Piagets and Vygotsky's Theories in the Classroom Essays

There are many great theorists for the Early Childhood Education. Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget are two of the many theorists that benefit the teachers and parents to comprehend their children learning development. The paper will compare the two theorists and their difference of their cognitive development.

Vygotsky may have overplayed importance on social influences because he suggests that child’s cognitive development occurs through social interactions, for example children do internalisation of problem solving via mutual interactions. However, if social learning is the essence of cognitive development then learning would be a lot faster than it is. Thus Vygotsky ignores the biological aspects that aid or restricts the cognitive development such as the development of brain and maturation. Therefore Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is different to

Piaget’s theory was introduced by Jean Piaget who established four periods of cognitive development. The four stages are; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal operational. The sensorimotor is the first stage and begins when the child is born and proceeds until the age of two years. The second stage is the preoperational stage and begins with the child is two years old and continues until the child reaches six years of age. The concrete stage is the third stage and begins when the child is six years old and proceeds until the age of 11 years old. The formal operational stage is the fourth stage and

Across all aspects and various lenses of development it is evident that children from birth until adolescence require guidance. In contrast, some theorists such a Piaget suggest that children are vastly independent and do not require parental or adult assistance for majority of their development. However, theorists such as Vygotsky believe otherwise. As Vygotsky was discussed during lecture, his developmental theory surrounding the methods of which children learn was a main focus. Namely, the methods of which children learn with adult

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky both agree and disagree in the area of the Nature/Development of Intelligence. Piaget and Vygotsky agree on the idea of constructivism, the certainty that cognitive development happens by accumulation to and building from what is previously recognized and learned. Piaget was a trivial constructivist, he believed that individuals acquire knowledge by interacting with their environment and building on their knowledge and understanding of their environment. On the other hand, Lev Vygotsky was a social constructivist, believing individuals acquire knowledge through social interaction and learning from others. They also both agree that the restrictions of intellectual growth are defined by social interactions. Individuals acquire knowledge from interactions that they have already been exposed to and what other people can teach them, whether if it other children that are older than they are, adults in the life, or teachers. Jean Piaget believed that individuals acquire their knowledge by interacting in their environment, and it comes as a direct outcome of the individual’s actions on to their environment. Piaget believed that individuals must learn before they develop (Educational Psychology). According to Jean Piaget’s theory, the order of acquiring knowledge is an individual acts upon their environment, learning from the consequences of their actions, and then developing knowledge and understanding of

Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development was one of the first steps in understanding how children become who they are as adults. In early childhood, children begin to understand symbols and representations (Berk, 2014, p. 227). Their learning shifts from sensing the world as in the sensorimotor stage to trying to find commonalities like symbols. According to Berk (2014), Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory focused on “social context of cognitive development” (p. 234). Vygotsky incorporated social context and social interactions into childhood development; in other words, who, how, and what children interact with in their everyday social environment contributes to their mental and emotional development. When it comes to both of these cognitive theories, there are many similarities and differences between Piaget and Vygotsky.

Piaget’s developmental stages are ways of normal intellectual development. There are four different stages. The stages start at infant age and work all the way up to adulthood. The stages include things like judgment, thought, and knowledge of infants, children, teens, and adults. These four stages were names after Jean Piaget a developmental biologist and psychologist. Piaget recorded intellectual abilities and developments of infants, children, and teens. The four different stages of Piaget’s developmental stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Sensorimotor is from birth up to twenty- four months of age. Preoperational which is toddlerhood includes from eighteen months old all the

In this domain Piaget stated that the child who is still in the preoperational stage can’t conceptualize abstractly and needs concrete physical situations. They can’t mentally manipulate information. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs and their thinking is still egocentric, which means that the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others. Piaget split this stage into the symbolic and intuitive thought substage. In the symbolic function stage children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. Vygotsky stated that children learn cognitive tasks through their interactions with older peers and adults. Not only do younger children watch and imitate older people or peers as they complete tasks, but these older guides also help younger children accomplish tasks they couldn’t accomplish on their own. He calls this the zone of proximal development which he describes what children can do alone and what they can do with assistance. Another theorist named Bandura coined the term observational learning which means people learn appropriate social behaviors by observing and modeling others. This type of learning is most effective during childhood. Vygotsky believed that the important part of the cognitive development is language. He observed that very young

