WHAT IS COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY

According to Piaget, active children tend to develop their understanding about their environment through four stages of cognitive development (Jantan, Razali, Yunus, 2011). Organization and adaptation is the most important process in building this understanding of world around them. This means our ability of differentiating between the main idea and the less important ones and ability of comparing between one ideas to the other. Furthermore, Piaget also further elaborated this theory that we not only able to organize our observations and experiences, but we also adapt our thinking by taking new ideas or thinking more critically and creatively in order to improve our understanding something. He suggested that children sort the knowledge they acquires through their experiences and interactions into groupings known as schemas. When new information is acquired, it can either be assimilated into existing schemas or accommodated through revising and existing schema or crating an entirely new category of information (Cherry, N.D.). Assimilation is defined as addition of new information. For example, if a child sees a “cat” and tell what she saw was a “cat”. When the child sees a “rabbit” next time, the child would say “it’s a cat”. It is because the information is understood without any modification. Whereas, accommodation is defined as the modification of the existing schemata in the understanding of new information. For instance as I mentioned before, the child who saw cat might see a “rabbit” on another day. The child might call it same as “cat”, and if someone, a father or a mother corrects after hearing the child calling a “rabbit” as a “cat”. The parent might tell the child it is a rabbit because it hops, and it does not meow and it eats leaves, the child would understand it. In addition, the child has received new information. Piaget explored both why and how mental abilities change over time (Slavin, 2000). Piaget believed that all children are born with an innate tendency interact with and make sense of their environment (Slavin, 2000).