How do schema, assimilation, and accommodation work together to help kids understand their world?

Schema, assimilation and accommodation

Explanation

Schema, assimilation and accommodation are three important concepts in Piaget’s cognitive development which the kids adapt to learn and understand their world.

Schema is the mental or cognitive idea, concept or framework which organizes and interprets information. Schema is built continuously during cognitive development of children through the interweaving of the adaptation processes of assimilation and accommodation.  

Assimilation helps a kid to take new information and add it to the existing schema or old information about the same concept. For ex., identifying a four-legged animal as a cow by a kid is assimilation of a new information.

Accommodation helps a kid to analyze and modify the new or old schema or information based on what is learnt or experienced. For ex., Identifying that all four-legged animals are not cow and they can be a horse or bullock also depending upon the difference in their structure is the accommodation made by the kid on top of existing schema of four-legged animals.