Cognitive Development Piaget & Vygotsky Flashcards
Who is Piaget
- Theory was widely accepted in the 60s
- Constructivist, learning through interacting with the world and theories
- Interested in the mistakes children make to understand processing
Piaget Key Principals (influences on development)
- Maturing, biologically changing
- Children are always learning from the environment and this is how they develop
- Socially, learning from others
- Equilibration, when something doesn’t follow our way’s of thinking we readjust to understand
Piaget’s Stages of development
- All children goes through the same stages in the same order although the rate at which children develop through the stages varies
Sensorimotor 0-2 years
Preoperational 2-7 years
Concrete operational 7-11years
Formal Operational 11years+
1) Sensorimotor
- Building sensory and motor exploration
- Child builds on basic reflexes
- Develops Object permanence
Sensorimotor Task
A not B task, child still looks in the same place for the object even when it’s not there
2) Preoperational
- Language development
- Limited appreciation of others perspectives
Preoperational Task
- Child can’t recognise basic properties or change in appearance
- Centration, only focuses on dimension also lack of reversibility, can’t reverse mental processes
3) Concrete operational
- Logical thinking
- Reversibility
- Can transform objects in the mind
4) Formal Operational
- Can make predictions
- Can test these predictions
What is Piaget’s pendulum problem
- Understanding what determines the pendulum speed
- Concrete operational child will vary factors such as length of string and weight of the object randomly
- Formal operational child will do this systematically and one factor at a time
Piaget Critical Evaluation
Constructivist view:
- Experiences help children to learn, they come up with their own opinions
- Development follows qualitative shift stages
- Uses observation and clinical interviews to investigate cognitive development
- Can describe explain and predict behaviour
- Kohlberg agrees that development is stage like
Differentiation with cultures
Piaget Critical Evaluation - contributions to school
- Listen to children and understand their thinking processes
- Set up situations with hypothesis testing
Vygotsky: Some Key Principals
Socio cultural theory, social interactions are important
- Mediators, art
- Elementary Mental Functions, basic attention
- Higher Mental Functions, problem solving
Private Speech
- When children explain their actions and thoughts
- Talking to themselves
- Vital in driving development
Piaget called it egocentric speech - Basis for higher cognitive processes i.e. problem solving
- Allows children to reflect
- Helps to guide difficult tasks
- More private speech leads to better task performance
- Children with learning and behavioural problems use private speech for longer rather than internalising (Ostad & Sorensen, 2007)
Zone of proximal development
- A level at which children can understand on their own
- A level which can be reached when given the correct support
- The zone of proximal development is the difference between these two
- Social interactions are important for us to reach our potential so the level which we can reach on our own then increases
Importance of Social interactions
- Intersubjectivity, start the task at two different levels and finish at the same.
- Scaffolding, adjusting task for children to better understand for example, breaking task down
- Guided participation (Rogoff, 2003), less formal teaching settings i.e. helping each other through play
Zone of Proximal development in research
Wertsch et al. (1980)
Wertsch et al. (1980): Problem solving with parent/ Mother
- As age increased children were less likely to need prompts or specific gazes to help them complete the puzzle
- Therefore, roles within this problem solving situation vary with age
Zone of Proximal Development in research
* Rogoff, Ellis and Gardner (1984)
- Mothers pay more attention to difficult tasks like maths rather than house hold chores
- Encourages children
Make Believe play
- Really important for cognitive development and social development
- Self regulation as the children aren’t responding to external stimuli, they are coming up with their own ideas.
Vygotsky Critical evaluation
- Underestimated the role of nature and how this impact learning
- Guide learning (what people can achieve is not as significant on their own)
- Children learn from each other collaborative
- Individual differences amongst children is really important - Vygotsky, sociocultural experiences
- Because of individual differences, important to tailor tasks - different difficulty chunks for different abilities
Piaget and Vygotsky Comparison
- Piaget has more of an inevitability, on how children develop whereas Vygotsky focuses on how the environment shapes children
- Piaget focuses what children can do on their own however, Vygotsky looks at what can be achieved when children work together and recieve support
- We don’t live in isolation, social context is important
Recent theoretical developments
- Movement towards nativism, criticism of Vygotsky as he may have neglected the role of nature
- Elizabeth Spelke’s research focuses on the role of nature, early childhood.
Life after Piaget and Vygotsky
Information processing theories: Siegler, (1996)
input -> processing -> output
- Focus on memory and attention
- slow to include biology and evolution
Neuroconstructivism: Karmiloff-Smith (1992)
- Genetics and environment
- Worked with Piaget, nature and nurture together
- Brains of children and adults as they develop as a result of the environment
Example Questions
How has Piaget’s work contributed to our understanding of cognitive development?
* How has Vygotsky’s work contributed to our understanding of cognitive development?
* How are the approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky similar?
Different?
* How has theory developed since Piaget and Vygotsky?
