What are the basic principles upon which Piaget guides our understanding of cognitive development?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Ans: Piaget believed that we are always actively trying to make sense of our experiences to adapt successfully to our environment and ensure our survival. By “making sense” he meant organizing our experiences into schemas, as we described in Chapter 2. Remember that a schema is a cognitive framework that places concepts, objects, or experiences into categories or groups of associations. People generally find the uncertainty of disequilibrium uncomfortable, so they try to make sense of what they are seeing in order to return to a comfortable cognitive state of equilibrium. When we need to change our schemas to fit new experiences, we use accommodation because we are accommodating or changing the way we think about something in order to understand the new information.