DPS Bhagalpur

A paper by John Trowell, our Director, Academics

Jean Piaget               Swiss Nationality

Born: Aug 9th 1896    Died: Sept 16th 1980     

He was a Psychologist in Individual Learning Theory. Now his theories are accepted as the proven method and process of how children learn and develop life skills.

The learning theory is bases on the concept that learning is a process of assimilation and accommodation. This will be explained as we progress.

In childhood there are four distinct learning phases that have to be taken into account when we plan a school syllabus and the methods of application. These are as follows:

• Children 0 - 2 years   A sensory motor stage.
• Children 3 -7 years    A pre-operational stage
• Children 8 - 11 years  A concrete operation stage
• Children 12 -15 years A formal concrete operational stage

The needs of education can be put in these terms:

Stage one 0 – 2 years: Children at this stage can neither express their feelings and needs in language. So they use basic expressive emotions of crying screaming or smiling as a language form.

They learn mainly by touch, simple exploration and innate curiosity. The learning aids are a caring environment with close bonding to parent figures. Second a rich stimulating environment with ample play objects and materials. The children have no intellectual skills at this time. It is only an interaction and re-action learning phase.

Stage two 3- 7 years: This is where a much quicker learning curve occurs. However it does depend on the previous stage as a platform for new learning. Without phase one phase having a broad experience in nurture and home environment learning phase two become much more difficult for the child.

This is the time of primary education and involves more than a interaction with their environment. They have some ability to read coded information so they can learn read, write and translate information sources. However the levels of skill start at a low level and still largely depend on actual practice assimilation with the topic of learning. Intellectual meanings are not part of any learning at this stage either. It is a time when clear boundaries in behaviour are important to them. These children like a safe island to live on and don’t understand confusion. Their world is black and white and greys are difficult for them.

The children can only relate to what they can see as reality in their lives. It is still pre-operational and not concrete learning that can be used in complex ways.

However the children can be given tasks and puzzles to solve at their level of understanding. They can learn body co ordination in sports and games.

Also learn about interpersonal skills that make healthy relationships. Learning key concepts in a wide range of subjects without detail is the best option. Over expectations confuse these children and hinders their learning and never enhances it. They still try to make sense of their world at this stage. Let them work it out!

Stage three 8-11 years: At eight years of age Children start developing a time of growing self awareness.  I and me and self value can be explored and questioned. However it is still not fully actualised and children at this time still go back to the more simplistic and understood phase from time to time. It is the struggle ‘Alice’ had in the book of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. When she starts to realise that the black and white values she thought were safe are more complicated than she thought. To be a queen or grow up some new learning and understanding was needed. At the beginning of this story she sees her sister was reading a book without pictures. Alice did not know the value of a book without pictures; so in school work today we must not use any material that can’t be put in to a vision form.

At school we start comparative tasks in learning and exercises in thinking about why thing happen, not just that they do. There is a new phase of test try and reshape older learned ideas. It is the pre adolescent stage when children work hard at assimilating new situations and re-accommodating them in a more complex way. However it a growth stage not yet concrete, keeping it fluid advancing and retreating from previous learning times.

In school learning they question nearly everything and enjoy an opportunity to do new things. Reality to a child at this stage is not clear but a time to discard some previous learning and consolidate other ideas about relationships and facts. These children will never stop asking you questions and will do any amount of familiarizing practice work as well.

Key knowledge is therefore to be ever kept at the forefront at this stage. Too much detail will again fail them. They will ask you many questions to enable them to explore your answer against their thinking. It is not a request for you to give them a precise answer.  Therefore any book learning at this stage is interpretive not concrete knowledge. Also children at this age are highly social beings and work in groups much more than in previous stages.

Stage four 12 -15 years: It is of course the first adolescent years and we now have to consider not only the social aspects of education but the  hormones which change both thought and make body changes. This brings to the forefront the importance of sexual identity and group loyalties.

