CAS PS 101 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Jean Piaget, Language Development, Egocentrism

• School: Boston University
• Department: Psychological & Brain Sciences
• Course: CAS PS 101
• Professor: Joseph Harris

Document Summary

Jean piaget (1896-1980) swiss psychologist who became leading theorist in 1930"s. Piaget believed that children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world . These understandings are in the form of structures he called schemas. Schemas are frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge. Assimilation - process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema. Accommodation - process by which existing schemas are changed or new schemas are created in order to fit new information. Primary method was to ask children to solve problems and to question them about the reasoning behind their solutions. Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults. Proposed that development occurs as a series of. Stages" differing in how the world is understood. Information is gained through the senses and motor actions. In this stage child perceives and manipulates but does not reason.