Piaget Says

Aside from commencing my month-long birthday celebration, May also means an entire month of workshops in preparation for the succeeding school year. To start with, we were mounded by six Word documents, totting up to a 56-pages reading requirement. Whew. This is so undergrad. It reminded me of my college days where ‘compassionate’ professors would test my eye’s endurance and my neuron’s capacity to abstract.

So what did I do with the 56-pages readings? Actually, not that much. I downloaded them, saved them, created a new folder for them in my desktop, and the rest is history.

Stupendously, I understood Piaget. Six years after I first met him inside the four corners of the classroom, this is the first time that I actually internalized his philosophy.

(Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis → Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis → Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis → Thesis + …)

The scaffolding will never end. This is the developmentalist’s view of learning. An unbounded skirmish of accommodation and assimilation, settled thru equilibration.

Conitive Development Inside the Science Classroom

by The urban gurU

Piaget’s curiosity of the ostensibly illogical utterances of children revolutionized the traditional thought that children are empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Einstein even dubbed the pedagogical breakthrough “so simple that only a genius could have though it.”

Dissecting Piaget’s hypothesis on cognitive development gives us a lot of implications in the teaching of science in the grade school level. This is because of the reason that ideas, concepts and principles of science should be developed around the personal experiences of the students. Hence, being an explicit body of knowledge, it is imperative for a teacher to maintain sufficient motivation for the students to be able to digest and absorb new information.

The stages of cognitive development go hand in hand with what they call science process skills. Science process skills or thinking skills are distinct mental operations we use as we think (Hiura, 1991). These are the competencies we need in order to accomplish a specific task.

Science process skills vary in density. Skills at the basic level form the foundation of the more composite skills. The same mechanism applies to a child who is traversing the pre-operational stage to the concrete operational until finally reaching the formal operation. Examples of basic science process skills are observing, classifying, and ordering.

Instruction in science should always start with the enhancement of these skills. That is the reason why a teacher should always start the school year with the review of the different laboratory techniques. Mastery of tasks in conservation of number, length, liquid content, substance, area, weight, and displacement of volumes would affirm to him/her that the students are ready to embark upon the succeeding science process skills.

Accordingly, the denser or what are called higher order thinking skills (HOTS) would only take effect if the students were able to master the basic skills. HOTS include problem solving, critical thinking, decision-making, and creative thinking. These are skills that would most likely to occur only during the formal operation stage of a child. At this stage, students are ready to formulate hypothesis, be logical in thinking, be aware of social issues, explore their own values, beliefs and philosophies, and be able to comprehend abstract reasoning. In other words, they should be able to demonstrate at this stage what we call the scientific method.

Piaget also pointed out that classifying a child’s answer as “true” or “false” misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. It should be taken for consideration that children are capable of making a lot of theories of their own. These theories may be fallacious in the perception of an adult, but highly logical in the point of view of the child.

As Piaget construed it, “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.”