Piaget VS. Vygotsky - Grade: A PDF

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This is an essay of the differences and similarities between Piaget and Vygotsky...

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There are many competing theoretical accounts of how children think and learn. For the purpose of this essay we will be focusing on two of the most dominant theorists of the domain, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. In order to put the discussion into context it will be useful to highlight some background information. Piaget’s ideas have only dominated our thinking about learning since the mid-sixties. His main focus was to discover a universal theory of biology and knowledge which can be applicable to all living organisms. In turn this motivated his focus on children. Vygotsky wished to understand the nature, evolution and transmission of human culture. Their perspectives naturally lead them to different views on the nature of childhood. Piaget theory is the theory of cognitive development which describes and explains the changes in logical thinking of children and adolescents. Piaget proposed that children proceed through four stages based on maturation and experience. Vygotsky theory is a cultural-historical theory which focus is based around the role of culture and social interactions and how this helps develop children. It is clear Piaget’s theory is more centered on the role that individuals play in their own cognitive development this is described as the child is a little scientist. The child develops independently from environments. Although interaction does take place with environments, Piaget did not place much emphasis on this interaction. On the other hand Vygotsky argues that development is rooted in the socio-cultural context. The socio-cultural context provides children with intellectual tools. Here the child is described as an apprentice in life. Therefore without this context development cannot

take place. Thus a child’s environment develops them. As a result development is more of a collective process according to Vygotsky. According to Piaget the child role is the center of their development. This implies that the child is seen as a scientist. On the other hand, the sociocultural context of Vygotsky implicates the child as an apprentice. These notions will be explained further. Under the Piaget theory the child is a theorist. Much like a scientist, children develop theories of the world. These theories have been labeled as naïve theories. According to the core knowledge hypothesis children are born with very basic knowledge of the world. This knowledge is expanded when environments are explored. Most of the theories that children first develop concern physics, biology and psychology. Infants and toddlers are able to develop theories that organize their knowledge about the properties of living and non-living objects. As a naïve physicist children will know that a hard physical object cannot move through another hard physical object, or that unsupported objects will fall. As a naïve biologists children will establish between what objects are living or non-living. As a naïve psychologist, children will gather that people act the way they do because they feel a certain way. For Vygotsky the sociocultural context plays an important role in development. What permits it to be so vital to development is the intellectual tools that enable learning. For example African cultures assign sequential tasks to the culturally perceived developmental stages. Being able to distinguish between animals will be a sign of development progression, or being able to master specific cultural customs or dances will be another indication of cognitive growth. This implies that development is subjective to the context a child is found in and

in the same light; the context is of high importance to develop successful individuals. From the examples of Piaget viewing the child as a scientist and Vygotsky viewing the child as an apprentice, it is clear that the way in which Piaget and Vygotsky construct how development takes place is diverse. Constructivism is an approach to intelligence and learning based on the premise that cognition is the result of the mental constructions of ideas with building blocks of information. Piaget argued from a cognitive constructivist view whereas Vygotsky argued from a social constructivist view. Piaget suggested that cognitive development is a product of the child’s mind which the child achieves through observation and experimentation. Thus knowledge is actively being discovered. It is through the active interaction with the world, that the child constructs his or her own knowledge. This construction of knowledge is seen through the schemas the child develops which helps them to organize and understand the world. Alternatively Vygotsky theory emphasizes the important role of social interaction in the development of cognition. Vygotsky argued under a Marxist-Leninist thesis that all fundamental human cognitive activities take shape in a matrix of social history and from the products of socio-historical development. As a result Vygotsky firmly believed that community plays a central role in the process of making meaning. He suggested that higher cognitive functions are in this way obtained through social interaction. A structural difference in theory between Piaget and Vygotsky is that Piaget had a stage theory. He chartered children’s development through a series of qualitatively distinct stages through which intellectual maturity evolves. Piaget claimed that these stages followed one another in a fixed, inevitable

