Piaget & Vygotsky

Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)

Piaget was a precocious youngster with a great curiosity regarding the natural world. His first scientific publication was a letter to the editor about an albino sparrow. He would go on to blended his interest in zoology and the adaptation of animals into his study of how humans acquire knowledge and use this knowledge to adapt to their world.

Piaget worked in the Alfred Binet laboratories in Paris on the first standardized IQ tests. Piaget became interest in the wrong answers that children gave to standardized questions and noticed that the errors of children the same age were often similar. He came to believe that younger children did not simply know less than older children, they thought in qualitatively different ways. From these observations he began to formulate his theory of cognitive development

Constructivism

Piaget viewed intelligence as the process that helped an organism adapt to its environment. He rejected both the philosophical position (Plato's idealism) that we are born with innate ideas; and the behavior or learning position that humans are blank slates written upon by the environment (Astrotle and later Hume's "tabular rosa"). He saw children as actively inventing their own ideas about the world and came to believe that children actively constructed meaning based on their experience, a position he referred to as constructivism (Piaget, 1950).

Piaget believed cognitive processes developed through a series of universal stages

Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)

Preoperational (2 to 7 years)

Concrete Operations (7 to 11 years)

Formal Operations (11 to 12 years and older)

Knowledge of the world is gained through active exploration, which leads to the developments of a scheme (schema, schemata). Schemes are cognitive structures, organized patterns of action and thought that people use to interpret their experiences. As more sophisticated schemes are developed, the individual's adaptation is enhanced.

schemes develop through organization and adaptation

organization is the combination of schemes into more complex structures

adaptation is the adjustment of schemes to the demands of the environment

assimilation: relate it to something familiar

accommodation: modify the scheme

criticisms:

Piaget had little to say about the influences of motivation and emotion; he placed relatively little emphasis on the role of social influences--the role of parents and others in nurturing cognitive development

the notion of universal stages has been questioned

Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934)

sociocultural perspective

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development was shaped by the sociocultural context in which the child grew and developed out of her/his interactions with their culture

cultures provide tools of thought, especially language, that provide ways to approach and solve problems

Daniel Everett (2008), Don't Sleep, there are snakes: Life and language in the Amazonian jungle.

social influences (especially language) guide cognitive development

zone of proximal development: in between the accomplished and the impossible

guided participation; similar to Jerome Bruner's concept of "scaffolding"

for Piaget a child's level of cognitive development determines what she/he can learn; for Vygotsky, interacting with more knowledgeable/skilled companions drives cognitive development

Tools of thought

speech and language

private speech

Vygotsky was much more optimistic than Piaget regarding the facilitation of development by training