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Brian Pinchback's avatar

Your comment reminded me of Jean Piaget's work about the learning process of accommodation and assimilation. Piaget believed that learning was proceeded by the interplay of assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term developmental change.

All this sounds a bit abstract and vague. However he demonstrated how the psychology pans out

in his experiment "The child's conception of space" For example if a child feels an object that is

out of sight, the child cannot identify the whole. In the beginning the child only identifies the various points of the object which the cube has or the lack of points which a ball has. When that

knowledge has assimilated the next stage of accommodation happens i.e the child will always

recognise the different shapes of a cube and a sphere after the points experience.

By learning how children comprehend the world and how their intellectual processes mature, Piaget contributed much to the theory of knowledge as an active process in which the mind transforms reality. Put simply, Piaget described children from a perspective that no one had seen before.

Your recent experience Shari is an assimilation/accommodation one dontcha reckon ?

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