pattern but accepted that there was no fixed time for each stage. Piaget stages included the sensorimotor stage which was between birth and 2 years. Secondly the preoperational stage, which was between 2 to 7 years. Thirdly was the concrete operational stage which was between 7 to 11 years. Fourthly was the formal operational stage which was between 12 years and beyond. Vygotsky on the other hand did not indicate that there was a need for a stage theory. This is due to the fact that he did not view development as universal but rather that development varied. For Piaget the key processes in development are schemas, assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. Piaget saw cognitive development from a biological perspective and believed that intelligence stems from a human ability to adapt and organize. Piaget believed children organize ideas into groups (schemes) through which they either assimilate new information or accommodate information that does not fit into the existing schemes. Piaget highlights that continuous interactions among existing schemas, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium create new learning. In contrast, Vygotsky explains the learning process by the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), scaffolding, language and tools of the culture. Vygotsky believed that learning and development is a collaborative activity and that children are cognitively developed in the context of socialization and education. In addition, the perceptual, attention, and memory capacities of children are transformed by vital cognitive tools provided by culture, such as history, social context traditions, language and religion. For learning to occur, the child first makes contact with the social environment on an interpersonal level and then internalizes this experience. Therefore

the earlier notions and new experiences influence the child, who then constructs new ideas. The key processes of learning are very diverse for Piaget and Vygotsky. To provide a clearer distinction of what they encompass, here are some examples. In Piaget’s theory here is how a child will develop new knowledge. A 22 month old baby will have a schema of a dog which is all four-legged, furry animals. When the child comes into contact with a cat she will thus refer to it as a dog, thereby assimilating the novel animal into her schema of four-legged animals. When the child is exposed to information that clashes with their schema they have to go and accommodate this new knowledge and therefore develop new schema. In terms of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development it carries a very different incorporation of who is involved. Piaget key processes only include the individual whereas Vygotsky key processes of learning are more dependent on others. The zone of proximal development is the idea that when a child is paired with a more skilled adult they will develop more skills than by working alone. This means that a more competent person collaborates with a child to help them move forward from where they are at that point in time. Furthermore a child may learn how to tie their shoe laces better if an adult shows them compared to if they had to work it out by themselves. There seems to be distinction in the key processes of learning that maybe the focus for Piaget was on thinking about how something works and for Vygotsky it is more about seeing and doing something in order it understand how it works. Piaget believed that language depends on thought for its development in other words thought comes before language. Piaget viewed egocentric

speech as merely reflecting the child's ongoing mental activity. And that they later shift from egocentric speech to communicative speech. For Vygotsky, cognitive development results from an internalization of language. Language plays two important roles in cognitive development: it is the main means by which adults pass culturally valued ways of thinking and problem solving to their children. Secondly Language itself eventually becomes a powerful tool of intellectual adaption. Vygotsky disagreed with Piaget with respect to egocentric speech. For Vygostky non social speech was not egocentric but instead communicative. This was referred to as private speech. Private speech eventually becomes internalized to form inner speech and mental activity. Both Piaget and Vygotsky advocated for active learning instead of passive learning, and emphasized the need to assess what the learner already knew, in that way teachers can estimate what the learner is capable of learning. Vygotsky's theory provided rather obvious implications for education. Piaget argued that the processes of assimilation and accommodation require that a learner is active and not passive, for the reason that learners cannot be taught problem solving skills; instead these skills must be discovered. He described the learner as the center who achieved through active discovery learning and the Teacher’s role is that of a facilitator. Piaget's theory is based upon biological maturation and stages the notion of readiness being important. Readiness refers to when children should be taught certain concepts. Piaget's theory proposes that children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development. Vygotsky on the other hand argued that teachers should promote guided participations in which they

would structure their learning activity and they should utilize instructional concepts such as scaffolding. In terms of Piaget and Vygotsky’s critique much of Piaget’s theory has come under intense criticism. Some argue that he underestimates children's abilities. For Piaget, failure at completing one of his tasks is the result of lacking the competencies required to successfully complete the task. Some argue that he failed to include emphasis on the socio-cultural influences on cognitive development. Some argue that his Research methods were invalid and that his sample size was too small. Vygoytsky’s theory does not present as many specific testable hypotheses as Piaget's constructivist theory of cognitive development did; which makes refuting his theory very difficult. Some argue that his theory is applicable to all cultures. Some suggest that guided participations that rely heavily on the kinds of verbal instruction that Vygotsky emphasized may be less adaptive in some cultures or less useful for some forms of learning than others. In some instances, the use of observation and practice could be more useful ways of learning particular skills....