Theoretical Perspectives of Piaget’s and Skinner’s learning theory. (Part 1)

Among all learning theories one of them is the Piaget’s Theory of cognitive development. His idea is a model of how humans live in the world by acquiring the information. Certain thinking is easy for the adults and others are easy for the child. They are organization and adaptation. Humans are born with knowledge to organize thinking. Small children for example can look at objects or feel it when they it comes in touch with their hands. They cannot do both actions together. But when they grew up they can do both together and even both separately. Theory gave a single word for this as schemes. As a person’s thinking level became more organized new schemes will develop to fit to the environment. The second is the adaptation, to fit to their environment. Adaptation involves two processes, which are assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation means using of existing knowledge to make a sense for the event. It involves trying to acquire something new by fitting it into the present knowledge. For example the first time many children see a cat, they call it a “baao” in local language). They try to connect the new experience with the existing knowledge to identify animals. Accommodation occurs when a person is going to change his existing knowledge to bring the new situation.

That means adjusting of thinking for the new information gathered. For example children add the existing knowledge to recognize the cats for identifying animals. All the things which have mentioned above are related to the stages of the cognitive development. Piaget’s four stages are called sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. He believes that all the human beings are following these four stages in the same order.

The Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years) is the earliest stage where they begin to make use of imitations, memory and thoughts. They begin to recognize the objects but do not when they are hidden. In other words, babies cannot initially distinguish between themselves and their environment. As they develop through the stage, they will be in a position to understand their capacity from everywhere around them. During this stage child also learn that if an object is out of their sight it will not exist.

By the end of the sensorimotor stage, the child can do many actions with their existing knowledge. The stage after sensorimotor is called the preoperational stage (2-7 years). It is because the child doesn’t no how to do the mental operations but is moving towards it. The ability to form and use symbols is thus a major part of this stage. The child’s earliest use of symbols is in pretending or miming. Children who are not yet able to talk will often use action symbols, particularly those represented in language. This also shows that their knowledge is more general and less specific actions.

Third stage in the cognitive development is concrete operational stage (7-11 years). Children from age’s six to eleven or twelve are in this stage. Here, children begin to understand rules. And they learn new ways. Consider a child shown three pitchers of water of varying sizes. She can understand that the medium one is bigger than the smaller one and at the same time smaller than the bigger one.  If one of the pitchers is poured into a shallow pan, child knows that when the height of the water is reduced, the width of the water will increase. Finally in this stage they will understand that the shape of the water s different, the amount of water has not been altered.

The final stage is formal operational. In this stage, people learn to understand things as they are and can imagine things as they might be. This can shows itself in imagining ideals or situations. Formal thinkers also practice what they can think about their own thought processes. And in this stage people start to concern about social issues.