“According to Piaget, active children develop
their understanding about their environment through four stages of cognitive
development” (Yunus, Razali &Jantan, 2001).
There are two important processes in building this understanding,
they are organization and adaptation. Organization refers to the nature of the
adaptive mental structure. Adaptation means adjusting schemes in response to
the environment. He said that the organization and processing information as
cognitive structure. He also has children show patterns of behavior or the
thinking is called schemes. “Schemes are mental patterns that guide behavior” (Salvin, 2000). An example of a
scheme is when someone says school we think about books, home works, teachers
and friends. This is what we call schema. In a nutshell the scheme is a mental picture
that we have about something. “Piaget further elaborated that only were we able
to organize all our observation and experiences, we also adapt our thinking by
taking in new ideas in order to improve our understanding about
something.”(Salvin, 2000). He also believed that the process of adapting occurs
through two ways that is accommodation and assimilation.
Assimilation
Assimilation is “understanding new experiments in term of existing
schema” (Salvin, 2000).this means that we are adding new information in to the
schema. For example when a toddler get a rattle to play he banged it it’s his
scheme to explore the world but when the toddler gets a block to play then also
he bangs it. This is what we called the assimilation. Assimilation can also be
defined as “the addition of new information to or enrichment of the existing
cognitive structure” (Yunus, Razali &Jantan, 2001). It means that when the toddler
got the block and banged it he got new information that not only the rattle but
the block also can be banged.
Accommodation
According
to Salvin (2000) accommodation is modifying existing schemes to fit new
situation. Accommodation occurs when the object does not fit the existing
scheme that that they have in their mind.
In the above example when the toddler got the block he experienced a new
thing but the block fit in to his existing scheme. However when the toddler is
given an egg and then he bangs it then the egg would crack because that does
not fit his existing scheme. This is what we call accommodation. In
accommodation the child learns something new and also he or she creates a new
scheme. For example the toddler would know that he or she should not bang the
egg.
