The Explanation of Vygotsky and Piaget’s Theories Essay

Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. Piaget’s work includes a detailed observational study of cognition in children. Piaget showed that young children think in different ways to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent knowledge is based.

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.

Piaget (Berger, 1994) is a well know cognitive theorist whose concept of cognitive development placed great importance on early childhood education. Piaget’s theory has four specific stages. He deemed that children learn by actively involving themselves in their domain. Piaget is also linked to the Constructivist Theory：children construct

Conservation is the ability to understand when appearance of something changes the amount is the same as before. Piaget argued that young children are unable to consider points of view different to their own and at the pre-operational stage’s children will not be able understand conservation. This essay will first illustrate the basic components of Piaget’s cognitive theory and then will discuss Piaget’s experimental evidence tests in Chapter 2 of Book 1 and in DVD Media Kit part 1, for stages in

Jean Piaget developed a systematic study of cognitive development. He conducted a theory that all children are born with a basic mental structure. He felt that their mental structure is genetically inherited and their learning evolved from subsequent learning and knowledge. Piaget’s theory is different from other theories and he was the first to study a child’s learning by using a systematic study of cognitive development. His theory was only concerning the learning of children, their development and not how they learn. He proposed stages of development marked more by qualitative differences than by a gradual increase in number and complexities of behavior or concepts. His goal for his theory was to explain the mechanisms a child uses from the infant stage to the growing child who develops into a thinking and reasoning individual when reasoning and using hypotheses. His theory was that cognitive development was how the brain reorganized mental processes over time due to biological maturation and the experiences they have in an environment. The three basic components to Piaget’s cognitive theory is schemas, adaption processes that allow the child to transition from one stage to another, and the four different stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.

According to (Quinn and Hugh 2007), “Piaget’s work focuses on the intellectual development of individuals and their adaptation to the environment”. Cognitive development takes place through four stages:

A key difference between Piagets approach in contrast to Vygotsky is the context that each of them viewed the relationship between the child and the environment or stimuli. Piaget took a more biological approach to his work stating that human cognition was a biological adaptation of a complex organism to a complex environment (Flavell, Miller, P. & Miller, 2002). He proposed that the child manipulated the environment around it by “actively constructing their own sense of the world” (Blades, Cowie & Smith, 2011). Vygotsky challenged this by stating that “learning must be viewed in the context of the person’s culture and the tools available in that culture” (Flavell, Miller, P. & Miller, 2002). He attributed learning to authority based relationships (Lourenco, 2012) and argued that,

It has been generally believed that what he proved is the fact that a child moves through cognitive developmental stages from a simple pre-operational to a concrete level and then to a more complex and abstract operational cognitive level in the process of maturation. Piaget’s theories have been heavily critiqued, both in terms of his assumptions of developmental stages as well as in terms of the smooth progression from stage to stage, however, the necessity of the shift from the concrete to the abstract level of cognition still appears to be firmly embedded in most educational theories today.

There are several concepts, which are considered basic in the theory of cognitive development: schema(ta) or cognitive structures, assimilation, accommodation, adaptation, equilibrium. Cognitive structures, which are “basic, interconnected psychological systems that enable people to process information by connecting it with prior knowledge and experience, finding patterns and relationships, identifying rules, and generating abstract principles relevant in different applications,” mattered to Piaget (Garner, 2008, p. 32). Whereas schema represents ones understanding of the world, adaptation formed through

Jean Piaget is considered to be very influential in the field of developmental psychology. Piaget had many influences in his life which ultimately led him to create the Theory of Cognitive Development. His theory has multiple stages and components. The research done in the early 1900’s is still used today in many schools and homes. People from various cultures use his theory when it comes to child development. Although there are criticisms and alternatives to his theory, it is still largely used today around the world.

Jean Piaget is one of the pioneers to child development, he was an important factor in the growth, development and one of the most exciting research theorists in child development. A major force in child psychology, he studied both thought processes and how they change with age. He believed that children think in fundamentally different ways from adults.. Piaget’s belief is that all species inherit the basic tendency to organize their lives and adapt to the world that’s around them, no matter the age. Children develop schemas as a general way of thinking or interacting with ideas and objects in the environment. Children create and develop new schemas as they grow and experience new things. Piaget has identified four major stages of cognitive development which are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to the text here are brief descriptions of each of Piaget’s stages:

Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is well-known and provides a basic understanding of the cognitive process and how children

A key idea in Piaget’s theory was cognitive development and how it relates to the 4 stages he created in his theory. Each stage is age related which is a key concept in

Piaget believed the process of adaption enabled the transition from one stage on to the next stage, and the process of equilibration was an innate response and a cause for cognitive development. Alongside this, he believed that children could not understand the cognitive concepts within each stage until their maturational development allowed for it, and therefore saw brain maturation a biological cause for cognitive development. Piaget also proposed two environmental causes for cognitive development - ‘social transmission’, information that the child acquires from other people, and ‘experience’, when the child has an active role in the direction of their experimentation and learning. According to Piaget, the presence and interaction of these four causes was/is essential for the full expression of cognitive development (Boyd & Bee, 2014).

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development focuses on the mechanism of learning within the context of natural sciences of the type of logic that learners use. Piaget believes that the biological maturation that human beings go through causes distinct