Piaget: assimilation and accommodation

Piaget: assimilation and accommodation

Suppose an infant of 4 months is presented with a rattle. He has never before had the opportunity to play with rattles or similar toys. The rattle, then, is a feature of the environment to which he needs to adapt. His subsequent behaviour reveals the tendencies of assimilation and accommodation. The infant tries to grasp the rattle. In order to do this successfully he must accommodate in more ways than are immediately apparent. First, he must accommodate his visual activities to perceive the rattle correctly, for example, by locating it in space. Then he must reach out, adjusting his arm movements to the distance between himself and the rattle. In grasping the rattle he must mold his fingers to its shape: in lifting the rattle he must accommodate his muscular exertion to its weight. In sum, the grasping of the rattle involves a series of acts of accommodation, or modifications of the infant’s behavioural structures to suit the demands of the environment. At the same time, grasping the rattle also involves assimilation. In the past the infant has already grasped things; for him, grasping is a well-formed structure of behavior. When he sees the rattle for the first time he tries to deal with the novel object by incorporating it into a habitual pattern of behaviour. In a sense he tries to transform the novel object to something that he is familiar with – namely, a thing to be grasped. We can say, therefore, that he assimilates the objects into his framework and thereby assigns the object 'a meaning.'
(Ginsburg and Opper, 1979: 19)

Here is a link with a diagram to explain this:

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/assimacc.htm

My own example of a recent personal experience that involved both accommodation and assimilation is when I change my daughters nappies – we always have the wet wipes right beside her. When she first grasped for it she had to experiment and found that she could pull tissues from the packet. Now whenever I change her nappie she automatically goes for the packet and pulls out the tissues; understanding the function of the packet.

This experience involved 'constructivist learning' because my daughter has gained knowledge as to the function of the packet. This experience could be more successfully explained in terms of behaviourism as it is a baby’s instinct to grab and experiment with new things