For Piaget, learning is an internal process of construction. It is based on contradiction. It is a process of building and tearing down knowledge over time. For Piaget, development needs to happen for true learning to exist. If a child hasn’t reached a level of development where he/she can understand the contradiction, he/she cannot reconstruct knowledge around that contradiction. Piaget gives an example of this in an experiment in which children are shown bottles of water titled at different angles and asked to predict what the level of the water in relationship to the angle of the bottle might look like. (See Fig. 1)
Fig.1
Depending on the ages and development of the child, some where able to draw the representation correctly after being show the correct answer (based on the contradiction with their drawing). While others, despite being shown the correct answer, were still unable to draw the correct picture, they were not developmentally ready to comprehend and understand the contradiction that was present.
To fully understand Piaget’s theory, we must understand his terminology.
Assimilation- Assimilation is the process by which new information from a new situation is made to fit with prior knowledge. That is, that this new information might add or subtract form information we already have in our possession. There is no major reworking of knowledge needed to accept this new information.
Accommodation- Accommodation occurs when new information requires some modification of our prior knowledge. There is some contradiction here that causes up to have to abandon or adapt what we thought was true to match the reality of the contradiction that is present. This is the construction and reorganization of knowledge that is essential for true understanding. Without these contradictions and the ability for higher level reorganization, learning would not be possible.
Equilibration- The process by which accommodation occurs. For a contradiction to take place, one must enter a state of disequilibrium, in which what s/he is experiencing does not match with the way s/he thought things would work. By accommodating this new situation into their conception, s/he is re-equilibration, or reaching a state of equilibrium in which his/her conception matches reality s/he is experiencing.
One of the more interesting points of Piaget is that in his perception of the cognitive process, learning is internal, that is, the environment play a small role in the understanding of reality. As an example, he explains a childhood friend learning the mathematical rule commutative property of addition (where no matter how you group object, they always add up to the same total) using rocks. In this situation, the rocks played virtually no role in his friends discovery of this rule, the rocks were the same he played with all his life until that point. The learning came form within, he saw recognized the contradiction and accommodated the new knowledge without any assistance from the environment.
