Hello welcome!
This is my first post related to psychology, since I am a student of this science and because my first publication is oriented to one of the most important psychologists in history Jean Piaget, this publication summarizes the theory of learning of the constructivist psychologist Swiss Jean Piaget.
Piaget's studies on the intellectual and cognitive development of children have exerted a transcendental influence on evolutionary psychology and on modern pedagogy. You are invited to read the article ... if you have not done it yet !.
Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980) was a Swiss psychologist, biologist and epistemologist. He developed his thesis on the study of psychological development in childhood and the constructivist theory of the development of intelligence. That is where what we know as Piaget's Theory of Learning came from.
The Piaget Theory of Learning
Jean Piaget is one of the most well-known psychologists of the constructivist approach, a current that draws directly from the theories of the learning of authors such as Lev Vygotsky or David Ausubel.
What is the constructivist approach?
The constructivist approach, in its pedagogical current, is a determined way of understanding and explaining the ways in which we learn. The psychologists who start from this approach emphasize the figure of the apprentice as the agent that is ultimately the engine of their own learning.
Parents, teachers and members of the community are, according to these authors, facilitators of the change that is taking place in the mentee's mind, but not the main piece. This is so because, for constructivists, people do not literally interpret what comes from the environment, either through their own nature or through the explanations of teachers and tutors. The constructivist theory of knowledge speaks to us of a perception of one's own experiences that is always subject to the interpretative frameworks of the "apprentice".
That is to say: we are unable to objectively analyze the experiences we live in each moment, because we will always interpret them in light of our previous knowledge. Learning is not the simple assimilation of information packages that come from outside, but is explained by a dynamic in which there is a fit between new information and our old structures of ideas. In this way, what we know is being built permanently.
Learning as reorganization
Why is it said that Piaget is constructivist? In general terms, because this author understands learning as a reorganization of the existing cognitive structures. 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 the theory of Learning from Piaget.
Just as a building is not constructed by transforming a brick into a larger body, but rather it is built on a structure (or, what amounts to the same thing, a specific placement of some pieces with others), learning, understood as a process of change that is built, makes us go through different stages not because our mind changes nature spontaneously with the passage of time, but because certain mental schemes are changing in their relationships, they are organized differently as we grow and we are interacting with the environment. It is the relationships established between our ideas, and not the content of these, that transform our mind; In turn, the relationships established between our ideas change the content of these.
Let's take an example. Perhaps, for an 11-year-old child, the idea of family equals his mental representation of his father and mother. However, there comes a point where his parents divorce and after a while he sees 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 more abstract idea in which they are ascribed (family).
With 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 new couple of the mother could have a place. Thus, thanks to an experience (the separation of parents and the incorporation into the daily life of a new person) seen in the light of the ideas and available cognitive structures (the idea that the family are the biological parents in interaction with many other schemes of thought) the "apprentice" has seen how his level of knowledge in relation to personal relationships and the idea of family has taken a qualitative leap.
The concept of 'scheme'
The concept of scheme 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 with others.
Jean Piaget argues that a scheme is a concrete mental structure that can be transported and systematized. A scheme can be generated in many different degrees of abstraction. In the early stages of childhood, one of the first schemes is that of the 'permanent object', which allows the child to refer to objects that are not within his perceptual reach at that time. Some time later, the child reaches the scheme of 'types of objects', through which he is able to group the different objects based on different "classes", as well as understand the relationship these classes have with others.
La idea de “esquema” en Piaget es bastante similar a la idea tradicional de ‘concepto’, con la salvedad de que el suizo hace referencia a estructuras cognitivas y operaciones mentales, y no a clasificaciones de orden perceptual.
In addition to understanding learning as a process of constant organization of the schemes, Piaget believes that it is the result of adaptation. According to the Piaget 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 features. This psychologist explains the dynamics of adaptation through two processes that we will see next: assimilation and accommodation.
Learning as an adaptation
One of the fundamental ideas for Piaget's Theory of Learning is the concept of human intelligence as a process of a biological nature. The Swiss argues that man is a living organism that presents itself to a physical environment already endowed with a biological and genetic inheritance that influences the processing of information from abroad. The 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 the ideas associated with Darwinism, Jean Piaget constructs, with his Theory of Learning, a model that would be strongly controversial. Thus, it describes the mind of human organisms as the result of two "stable functions": the organization, whose principles we have already seen, and adaptation, which is the process of adjustment by which the knowledge of the individual and the information that comes from the environment they adapt to each other. In turn, within the dynamics of adaptation operate two processes: assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation
Assimilation refers to the way in which an organism faces an external stimulus based on its present organization laws. According to this principle of adaptation in learning, stimuli, ideas or external objects are always assimilated by some preexisting mental scheme in the individual.
In other words, assimilation makes an experience be perceived in the light of a previously organized "mental structure". For example, a person with low self-esteem may attribute congratulations for their work to a way of expressing pity for them.
Accommodation
Accommodation, on the other hand, involves a change in the organization present 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 assimilation.
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 balancing process. Balance can be understood as a process of regulation that governs the relationship between assimilation and accommodation.
The process of balancing
Although assimilation and accommodation are stable functions as long as they occur throughout the evolutionary process of the human being, the relationship between them does vary. In this way, the cognitive and intellectual evolution maintains a close link with the evolution of the assimilation-accommodation relationship.
Piaget describes the process of equilibration between assimilation and accommodation as resulting from three levels of increasing complexity:
- The balance is established based on the subject's schemes and the stimuli of the environment.
- The balance is established between the person's own schemes.
- The balance becomes a hierarchical integration of different schemes.
However, with the concept of equilibration a new question is added to the Piagetian Learning Theory: what happens when the time balance of one of these three levels is altered? That is, when there is a contradiction between own and external schemes, or between schemes of their own.
As Piaget points out in his Theory of Learning, in this case a cognitive conflict occurs, and at this moment it is when the previous cognitive equilibrium breaks down. The human being, who constantly pursues the attainment of a balance, tries to find answers, raising more and more questions and investigating on his own, until he reaches the point of knowledge that restores it.