Equilibration is therefore termed as dynamic process of
moving between the states of cognitive disequilibrium, as one dissimilates new and the old
schemes. Piaget regarded accommodation as the engine driving the development of the learner.
In the equilibrium process the accommodation and the assimilation interacts with each other
continuously and it is the accommodation that opens up the possibilities of assimilation and vice
versa and eventually in to an expanding cycle (Mischel, 2013).
Achievements
Piaget is considered to be a distinguished and a well known theorist in the field of child
development due to the fact, that the cognitive developmental theory has helped the teachers to
see the importance of children to experience things that we want them to learn by providing them
with real world experiences. Again it is largely due to Piaget, that the uninterrupted playing
sessions in the early child hood classrooms are being encouraged.
Image of a Child in Piaget’s Perception
According to Piaget, children are able to construct their own knowledge in response to
their experiences. Children learn several things on their own, without the assistance of the adults