In education we can now begin to introduce abstract ideas that can separate the imaginary world from reality. We can now get children taking information and interpreting it in different ways for different purposes. They can manipulate number codes and math work with greater ease and multi level tasks are an option. They can separate fact from fiction and from reality better now too. They can classify and order their world into areas of priority and will challenge life style structure though they still need it. Formal learning is now possible, though theory and practice are still the rules of learning. All learning at any phase or time of life is this process of assimilation and accommodation.

In later adolescence more reason and self assurance can grow but when children know themselves and the realities of life, new problems can occur! That is another topic!

THE WIDER PICTURE

Two other social psychologists Bruner and Vygotsky made the discovery that all leaning has a social context whereby at any time or place we try and make sense of what we see, feel, hear, or experience.  What we assimilate and accommodate in each situation varies but we often take in just enough information to meet an immediate needs to handle a current situation. We reject much of the evidence from our short term memory because we think it unimportant. Further we don’t remember any details soon after.

THE ROLE OF MEMORY

Memory enables us to store information to ether understand something or use it in a particular skill. We have three levels of memory short, medium and deep long term.

• Short term memory helps only support immediate needs and soon is lost.

• Medium Memory is sometimes called the user memory because it can remember a lot of information and essentially holds the grid index for all we know. It is however only maintained by usage and be retained when proper learning has occurred. This is that vital assimilation and accommodation process.

• Long term memory is only available by having a number of indexed cue words and thoughts.  It can trace very distant past events but rarely very accurately.

MEMORY and EDUCATION

The old Grammar translation method still used where limited understanding is required, tries to use memorisation as its main approach. This can give a child an ability to copy write but not interpret the text information. They can read but beyond the phonics there is no depth of understanding what is read. Speaking and listening skill are not practiced and the child never masters the language. The result goes deeper to exclude that student from thinking and problem solving skills.

If any school pursues short term learning by remembering what is read or said by a teacher without any assimilating and questioning to find accommodation and understanding; no learning has taken place. If that information is remembered without a thought process and actual task practice no learning has taken place. We remember only what we do and do repeatedly. When we question we find answers because facts don’t speak for themselves.

When learning has short time span no accommodation can happen and the short term memory holds information on a short term memory file which deletes its self after a single retrieval. Like a computer information storage can be short term.

It is good to see the rapid apparent improvements in test scores when weekly test are conducted because the right answers are remembered but not learned.

However ask the same questions a month later and the student fails that same test. This is because short memory has not internalised any learning points. This is a cycle of failure that can go on for years because memorisation is information storage not a thinking skill to analyse or interpret information.

This paper affirms that learning is a process changing by age and maturation of the child. However memory is a tool and data base of recall, not a process of long term learning.

A useful quote is found in the Alice in Wonderland story. Alice is at the Mad Hatters tea party and Alice is angry because they don’t seem to understand what she said.

Alice states boldly “I mean what I say and I say what I mean!”.

The Mad Hatter makes this comment. “That can’t be true because the subject in the first is the meaning in what you say! In the second sentence your subject is your saying which may not be what you mean!”

This thought occurs to me. “I memorise what I know and I know what I memorise are not the same ether”.

A  SUMMARY

1.  The child will provide different explanations of reality at different stages of cognitive development.

2. Cognitive development is facilitated by providing activities and structure that engage learners and require the adoption and experimentation of information to achieve differing goals. This has to be an assimilation and accommodation process.

3. Learning materials and activities should involve the appropriate level of motor metal operations for the child to a given age. Over intellectualising learning is worse than an underestimation.

4. Use teaching methods and approaches that challenge thinking and give practice to the learning aims

5. Memory is not knowledge or has any application with out an understanding of its relevance to some understood situation. Memory alone cannot replace the process of cognitive learning because it never questions how why when or how something happens. Memory is the result of learning experiences and has no foundation with that.