Piaget: Children as an Active Learner

According to Piaget, child is an active learner. Piaget’s approach concerns with how children as young learner can function in the world that surrounds them, and how this influences their mental development. 

The child is seen as continually interacting with the world around her/him, solving problem presented by the environment. It is through taking action to solve problem that learning occurs.
Piaget believes that children’s knowledge is not imitated or in-born but actively constructed. Their thought is seen as deriving from action which is internalized or carried out mentally in the imagination, so then the thought develops. 

Piaget is popular with his concept of psychological development that differentiates in two ways, those are assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is when action takes place without any changes to the child while accommodation is when child adjusts to features ot the environment in some ways. Assimilation and accommodation are initially adaptive process of behavior, but they become the process of thinking. 

According to Piaget, child’s thinking develops gradually with knowledge and intellectual skills to achieve their logical thinking. This process consists of four stages, those are sensory motor stage (birth – 2 years), pre operational stage (2 years – 7 years), concrete operational stage (7 years – 11 years), and formal operations stage (11 years – 16 years) (ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2000/Piaget/stages.htm). In this case, Piaget has concerns with the notion of discrete stages in which the children cannot do certain things if they have not reached such stage yet. However, there is an important idea of children’s lives neglected by him; that is the social dimension. He believes that child is in her or his own world that concerns him, rather than child also can communicate with adults or other children. Meanwhile, Vygotski’s idea has a greater priority to social interaction (Cameron, 2001:2)