Accommodation and Assimilation

Regardless of type, all knowledge ultimately consists of basic concepts, or schema, a term originally coined by psychologist Jean Piaget. Examples of individual schema include concepts about colors, such as the ideas of “blue,” “red,” and “green,” or the idea that a rubber ball is round and smooth and rolls when pushed. Piaget (1969) described how children acquire and modify concepts through the assimilation and accommodation of experiences.

When a child encounters something new, the brain tries to process it in terms of concepts already stored. That is, the brain assimilates or integrates the new object or experience if it conforms to schema already formed. Using the ball example above, if you give the child similar balls that are smooth, round, and roll when pushed, the existing concept is confirmed and the child moves on to exploring other things.

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A discrepant event is a previously unencountered experience or object that induces a state of mental disequilibrium; this motivates the child to adapt existing schemas in order to regain intellectual balance.

If, however, you structure a discrepant event, by giving the child a different kind of ball that he has not previously encountered, disequilibrium (cognitive conflict) arises owing to tension between the child’s concept of “ball” and the new unfamiliar balls. Because humans are wired to prefer equilibrium, the child will be motivated to expend mental effort to make sense of the new balls. He will thus accommodate the new information by modifying or expanding the original schema to include the characteristics of the new balls (e.g., whether the ball is knobby or made of leather or wood, or much larger or smaller than those he encountered before).

Accommodation is a more complex process than assimilation, affected by the quantity and kinds of experiences a child encounters. As one concept builds upon another, children develop more complex thinking. This is one of the reasons early childhood experiences are considered so critical to future intellectual and academic functioning and one of the premises of early intervention programs such as Head Start.

Early childhood educators foster accommodation as well as the three kinds of knowledge, by introducing a variety of familiar and new materials as children are ready for them and using language to help them expand and create new schema. In the early childhood years, children progress through two of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, sensorimotor (birth to age 2) and preoperational (ages 2 to 7). Thereafter they begin the transition to concrete operations (ages 7 to 11). Teachers must therefore adapt the experiences and materials they use to complement the different ways in which children think during each of these developmental periods, as the next two sections illustrate.