Piaget And Vygotsky Essays - Constructivism, Child Development

Piaget And Vygotsky Everyday life is characterized by conscious purpose. From reaching for food to designing an experiment, our actions are directed at goals. This purpose reveals itself partly in our conscious awareness and partly in the organization of our thoughts and actions. Cognition is the process involved in thinking and mental activity, such as attention, memory and problem solving. Much past and present theory has emphasized the parallels between the articulated prepositional structure of language and the structure of an internal code or language of thought. In this paper I will discuss language and cognition and two famous theorist who were both influential in forming a more scientific approach to analyzing the process of cognitive development. Jean Piaget There are those that say that Jean Piaget was the first to take children`s thinking seriously. Although Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist his real interest was epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which, like physics, was considered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science (2000). Children and their reasoning process fascinated Piaget. He began to suspect that observing how the child`s mind develops might discover the key to human knowledge. Piaget`s insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. Jean Piaget has made major theoretical and practical contributions to our understanding of the origins and evolution of knowledge. Stages of Childhood Development In his work Piaget identified stages of mental growth. He theorized that all children progressed through stages of cognitive development. He discovered that children think and reason differently at different periods in their lives. Piaget believed that everyone passed through a sequence of four qualitatively distinct stages. They are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. In the sensorimotor stage, occurring from birth to age 2, the child is concerned with gaining motor control and learning about physical objects. This stage promotes that thought is based primarily on action. Every time an infant does any action such as holding a bottle or learning to turn over, they are learning more about their bodies and how it relates to them and their environment. Piaget maintains that there are six sub-stages in the sensorimotor stage although children pass through three major achievements. In the preoperational stage, from ages 2 to 7, the child is preoccupied with verbal skills. At this point the child can name objects and reason intuitively. Piaget has divided this stage into the preoperational phase and the intuitive phase. In the preoperational phase children use language and try to make sense of the world but have a much less sophisticated mode of thought than adults. They need to test thoughts with reality on a daily basis and do not appear to be able to learn from generalizations made by adults. In the intuitive phase the child slowly moves away from drawing conclusions based solely on concrete experiences with objects. However, the conclusions drawn are based on rather vague impressions and perceptual judgments. It becomes possible to carry on a conversation with a child. Children develop the ability to classify objects on the basis of different criteria. At this stage children learn to count and use the concept of numbers. In the concrete operational stage, from ages 7 to 12, the child begins to deal with abstract concepts such as numbers and relationships. It is here that children learn mastery of classes, relations, numbers and how to reason. In this stage a person can do mental operations but only with real concrete objects, events or situations. Logical reasons are understood. For example, a concrete operational person can understand the need to go to bed early when it is necessary to rise early the next morning. A pre-operational child, on the other hand, does not understand this logic and substitutes the psychological reason, "I want to stay up. Finally, in the formal operational stage, age 12 to 15, the child begins to reason logically and systematically. The last stage deals with the mastery of thought (Evans, 1973). A formal operational thinker can do abstract thinking and starts to enjoy abstract thought. The formal operational thinker is able to think ahead to plan the solution path. Finally, the formal operational person is capable of meta-cognition, that is, thinking about thinking. A central component of Piaget`s developmental theory of learning and thinking is that both involve the participation of the learner. Knowledge is not merely transmitted verbally but must be constructed and reconstructed by the learner. Piaget asserted that for a child to know and construct knowledge of the world the child