Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was a renowned psychologist, biologist and epistemologist of Swiss origin.
He developed his theses around the study of psychological development in childhood and the constructivist theory of intelligence development. From there arose what we know as the Piaget’s Learning Theory
Jean Piaget is one of the best-known psychologists of the constructivist approach, a current that draws directly from the learning theories of authors such as Lev Vygotsky or David Ausubel.
What is the constructivist approach?
The constructivist approach, in its pedagogical current aspect, is a certain way of understanding and explaining the ways in which we learn. Psychologists who start from this approach They emphasize the figure of the learner as the agent who is ultimately the driving force of their own learning
Parents, teachers and community members are, according to these authors, facilitators of the change that is taking place in the learner’s mind, but not the main piece. This is because, for constructivists, people do not literally interpret what comes to them from the environment, either through nature itself or through the explanations of teachers and tutors. The constructivist theory of knowledge tells us about a perception of one’s own experiences that is always subject to the interpretation frameworks of the “learner.”
That is to say: we are incapable of objectively analyzing the experiences we live at every moment, because we will always interpret them in the light of our previous knowledge. Learning is not the simple assimilation of packages of information that come to us from outside, but is explained by a dynamic in which there is a fit between new information and our old structures of ideas. This way, what we know is being permanently built
Learning as reorganization
Why is Piaget said to be a constructivist? In general terms, because This author understands learning as a reorganization of cognitive structures existing at all times. That is to say: for him, the changes in our knowledge, those qualitative leaps that lead us to internalize new knowledge from our experience, are explained by a recombination that acts on the mental schemes that we have at hand as Piaget’s Learning Theory shows us.
Just as a building is not built by transforming a brick into a larger body, but is erected on a structure (or, what is the same, a specific placement of some pieces with others), learning, understood as a process of change that is being built, makes us go through different stages not because our mind changes its nature spontaneously with the passage of time, but because certain mental schemes vary in their relationships, They are organized differently as we grow and interact with the environment. It is the relationships established between our ideas, and not their content, that transform our mind; In turn, the relationships established between our ideas change their content.
Let’s take an example. Perhaps, for an 11-year-old child, the idea of family is equivalent to his mental representation of his father and her mother. However, there comes a point where his parents divorce and after a while he finds himself living with his mother and another person he does not know. The fact that the components (father and mother of the child) have altered their relationships calls into question the most abstract idea in which they are ascribed (family).
Over time, it is possible that this reorganization affects the content of the idea “family” and makes it an even more abstract concept than before in which the mother’s new partner can have a place. Thus, thanks to an experience (the separation of parents and the incorporation of a new person into daily life) seen in the light of the ideas and cognitive structures available (the idea that the family is the biological parents in interaction with many other schemes of thought) the “apprentice” has seen how his level of knowledge regarding personal relationships and the idea of family has given a qualitative leap
The concept of ‘schema’
The concept of schema is the term used by Piaget when referring to the type of cognitive organization existing between categories at a given time. It is something like the way in which some ideas are ordered and put in relation to others.
Jean Piaget maintains that a scheme It is a concrete mental structure that can be transported and systematized. A schema can be generated at many different degrees of abstraction. In the early stages of childhood, one of the first schemas is that of ‘permanent object’ , which allows the child to refer to objects that are not within their perceptual range at that moment. Some time later, the child reaches the scheme of ‘types of objects’ through which it is capable of grouping different objects based on different “classes”, as well as understanding the relationship that these classes have with others.
The idea of ”scheme” in Piaget is quite similar to the traditional idea of ’concept’, with the exception that the Swiss refers to cognitive structures and mental operations, and not to perceptual classifications.
In addition to understanding learning as a process of constant organization of schemes, Piaget believes that it is the result of adaptation According to Piaget’s Learning Theory, learning is a process that only makes sense in situations of change. Therefore, learning is partly knowing how to adapt to these new developments. This psychologist explains the dynamics of adaptation through two processes that we will see below: assimilation and the accommodation
Learning as adaptation
One of the fundamental ideas for Piaget’s Learning Theory is the concept of human intelligence like a process of nature biological The Swiss maintains that man is a living organism that appears in a physical environment already endowed with a biological and genetic inheritance that influences the processing of information coming from outside. Biological structures determine what we are able to perceive or understand, but at the same time they are what make our learning possible.
With a marked influence of ideas associated with Darwinism, Jean Piaget built, with his Theory of Learning, a model that would be highly controversial. Thus, he describes the mind of human organisms as the result of two “stable functions”: the organization whose principles we have already seen, and the adaptation , which is the adjustment process by which the individual’s knowledge and the information received from the environment adapt to each other. In turn, two processes operate within the dynamics of adaptation: assimilation and accommodation.
1. Assimilation
The assimilation It refers to the way in which an organism faces an external stimulus based on its present laws of organization. According to this principle of adaptation in learning, external stimuli, ideas or objects are always assimilated by some pre-existing mental scheme in the individual.
In other words, assimilation causes an experience to be perceived in the light of a previously organized “mental structure.” For example, a person with low self-esteem may attribute a compliment on her work as a way of expressing pity for him.
2. Accommodation
The accommodation , on the contrary, involves a modification in the present organization in response to the demands of the environment. Where there are new stimuli that compromise too much the internal coherence of the scheme, there is accommodation. It is a process opposed to that of assimilation.
3. Balance
It is in this way that, through assimilation and accommodation, we are able to cognitively restructure our learning during each stage of development. These two invariant mechanisms interact with each other in what is known as the process of balance . Balance can be understood as a regulatory process that governs the relationship between assimilation and accommodation.
The balancing process
Although assimilation and accommodation are stable functions as they occur throughout the evolutionary process of the human being, the relationship between them does vary. In this way, the cognitive evolution and intellectual maintains a close connection with the evolution of the relationship assimilation-accommodation.
Piaget describes the balancing process between assimilation and accommodation as resulting from three levels of increasing complexity:
The balance is established based on the subject’s schemas and the stimuli from the environment.
The balance is established between the person’s own schemes.
Balance becomes a hierarchical integration of different schemes.
However, with the concept of balance A new question is incorporated into Piagetian Learning Theory: what happens when the temporal balance of any of these three levels is altered? That is, when there is a contradiction between own and external schemes, or between own schemes and each other.
As Piaget points out in his Learning Theory, in this case there is a cognitive conflict , and at this moment is when the previous cognitive balance is broken. The human being, who constantly seeks to achieve a balance, tries to find answers, asking himself more and more questions and investigating on his own, until it reaches the point of knowledge that resets it
