Grades 3-6 Science, Children, and Learning by Donald Peck Science education, indeed education in general, is deeply indebted to Jean Piaget, the renowned Swiss psychologist and learning theorist, for his research on how children learn, and to Mary Budd Rowe, an American researcher who discovered effective methods of classroom discourse. According to Piaget, intellectual development is the process of restructuring knowledge. He posits that new sensory data received by a person either support or conflict with that person's mental constructs. According to Piaget, the process of revising previously held mental structures involves assimilation of the new data and accommodation of one's mental constructs to the data.
Assimilation is the acquisition and integration of perceptions into mental structures.
Accommodation is the alteration of the mental constructs that occur in order to resolve conflicts between the new data and the preexisting mental structures. His term for assimilation and accommodation, taken together, is equilibration . Piaget maintains that equilibration is the basis for acquiring knowledge. While children in any one grade or classroom will exhibit the characteristics of this stage to different degrees, most will have arrived in this stage by Grade 3 and a few will have acquired some characteristics of the next stage, the Formal Operational Stage, by Grade 6. When a child mentally manipulates things, he is thinking about operating on concrete objects, not abstract ideas.