Assimilation, Accommodation and Adaptation - Word of The Day | Dictionary (Vocabulary) of Psychology & Education - By Pawan Kumar Jha
Definition of Assimilation, Accommodation and Adaptation
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According to Piaget assimilation and accommodation help a child adapt to his environment. Assimilation and accommodation both are the part of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s idea of adaptation, or the ways in which children learn about and categorize the world.
Both assimilation and accommodation are related to the idea of Schemas. Schemas are simply established patterns used to organize knowledge.
Assimilation
This term stemmed from the work of Jean Piaget and his work on cognitive development of children.
Assimilation is the cognitive process of fitting new information into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding.
This means that when you are faced with new information, you make sense of this information by referring to information you already have (information processed and learned previously) and try to fit the new information into the information you already have.
Through assimilation, we take in new information or experiences and incorporate them into our existing ideas. The process is somewhat subjective because we tend to modify experience or information to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs.
Accommodation
A similar process is accommodation (another one of Piaget's processes), but with accommodation the information you already have has to be adjusted to incorporate the new information.
This process is what Piaget referred to as accommodation, in which old ideas (existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding) are changed, manipulated or even replaced based on new information.
Assimilation and accommodation both work in tandem as part of the learning process. Some information is simply incorporated into our existing schemas through the process of assimilation while other information leads to the development of new schemas or total transformations of existing ideas through the process of accommodation.
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