PIAGET’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO COGNITION TO PREVAIL FOR SO LONG

Mehmet Akın Bulut

                                                                                              Learning and Cognition

                                                                                              Ph.D. Assignment

                                                                                              10 / 11 / 2019

PIAGET’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO COGNITION TO PREVAIL FOR SO LONG

Empiricists argue that experience is the root of all learning while nativists propose the existence of an innate set of ideas to form the knowledge in humans. Piaget contends an opinion on learning which is placed exactly in-between these two suggestions, that’s, empiricism and nativism. He called it interactionism as Piaget believed that learning was a product of nature (nativism) and environment (empiricism).

To Piaget, there were three types of knowledge: physical knowledge which elaborates on the interaction with the objects in the tangible world, logical-mathematical knowledge that ponders upon basic abstract concepts and social knowledge that is learned as a result of child’s interaction with the ones around him/her.

Piaget also proposed a four-step development in children. First one was ‘qualitative changes’ in children as the quantitative changes were not adequate to explain any development. Second was that children progress through stages in a culture-specific domain. Third was that each stage was inclusive of the concepts and skills in the previous stages. The last one was the wholeness of schemes and operations in a child’s brain.

Developmental stages were defined as sensorimotor period (ages 0-2) which is the recognition of people and objects, preoperational period (ages 2-7) which is recognition of symbols and language, concrete operational period (ages 7-11) which is the time for mental operations and problem solving, and lastly formal operational period (ages 11 & +) which is systematic, logical and hypothetical thinking over real issues.

To Piaget, to make sure that skills in any stage are accomplished successfully, children needed to go through a number of processes such as (first) assimilation which is the first step in gaining a complete development of any stage such as throwing, sucking and touching objects, (second) accommodation which is the second stage dealing with the application of learned skills in other settings, (third) equilibration which is the mastery of any stage with complete control and competency over the stage skills.

When it comes to the criticism of Piaget’s ideas, what stands out is the existence of certain stages as Piaget asserted, however, the age differences at which children from different cultures show competency of the stage. Beyond this, several scientists brought about the issue that children learned more than Piaget thought at each stage.