Overview Of Piaget And Vygotsky

The Cognitive theory was developed by Piaget. In this theory Piaget insisted that children are not born with instinctive ideas of reality. Piaget viewed development as a process that helped humans relate to their environment. With this he felt that children actively create new ideas based on previous experiences or observation. Piaget believed that we gained knowledge through active exploration that takes the form scheme. A scheme is a cognitive structure or organized patter of action that people construct to interpret their actions. Piaget believed that all schemes, which were forms of understanding that, are created though the operation of inborn intellectual functions. He called these functions organization and adaptation. Organizations are how children systematically combined existing schemes into more complex ones. Adaptation is the process to the demands of your environment, this occurs through

to complentary processes, assilmation and accommodation. Assilamtion is a process in how we interpret our new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures. Accommodation is the process of modifying existing schemes and making them better to fit new experiences. Thru the development of intelligence and the interaction of the individual and the environment nature provide the complementary process of assilmation and accommodation with make adaptation to the environment possible. As a result to the interactions, humans progress through

4 stages of development. The 4 stages are sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years) pre operational state (2 to 7 years), the concrete operation stage (7 to 11 years) and the formal operation stage (11 years and beyond). However depending on experiences children might progress at different rates through these stages. As children progress through

the sensorimotor period by perceiving and acting on the world, they progress by using their reflexes to adapt to their environment, using symbolic or representational thought to solve problems in their heads. In the pre operational stage children make use of their symbolic capacity but are limited by their dependence on appearance, lack of logical mental operation and ego centrism. They fail to grasp the concept of conservation because they centraiton, irreversible thinking and static thought. In the concrete operational stage most of the problems in the pre operational stage are solved. Concrete operational students can reverse thought and can understand change, Cognitive changes result in other developmental advances and my contribute to confusion, rebellion, idealism, and adolescent egocentrism. Adolescent ego centrism leads to imaginary audiences and the personal fable. The imaginary audience involves confusion with your own thought, for example, a child might feel that people are staring at them, but it is usually exaggerated thoughts. Personal fable is best described by a teenage girl who feels that her mother has never felt the same feelings that she is currently feeling. In formal operations adults are most likely to display the best skills in their area of expertise. Some adults will revert back to formal operational thought, however some back to concrete thought state, not all adults go through this change.

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