When learning something new, we hope to master whatever it is we are working towards learning. When we start the process of learning we start as novices, and some, but not all, move to become experts. (If you’d like to learn more about experts and novices, check out this blog post.) As we learn, we organize information in our brain. Our schema helps us to make sense of this new information and organizes it according to the framework we have built. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, is well known for his Theory of Cognitive Development. He proposed that when we gain new information we either add new information to something we already know, which is known as assimilation, or we change our existing knowledge based on new information, which is known as accommodation.
Assimilation happens when students add information to something they already know. As a baby, a child learns that a round object that they play with is a ball. When they see the moon, they may refer to this as a ball. Parents provide the new vocabulary for the moon. They have acquired new information by adding to their existing schema. This is an example of assimilation.
Accommodation happens when you change your existing knowledge. In Understanding Accommodation in Psychology (2020)Cherry gave the example of a child's schema of a dog having four legs and assuming all animals with four legs are dogs. When the child learns that a cat, which has four legs, isn’t a dog, the process of accommodation has happened. Accommodation and assimilation are both important in the acquisition of knowledge.
Sources Cited:
Cherry, K. (2020, May 4). The Role of Accommodation in How We Learn New Information. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-accommodation-2795218.
Image Credit:
Kelly Vujea, 2020
