Our students will have to demonstrate their ability to integrate the language skills by completing tasks similar to those that they will be expected to accomplish in academic settings. They will have to speak and write at high levels of proficiency. | MODEL TEST 7 READING SECTION 463 - Assimilation occurs when individuals incorporate new information into their existing knowledge. Accommodation occurs when individuals adjust to new information. Consider a circumstance in which a 9-year-old girl is given a hammer and nails to hang a picture on the wall. She has never used a hammer but from observation and vicarious experience she realizes that a hammer is an object to be held that it is swung by the handle to hit the nail and that it is usually swung a number of times. Recognizing each of these things she fits her behavior into the information she already has assimilation . However the hammer is heavy so she holds it near the top. She swings too hard and the nail bends so she adjusts the pressure of her strikes. These adjustments reveal her ability to alter slightly her conception of the world accommodation . Piaget thought that assimilation and accommodation operate even in the very young infant s life. Newborns reflexively suck everything that touches their lips assimilation but after several months of experience they construct their understanding of the world differently. Some objects such as fingers and the mother s breast can be sucked but others such as fuzzy blankets should not be sucked accommodation . Piaget also believed that we go through four stages in understanding the world. Each of the stages is age-related and consists of distinct ways of thinking. Remember it is the different way of understanding the world that makes one stage more advanced than another knowing more information does not make the child s thinking more advanced in the Piagetian view. This is what Piaget meant when he said the child s cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared to another Vidal 2000 . O What are Piaget s four stages of cognitive development like IB The sensorimotor stage which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age is the first Piagetian stage. In this stage infants construct an understanding of the
