Jean Piaget And Vygotsky's Theory Of Cognitive Development

Cognitive development is concerned with the many ways in which children’s thinking develops in stages of life to adulthood. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky two influential developmental psychologists, play an important role in developing a scientific approach to examining the cognitive development process of a child. As similar as their theories are, they have numerous differences.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. Piaget believed that children construct an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies

In this stage, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences with physical interactions with objects. Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform within it. They progress from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage. Piaget believed that children’s knowledge of the world was organized into schemas, structured patterns of knowledge and action. A schema allows an individual to make sense of the world as scheme are experiences, memory, and information. At age two, children enter the preoperational stage. During the preoperational stage of cognitive development, children learn how to think abstractly, understand symbolic concepts, and use language in more sophisticated ways. During this stage of cognitive development children become insatiably curious and begin to ask questions about everything they see. Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of

Vygotsky’s main assertion was that children are entrenched in different sociocultural contexts and their cognitive development is advanced through social interaction with more skilled individuals. The Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development is mainly concerned with the more complex cognitive activities of children that are governed and influenced by several principles. Believing that children construct knowledge actively, Vygotsky’s theory is also one of those responsible for laying the groundwork for