Jean Piaget's Approach To Cognitive Development

Throughout life each and every individual goes through an event, a theme, or a crisis in their life. For me this specific time would have been an event that changed my life. They always said that bad things happened in groups of threes, and for my life, it happened in fours. On January 18th of 2013, I got the tragic news that my grandfather had passed away due to a heart attack. Death for anyone is especially hard, however for me, his death was just the beginning of a yearlong curse of bad things happening to my family. A few months later when I was grieving the loss, I got hit with more bad news. My parents said the doctors suspected that my mom had cancer. My mom was brought into surgery in May of 2013. They did the surgery and found out …show more content…
Much like Bronfenbrenner’s theory, Piaget believed that the cognitive development was a result of the environmental influences. To understand Jean Piaget’s approach to development, he came up with five specific terms used to describe the dynamics of development. These five terms were schema, adaptation, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium. The text describes schema as: “the original patterns of thinking; the mental structures that people use for dealing with what happens in the environment” (Dolgin, 2011, 39). Adaptation is described as the ability for one to adjust to new information that they are learning that will increase their understanding. Assimilation is defined as being able to incorporate something in the environment into the existing structure of one’s thought. Accommodation is defined as the individual would adjust to this new information and they would replace the new information with the old information that they already have. Equilibrium can be described as a balance between assimilation and accommodation. For my personal situation that I was dealing with Piaget talked about the idea of having to adapt to new information and with this new information it will increase the individuals ability to learn. For me I had to adapt to the fact that my grandfathers were gone, with this information I had to learn how to move on, accept the death and learn how to be a stronger person. This was a struggle as I was not sure how I was going to move on from their death. I felt that I strongly related to the idea from Piaget within the equilibrium. “It means feeling comfortable because the reality that a person experiences is compatible with what he or she has been taught to believe (Dolgin, 2011, 39)”. I had to take everything that I learned and everything that I knew and implement it into being