Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist, proposed a theory to explain how children learn to adapt their thinking to better understand and function within their world. According to Piaget, they adapt their thinking in two important, but different ways: through assimilation and accommodation.
In assimilation, individuals observe something that they’ve never seen before, and then, incorporate what they’ve observed into their existing knowledge, without any change. For example, consider a little boy who wants to hang a picture in his room. He’s never used a hammer or a nail before, but he sees his father use them all the time. He remembers that his father takes the nail with one hand and places it in the position he would like; then, he takes the hammer in his other hand and swings it to hit the nail so that it will rest firmly in the wall. Finally, his father takes the picture and hangs it. Though the boy has never done this before, he simply takes what he’s observed his father do, incorporates that information into his own knowledge, and then uses it to achieve his desired result. That’s assimilation.
During accommodation, an individual adjusts or changes his behavior to adapt to new information. If we expand on the previous example, we can clear this idea up. Let’s say that as the boy copies his father, he doesn’t quite get the desired result. He will adapt his behavior to the situation. For instance, he knows that his father always holds the hammer from the bottom. But, when the boy holds the hammer from the bottom, he finds that it is too heavy, so he can’t control it very well, and he never manages to hit the nail. He adapts to this new information, this fact that he can’t control the hammer well, by holding it nearer to the top. Thus, the child changes his behavior to the new information and succeeds at hanging the picture. That’s accommodation.
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