Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
to reconcile the new knowledge with existing schemas. Piaget believed that the children use two
distinct methods in doing so, methods that he called assimilation andaccommodation (see Figure
6.5 "Assimilation and Accommodation").
Figure 6.5 Assimilation and Accommodation
When children employ assimilation, they use already developed schemas to understand new
information. If children have learned a schema for horses, then they may call the striped animal
they see at the zoo a horse rather than a zebra. In this case, children fit the existing schema to the
new information and label the new information with the existing knowledge. Accommodation,
on the other hand, involves learning new information, and thus changing the schema. When a
mother says, “No, honey, that’s a zebra, not a horse,” the child may adapt the schema to fit the