03 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
Schemata
Not only does background knowledge grow in the brains of our students through their experiences,
but the vocabulary words that are stored as a result of such experiences provide avenues
to comprehend the curriculum from the text, as well as lecture and discussion. We can look at the
work of Piaget (1970), who concluded that we organize information in our brains in the form of a
schema, a representation of concepts, ideas, and actions that are related.
Schemata (the plural of schema) are form...24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Conservation Tasks and Reason
Piaget had his own way of assessing brain maturation during this period, using his now-famous "conservation" tasks, try this one out on your tour-to-eight-year-old: fill two identical short, squat glasses with equal volumes of water, and ask your child, "Do the two glasses contain the same amount of water, or does one have more?" Now, pour all the water from one of these 'lasses into a tall, narrow glass, and ask your child the same question.
Four-year-olds almost invariably say that the ta...A four-year-old cannot grasp the concept of conservation of mass, but an eight-year-old has no problem with it.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Vygotsky's View of Child Learning
Vygotsky saw that adults, and especially parents, were a kind of tool that children used to solve the problem of knowledge. in contrast to our—probably necessary—parental megalomania. Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society.
But Vygotsky also thought that...Parents and culture are a crucial part of child learning.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Piaget's View on Child Learning
Piaget concluded that babies aren't just born in possession of adult knowledge, either from a past life or from DNA. Instead, Piaget thought that children must have powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to construct new pictures of the world, pictures that might be very different from the adult picture. When we learn about the world, when we do science. for example, we don't just hit the right answer once and for all. Rather, there is a very gradual unfolding sequence of corrected erro...Learning is natural, innate.