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Jean Piaget Vs Vygotsky

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Jean Piaget was a cognitive theorist who was born in Switzerland in the late 1800’s. He began his life with a concentration in the natural sciences, particularly the subject of mollusks, and later developed an interest in cognitive theory (“Jean Piaget Biography,” n.d.). His subsequent research and findings greatly influenced the field of developmental psychology, particularly childhood cognitive development theory. According to Saul McLeod, an instructor at the University of Manchester, prior to Piaget’s work “the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults” (McLeod, 2009). Instead, Piaget suggested …show more content…

Piaget’s four developmental stages stressed the importance of a child’s interaction with their environment. The first stage, the sensorimotor stage, encompasses the first two years of a child’s life where they use their senses to explore the world around them. The second stage, the preoperational stage, occurs between ages two and seven, where children develop symbolic thought. Symbolic thought is “a type of thinking in which symbols or internal images are used to represent objects, persons, and events that are not present” ("Symbolic Thought," n.d.). Again, children develop this type of thought through activities such as make-believe play, rather than social learning from others. The third stage, the concrete operational stage, occurs between ages seven and eleven where children begin to think logically and work things out in their head (McLeod, 2009). It is important to note that this only applies to physical, concrete concepts. Abstract thinking appears in the final stage, the formal operational stage, which occurs from age eleven into adulthood. In this stage, children and adults are able to think abstractly and use reasoning (“Jean Piaget,” 2015). All of these stages are based on humans, particularly children, interacting with their environment and theorizing about the world around them; “advancement through these levels occurs through the interaction of biological factors and experience, through a mechanism he called equilibrium" (“Jean Piaget,” 2015). Piaget paid no mind to the role of social interaction and the importance of learning from others in intellectual development and this is the key area where he differs from

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