Jean Piaget's Influence On The Development Of Constructivism

Ivan Pavlov spent his childhood in Ryazan in central Russia and regularly attended a church school and theological seminary as he was the

Vygotsky believes in a historical human nature, alternates qualitative and quantitative observations, intertwines nature vs. nurture and everything develops. He is known for his zone of proximal development, which

Unlike Piaget, who was of an academic background and didn’t apply his theories. Never the less, they both theories influenced education and empahsied the importance of assessment however Vygotsky wanted the observation of children and their abilities to be as valied as test scores.

|Vygotsky’s Theory |1. Vygotsky’s Theory stressed the importance of the influence of culture and social context of learning. |

According to "New World Encyclopedia" (2014), “Lev Vygotsky was born was born in Orsha, Belarus (then Russian empire), into a well-to-do family of Jewish ancestry, on November 17 (November 5 in the Old Style), 1896. Soon after Lev 's birth, his father was appointed department chief of the United Bank of Gomel and the family moved to Gomel, where Vygotsky spent his childhood. Vygotsky 's mother had trained to be a teacher, but saw her priority in being at home to provide a stimulating and enriching environment for her eight children. Vygotsky completed his primary education at home with his mother and a private tutor, and then entered public school for his secondary education. Vygotsky graduated from secondary school with a gold medal at the age of seventeen. He entered the University of Moscow and initially studied medicine, then switched to law. Vygotsky continued his

Vygotsky is a theorist who believed that the social and cultural environment of a child can help them develop and learn. Vygotsky was born into an intellectual Russian-Jewish family. His father was a bank manager and his mother was a teacher. Being a Jew his education was restricted.

1. Vygotsky was focused on how children come to understand their social world. He believed cultural learning is acquired through a gradual process of social interactions between children and parents, teachers, and other members of society. These social interactions provide children with the knowledge they need to face the challenges and meet the demands placed on them by their culture. So, basically according to Vygotsky the adults are the experts and the children are the novice.

Kuznetsov grew up Russian, being raised by his mother and taking her name, since his Jewish father was killed during the war before Eduard had a chance to know him. He grew up as a nearly ideal Soviet; he was a good young Communist who served his time in the Red Army, and attended Moscow University, where he excelled in literature. Being very intelligent, he was deterred by the lack of artistic freedom within the Soviet Union. This led him, in his junior year, to make his first strategic life move, by starting some of the first samizdat magazines and organizing literary readings at Mayakovsky

Lev Vygotsky concept is showing or helping children with a task. They are taught everything through social interaction no matter what it is. They are taught by example, by getting help with the task and are expected to be able to complete it by themselves. With this concept of learning every child is able to learn and evolve into completing activities independently and progressively from what they have learned. It is important that the environment for the child be set with ideas and task that will allow them too mentally, educationally and physically develop with or without adult and peer assistant.

Vygotsky was born in Russia in 1896 into a middle class family (Gallagher 1999). Vygotsky studied law at Moscow University and he did not have any

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on November 7, 1879, in what is today known as Ukraine. He was the fifth child of a wealthy farmer, David Leontyevich Bronstein, and Anna Bronstein. The family was ethnically Jewish but not religious. At the age of nine, Trotsky was sent to Odessa to attend school, and as Deutscher points out in his biography, ‘Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook.’ Trotsky was always ‘quick-tempered, arrogant and a stubborn believer in intellectual solutions.’

Social constructivism’s origins are largely attributed to Lev Vygotsky (1978). Vygotsky believed that social constructivism is the idea that learning occurs when people are socially active; in other words, learning is created through our interaction with others. In a constructivist style classroom, the focus shifts from the teacher teaching the students to the students teaching each other and having more control over what they learn by asking questions and coming up with their own conclusion on things (2016). This style of teaching can be very successful when the teacher provides enough scaffolding. In a typical classroom, you have a teacher standing in the front of the room lecturing to students while they sit and take notes on the information being given so they can spit it back up for a test they will have at the end of the unit. In the constructivist style classroom, the students are pushed to be more active and engaged in their learning process (Education Theory). The teacher creates an environment where students are urged to speak up and share what they think and have the class run more on a student run process. The teacher’s role in this style is not to sit and lecture information but rather engage students actively to find this information on their own and discover it so that it creates more meaning and provides a better understanding. The main goal in this type of learning environment is problem solving. This style of teaching promotes self-guidance and can even

Constructivism is a coherent theory of learning that emerged as a prevailing paradigm in the last part of the twentieth century. Constructivism is a theory which brings cogitation to pedagogy (Bruner, 1966). Constructivism capitalizes on the ways in which human beings create their own personal construct of reality by understanding and experiencing the world. The main underlying assumption of constructivism is that individuals are actively involved right from the birth in constructing personal meaning.

Lev Vygotsky is one of the earliest proponents of a constructivist learning theory. Although he only lived through the early 1930s, his work was largely unknown in the West until the 1960s (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2012). His significant contributions to constructivist learning theory include three important distinctions. First, he purports in Mind and Society: the development of higher mental process (1978) that “social interaction between people plays the first fundamental role in the process of cognitive development” (explained in the Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2012). This means we first learn by watching others and discussing new information with others, only then do we attempt to use our own cognitive systems for storing that new knowledge individually. “Vygotsky focused on the connections between

Constructivism is connected to the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky. Piaget believed that cognitive development occurred in four stages that have distinct developmental characteristics.  He theorised that all information is organised into ‘schemas’, and this refers to the manner in which a child organisesand stores information and knowledge received. As new information is received, it is either incorporated into existing schemas (assimilation) or new schemas (accommodation) are created (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2010).  Vygotsky’s theories compliment those of Piaget and place a greater importance on social interaction as he considered cognitive development predominately was achievedthrough social interaction.  Vygotsky believed that learning could be accelerated with the assistance of a more advanced peer or teacher.  This concept is referred to as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and works in conjunction with the theory of ‘scaffolding’, where a teacher provides support to student and as proficiency increases the scaffolding is decreased (Marsh, 2008). Evidence of scaffolding is seen throughout the Maths video as Ms Poole provides an outline of the lesson and the goals to allow students to establish a focus.