At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and

Jean Piaget is a developmental psychologist who studied young children and analyzed their development at a young age. Piaget is well known for his four cognitive development stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, and formal operations; as mentioned by Siegler and Alibali (2004). Siegler and Alibali (2004) also stated that these four stages begin as soon as the child is born and it continues throughout their young adolescent years all the way to adulthood. Piaget conducted numerous research experiments towards young children in order to prove his hypothesis and drew conclusions for

“According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, it states that all children go through specific stages as their brain matures. It also stated that these stages are completed in a fixed order within all children, according to their range of age (Atherton).” In other words, one cannot expect a two month old baby to solve simple math problems as that of a five year old. There are four stages in which Piaget grouped the development of a child according to their age groups, in which children interact with people and their environment. The sensorimotor stage (birth until age 2) children use their senses to explore their environment. During this stage, children learn how to control objects, although they fail to understand that these objects if not within their view continue to exist. The preoperational stage (2 until age 7) children are not able to see other's viewpoints other than their own. In other words, if the same amount of water is poured into a short wide glass and then a tall thin glass the child will perceive that the taller glass has more water because of the height. The concrete operational stage (7 until 12) children begin to think logically, but only with a practical aid. The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory is the formal operation stage (12 through adulthood) in which children develop abstract thinking and begin to think logically in their minds (Piaget).

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development proposes that a child’s capacity to understand certain concepts is based on the child’s developmental stage. He outlined 4 stages of development that spanned a child’s age from birth through 11 years old. The list below presents a summary of the characteristics typical at each stage:

Learning, according to De Houwer, Barnes-Holmes, & Moors (2013), “has been defined functionally as changes in behavior that result from experience or mechanistically as changes in the organism that result from experience”. Throughout the years, a number of psychologists have come up with different theories to try and explain how young children develop and learn. Lev Vygotsky, a Russian theorist and psychologist that was born in 1896, constructed his own child development and learning theory that has strongly influenced the world of education (Nordlof, 2014; Dahms, Geonnotti, Passalacqua, Schilk, Wetzel, & Zulkoqsky, n.d.). His theory is created from concepts of both behaviorist and constructivist. Vygotsky’s theory suggests that learning and development occurs through social function as well as intentional teaching (DeVries, 2000; Nordlof, 2014; Slavin, 2015).

The essay is going to introduce short overviews of Piaget (1926) and Vygotsky’s (1978) theories to indicate their different approaches when considering cognitive development. Piaget (1926) developed a constructivist theory which is the basis for the other cognitive development theories that followed. He proposed the definition of schema which refers to children’s construction of shaping their thought and actions through the set of cognitive processes as assimilation, disequilibriums and accommodation. When encountering new experiences, children try to interpret them in terms of known cognitive schemas. In case of failing, they need to adjust their interpretation to the reality (Schaffter & Kipp,8th ed). Based on his assumptions, Piaget (1926) proposed that child as a lone individual progress through four main stages of cognitive development. On the other hand, Vygotsky (1978) presented sociocultural theory. Vygotsky (1978) concentrated on the social interaction between child and adult considering

In the first, or sensorimotor, stage (birth to two years), knowledge is gained primarily through sensory impressions and motor activity. Through these two modes of learning, experienced both separately and in combination, infants gradually learn to control their own bodies and objects in the external world. Toward the end of Piaget¡¦s career, he brought about the idea that action is actually the primary source of knowledge and that perception and language are more secondary roles. He claimed that action is not random, but has organization, as well as logic. Infants from birth to four months however, are incapable of thought and are unable to differentiate themselves from others or from the environment. To infants, objects only exist when they are insight