Jean Piaget

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one of a cognitive constructivist approach.  He realized that people desire to learn about what matters in the world around them.  Piaget firmly believed in the natural organization of information by the mind. He realized that in order to learn, adolescents separate the unimportant information for the important information and that they connect information to other pieces of information. They also learn through the assimilation and accommodation of information.  Assimilation is putting information with other learned material most similar to it, while accommodation is changing past information to for new information to be learned. Piaget also recognized that not everyone will learn about the world in the same way depending on which stage of development they are in: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, or formal operational.  The shift from one stage to the next is qualitative. Most of my students will be in the formal operational stage. This stage is characterized by hypothetical-deductive reasoning, idealism, and propositional logic. Piaget's theory believes that students are constructive thinkers (Miller, 2011).

There are many ways to provide Piagetian approaches to education in the classroom. For a statistics class, I can have students each design their own ideal paper airplane model. I would ask them to assimilate their prior knowledge of plane designs to hypothesize what they believe will be the ideal plane model. They will then need to make their ideal plane and test fly it several times to collect statistical data they deem important (such as distance flown, height, and air time) on all flights. In order to see if their model was ideal, they will need to accommodate any imperfections they find during the flight tests and change certain aspects of their ideal model to fit their findings (2.2). They will then test fly their new plane models and record more statistical data on each flight. Students will repeat this process of tweaking their airplane models and collect data until they believe that they have found their ideal plane model. By allowing students to construct their own ideal plane, students should desire to discover their best plane model possible. Paper airplane models can also be compared to real plane models and show how the strategies used by the students to find important statistical data relate to how engineers work to craft real airplanes.