Schemas, assimilation and accommodation

1. A schema is a mental framework: an organised package of what you know about one kind of thing.

1. Assimilation means fitting a new experience into a schema you already have.

1. Accommodation means changing a schema, or building a brand new one, because the old one no longer fits.

Equilibrium and the cycle of learning

1. Piaget said learning begins when you try to assimilate something new and your existing schemas cannot make sense of it.
2. That mismatch creates disequilibrium, an uncomfortable feeling of mental imbalance.
3. To escape the discomfort, you adjust the schema through accommodation.
4. Once the updated schema fits the new information, balance returns and equilibration is reached.

The four stages of cognitive development

1. The stages are invariant, which means each child goes through them in the same fixed order.
2. The change between stages is qualitative, meaning the child's thinking changes in kind rather than merely in amount.

1. In the sensorimotor stage, from birth to about two, a baby explores the world through the senses and movement.
2. The key achievement here is object permanence, knowing that a hidden object still exists.
3. In the preoperational stage, from about two to seven, the child can use language and other symbols.
4. Their thinking is still egocentric and they cannot yet conserve, so appearances easily fool them.

1. In the concrete operational stage, from about seven to eleven, the child can think logically about real, concrete things.
2. They can now conserve, grasping that a quantity stays the same even when its appearance changes.
3. In the formal operational stage, from about eleven onwards, thinking becomes abstract.
4. The young person can now reason about hypothetical ideas and work problems through in their head.

How younger children think differently

1. A preoperational child often treats objects as if they have feelings and intentions.
2. This is called animism: believing that lifeless things are alive or can feel.
3. A preoperational child assumes that other people share their own viewpoint.
4. This is egocentrism: being unable to picture a scene from anyone else's position.
5. Conservation is knowing that the amount of something stays the same when only its appearance changes.
6. Decentration is the ability to focus on several features of a situation at the same time.
7. Reversibility is understanding that an action can be undone in your mind to get back to the start.

Strengths

1. Piaget changed how children are taught, because active discovery learning in primary classrooms comes directly from his idea that children build understanding for themselves.
2. The order of the stages holds up across very different cultures, so the sequence he described looks genuinely universal rather than a feature of one sample.

Weaknesses

1. Piaget underestimated what young children can do, because they conserve earlier when the task is made simpler and the change to the materials is not made deliberately.
2. The stages are less fixed than he claimed, because a child can show a skill in one situation but not another, and adult guidance can move them on faster than he allowed for.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the four stages with their rough age ranges and give the main feature of thinking at each, because that is what a description question credits.
2. Use the words schema, assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium when you explain how a child learns, because the marks sit on those exact terms.
3. The mark most often lost is on evaluation, where it is easy to list criticisms without crediting his influence, so weigh both sides and say which one wins.