Activity 3.2

 

Piaget’s stages of development follows four sequential stages which begins at birth and stretches across a person’s lifetime.  At each stage the learner is achieving cognitive development and building upon their past experiences in order to understand the present cognitive challenges. 

Similarly, James states, “That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of logically associated or systematic whole.” (p. 49) In essence, James is expressing that humans make associations with information and build upon their prior knowledge just as Piaget’s stages of development follows a cognitive progression.  James statement also supports cognitive constructivism because it follows the idea that students are “active” learners that assimilate or accommodate information as they learn.