Piaget's Theory on Knowledge

Piaget’s theory develops different ideas of how children attain knowledge. He sees children as active thinking people. Therefore, children are usually pursuing knowledge. This is considered as a natural characteristic that defines the child. The theory leads to Piaget’s concerned with the growth of intelligence of a child. For Piaget, children build knowledge based on their personal interpretation of the world at the different stages of their life that range from infancy, childhood and adolescence. Piaget formulates many hypothesis that guide to the understanding of the cognitive development on children. According to Piaget structures are one of the basis of children’s knowledge that relates to their own observation and perception of their surroundings. This means that children at different ages view the world differently from each other. His theory also remarks two major principles that deal with the cognitive development on children: organization and adaptation. Organization is the process in which two distinct structures are combined with one another as one action. Adaptation is derived into two parts which are assimilation and accommodation. Basically, assimilation is when the child perceives new information that is added to match the basic knowledge that he or she already has. Here, Piaget suggests that during this process the child attempts to coordinate the new and the old information that are being received, which usually end up with wrong answers or conclusions. In contrast, accommodation is a way of completely changing the old information for the new one. Furthermore, Piaget develops the idea of “equilibrium” in which the child’s mind does its best to keep a balance of the inconsistency that might exist between of the new and old information that are being acquired. This frequently happens when the child does not assimilate very well the new information compare to the basic Knowledge he or she already possess. For example, when a year old boy sees his own reflection on a mirror for the first time and he is not able to recognize himself, as a result, he might think that the reflection in the mirror is another child or he might not pay attention and ignore it. In a case of disequilibrium in which the new information is completely irrelevant to the old information, the child tends to ignore the new information or attempts to modify it.