Piaget Vs Vygotsky Research Paper

Piaget’s stages of development are broken into stages of growth to bridge the connection between cognitive and biological development. According to Piaget, there are four stages to cognitive development; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations. In the sensorimotor stage, children form babies to two years old, experience and gather information by using the five senses.

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

Feldman (2014) states that “Piaget’s Theory is based on a stage approach to development” (p.144). It is supposed that children move through a series of similar stages in a particular order from the time of birth to adolescence. Feldman (2014) discussed these stages and explains that a child will move through these stages when an appropriate level of maturity has taken place physically with significant interaction, through experiences. Therefore, once a child has reached the toddler years, he/she will have passed through several of Piaget’s six sub stages of the sensorimotor stages. Piaget suggests that when a child has reached a certain level of physical development and has experienced pertinent experiences, the child will pass through to the next stage in a gradual, steady transformation of behavior (Feldman, 2014).

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

The second aspect of his cognitive development is the Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky 's idea of a zone of proximal development is the second aspect of his cognitive theory. A zone of proximal development describes tasks that children have not learned but are capable of learning. The zone of proximal development contains things that children may not be able to do alone at the time, but are on the verge of achieving with some assistance. He believes that learning takes place during the Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky felt it was important to work within the zone proximal development to achieve maximum learning. Another aspect is Scaffolding, which means providing a child with a great deal of support during the early stages of development. Scaffolding involves the final piece of Vygotsky’s cognitive development theory.

Vygotsky main love was for kids that had disabilities both mental and physical, to help with Vygotsky's idea Vygotsky came up with the concept of Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD). According to Schunk (2012) the concept of (ZPD) is defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers

In Piaget’s studies, he lists four stages that children go through in development. Starting at birth, a child goes through sensorimotor development. Sensorimotor development is often found through schemes that are based largely on behaviors and perceptions (Ormrod, 2012, p. 153). Throughout this stage, a child will acquire objects permanence and symbolic thought. Words spoken by those around the child begin to have a meaning such as milk, eat, or toy. Children begin experimenting with activities by touching objects, throwing toys, and sticking items in their mouth that is around them. The preoperational stage often emerges around the age of two. This change occurs while children are rapidly developing language and the symbolic thought it enables. Children during this stage can now think and talk about things beyond their immediate experiences. Language and intuitive thought are both acquired abilities during this stage. The vocabulary grows along with the grammatical structure of sentences. The thought processes begin to be based on intuition. For example, a two year old may remember touching a hot iron in the past so they realize when seeing the iron again, they do not need to touch it. They know the iron is hot without being able to grasp the concept of cause and effect in any situation. Between the ages of six and seven, a child goes through the concrete operational

The two most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky dedicated their lives to the field of Developmental Psychology. They spent every possible day studying the wide span of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional growth and development over a human lifespan. Apart from many criticisms regarding their work, Piaget and Vygotsky’s enduring research is an important part in children 's education around the world. In addition to spreading light on a child develops into an adolescent and adult.

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are two renowned psychologists in the field of developmental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to summarize, to discuss the similarities, to discuss the differences, and to discuss what can be gained from a better understanding of the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky.

Piaget and Vygotsky were split by their differing styles of thinking as to how and why children learnt in different stages. Piaget was first to discover that children think in separate ways through the different periods of time in their childhood and he thought that children go through four different stages of cognitive development (as well as the various sub-stages within them) which are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.

Piaget was a Swiss scholar and a psychologist who studied children’s cognitive development. He developed the four critical stages of cognitive development and believed that children progress from the stages. The sensor motor stage is from birth to two years. Children experiment and learn the world through senses and actions. The Pre-operational stage is from around two to seven years. Children start to expand and develop vocabulary through pretend play, but still lack of logical reasoning. They begin to represent the world symbolically. The concrete operational state is to eleven years. Children think logically and rational. They begin to understand the thoughts and others are not necessarily the same. The formal operations stage to sixteen or more. At this final stage, children have abstract reasoning and concrete thinking.

Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, dedicated his studies to cognitive development. His theory, the Social Constructivist, or Social Development Theory, stresses the importance of social influences, especially through instruction, on children’s cognitive development. This theory suggests that social interaction and community play a large role in “making meaning.” Vygotsky displays his theory using his “Zone of Proximal Development,” or ZPD. The Zone Proximal Development is a term used to describe the range of tasks that are too difficult for a child to master alone, but can be learned with guidance or assistance from adults or more-skilled children. The lower limit of the Zone of Proximal Development is the level reached by children when working by themselves, without assistance from others. Contrary, the upper limit is the level in which tasks become too difficult for a child to work independently, and additional help from a more-skillful adult or peer is needed. The purpose of the ZPD is to recognize where students lie in terms of ability of certain cognitive tasks and skills. It allows monitoring of student progress using scaffolding. Scaffolding is a term that is used to describe the level of support or guidance that is being offered to a student when learning a task. Scaffolding is a large factor of Vygotsky’s theory; when a child is learning a new task, the level of guidance from a more-skilled person is high, often through direct instruction. The child begins to

Child psychology is an important part of the process of teaching a child, knowing child psychology in teaching is a characteristic every teacher should have. Using child psychology in everyday teaching will improve a teacher 's ability to teach as well as improve a student 's ability to learn. When incorporating psychology into everyday teaching, two very intelligent men of the past and their theories should be kept in mind: Piaget and Vygotsky. Each of their theories have had an impact on education like no others. (Fernyhough, 1999)

Piaget and Vygotsky are theorists that offer theoretical viewpoints on how a child develops. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development is recognised as Piaget’s Stage Theory and it deals with four stages of development. Each stage has its own mechanisms and characteristics that take place. They are all detached by an approximate