Piaget and Vygotsky

Jean Piaget

During the 1920s, Piaget began observing children and developing his theory.

Jean Piaget shifted the emphasis of his work from the science of the body to the science of the mind.

His overall perspective was that the thought process was essential in the human development process.

Piaget spent a lot of his time playing and talking with children (including his own).

He treated language as just one of a number of symbolic functions a child develops as he interacts with his environment.

How do children go from one stage to the next?

Children are active learners.

Schemas

According to Piaget (Rumelhart, 1980), two processes affect these schemas: adaptation and equilibrium.

Within adaptation, there are two sub- processes, assimilation and accommodation.

When a child assimilates, he or she incorporates new information into an existing mental scheme. When a child accommodates, he or she creates a new mental scheme or changes an existing one to understand new information.

Equilibrium is the balance people try to maintain between what they experience and the schemas they assemble to understand their experiences.

As children mature, they pass through multiple stages and multiple ways of organizing knowledge. A brief summary of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development is as follows:

Sensorimotor Period (occurs from the age of 0 to the age of 2)

Preoperational Period (occurs from the age of 2 to the age of 7)

Concrete Operational Period (occurs from the age of 7 to the age of 11)

Formal Operational Period (occurs from the age of 11 and up)

According to Piaget, the first three stages of development are universal but the fourth stage depends on formal schooling.

It is possible that a child’s communication skills are advanced by his cognitive development.

Jean Piaget’s work on cognitive development influenced how cognitive psychology has researched and understood how children understand, make sense of and reason about the world.

LEV VYGOTSKY

LANGUAGE For Vygotsky learning language facilitates development. It allows children to receive ideas, culture, and thinking from those around them.

Private speech

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT The level of achievement that includes tasks that the child cannot accomplish alone but can achieve when assisted by a competent adult (or peer)

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT Tasks below the zone- too easy Tasks above the zone- frustrating

THEREFORE The job of the educator is…. to provide activities within each child’s Zone of Proximal Development.

SCAFFOLDING Students receive help that enables them to complete tasks that they cannot complete independently Scaffolding is provided by knowledgeable others. This may be the teacher or other students in the classroom. Thus, Vygotsky would be a proponent of cooperative learning.

In contrast to Piaget’s belief that cognitive development proceeds in an orderly stage-by-stage manner, Vygotsky sees development as continuous and shaped by the influences of important adults and peers in the child’s social environment.

A critical difference between the theories of the two men, however, is that Piaget viewed the child as an independent operator in cognitive development while Vygotsky believed that during cognitive development, the child maintains a cooperative relationship with his environment and culture.