Abstract
Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky have both contributed to developmental psychology by explaining the way a child’s cognition develops and how they learn. Vygotsky places emphasis on culture and social factors affecting cognitive development. Through his model of the more knowledgeable other and zone of proximal development he also emphasizes the importance of a mentor or an adult guiding the child. Vygotsky’s time was a time of tyranny and oppression but that did not stop him from being Jewish nor expressing the views he believed in. Piaget believes in universal stages of development. He also emphasizes the importance of the schema and peer interaction. He believes in the study of genetic epistemology and its evolutionary effect on the way a person will adapt or accommodate. Both were great scientists that greatly left their mark on developmental psychology.
Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget
Lev Vygotsky is one of the most influential pioneers in psychology and pedagogy in history (Haggbloom, Warnick, Jones, Yarbrough, Russell, Borecky, McGahhey, et.al, 2002). Despite living in hardship and times of tyranny, he and his ideas managed to persevere, and flourish. His works on cognitive development manage to line up with new scientific advances. Not surprisingly, many articles, papers, and books follow closely with his teachings. Vygotsky is a significant origin of the development of many ideas in cognition, ideas that complement that of Jean Piaget’s (Pass, 2007).
Many times, Vygotsky and Piaget are seen as complete opposites when it comes to their teachings. Some people believe that Piaget explored the very roots of a person in Genetic Epistemology, while Vygotsky focused on the social aspects of learning in his Cultural-Historical Theory. To view them as separate entities is wrong, they are more complementary than they are opposites. Both focused on the aspects of learning; Piaget focused on individualization meanwhile Vygotsky focused on the social aspect. (Pass, 2007) Vygotsky and Piaget even communicated in their time until the great Iron Curtain was placed between the East and West by Joseph Stalin in 1924. Throughout this paper as we study the historical lives and working theories of both Vygotsky and Piaget, we will see how they are complementary to each other.
Lev Vygotsky
Perspective and contributions
In his theory, Vygotsky believed that social influences on cognitive development had a huge role in the developing child (Vygotsky, 1978). According to his theories, Vygotsky believes that especially important learning happens through social interactions between a child and another. Vygotsky calls this cooperative dialogue; it is where the developing child embraces information provided by (often) a parent and then internalizes the new information using it as a template or guide (Vygotsky, 1978). This type of social interaction, according to Vygotsky encourages cognitive development.
Another take of Vygotsky’s on cognitive development is called the more knowledgeable other. The more knowledgeable other is the party that has a better or higher understanding of the learner. This more knowledgeable other has a key role in Vygotsky’s theory of Zone of Proximal Development.
The Zone of Proximal Development highlights how much a child or learner can learn more with a more knowledgeable other in comparison to learning alone. Vygotsky views the Zone of Proximal Development as the most sensitive area in which instruction should be given, it is where a child or learner can develop higher mental functions.
In his theory of cultural mediation, Vygotsky simplifies the mind to a string of atomic structures with relation to the brain as only S-R processes, or stimulus response processes (Vygotsky, 1978). In his mind, the relationship between a human mind and an object is looked for in society and culture and must be studied as they change historically, rather than the relationship between the human mind and the object directly. Vygotsky believed that consciousness is brought about by human activity encouraged by stimulus. This idea is manifested in Vygotsky’s triangular model. The model portrays the subject, mediating artefacts, object, and outcome.
Vygotsky believes that the use of signs goes to a detailed structure of human behavior, divorcing from simple biological development, making room for novel culturally based psychological processes. Therefore, in Vygotsky’s mind, people cannot be understood without their cultural context. The object translates into their cultural state, and action directed at the object becomes human understanding.
Impact
Vygotsky’s studies on cognition are in line with and have inspired contemporary research. Most of Vygotsky’s work as mentioned previously concentrated on the effects cultural environment may have on cognitive development and learning. His experiment with Luria done in Uzbekistan in 1930 and 1931 was to explore the influence of culture on learning and on the development of higher cognitive functions (Luria, 1931). One major contribution of the research was that illiterate people were tied to concrete situations of life and struggle solving problems that go beyond personal experience. The real conclusion the research made was that the usage of abstract reasoning depends, to a degree, on the educational skill level of that person.
Interestingly enough, contemporary research supports Vygotsky’s conclusions (Ardila, 2016). A study done on five hundred and twenty-one individuals with ranging ages found, after conducting several memory and executive function tests, that age is concerned with memory meanwhile education level is concerned with executive function, a cognition brain factor. This means that abstract problem solving and other functions alike are closely associated with an individual’s degree of education and learning, just as Vygotsky and Luria found in the Uzbekistan study (Ardila, 2016).
Personal life
Vygotsky was born on November 5, 1986 to a family that was well off. He was the second child of eight children and had access to proper education. All children had access to private tutors and a library, further implicating the family was well fed and well off (Veer and Valsiner, 1991). Later in his life, Vygotsky created the cultural-historical theory of psychology, yet the works that talk about it very rarely take into account his personal life. In his developmental years, he was surrounded by a Jewish world. His friends, the place he lived, and especially family had a sturdy connection with their Jewish heritage. In works of school and education, Vygotsky raised interest about Jewish history and the problem of anti-Semitism. Vygotsky was curated to become a thinker that would create a cultural-historical take on psychology with his upbringing. He was influenced by the works of Spinoza, a person who defied authority when authority defied reason and logic (Kotik-Friedgut and Friedgut, 2007). Vygotsky spent his life trying to harmonize between worlds. He was defiant to ethnic labeling and dedicated his life to serving human universal values. He absorbed much Jewish history and culture as a child, which made it a framework to which he referenced later in his career (Kotik-Friedgut and Friedgut, 2007). A prime example of this is his complete rejection of bigotry in his personal life and that of an authority figure.
Jean Piaget
Perspective and contributions
Jean Piaget first addressed psychology in the 1920’s (Vidal, 1994). He was a scientist that explored structural changes that happen during cognitive development. Using concepts from sciences like biology and philosophy, he was able to examine the way children discover the world around them. One of his earliest contributions was his take on children moving from a state of egocentrism to a more understanding viewpoint of society. Egocentrism is defined as the inability to differentiate between one’s self and other (Kesselring and Müller, 2011).
Piaget also believed that thinking processes and intellectual development could be a result of biological processes through evolutionary adaptation of the species. This adaptation has two pathways: assimilation and accommodation (Beilin, 1992). Assimilation is when the response to a new event is in line with an existing schema. Meanwhile, accommodation is when the response to a new event is modifying an existing schema or even creating an entirely new schema (Wachtel, 1980).
One of the key things to note about Piaget is that his models were in stages. In his mind, intelligence develops in a series of stages that are closely tied with age. Each stage is progressive since one must complete a stage to graduate to the next. Children must also keep up with their mental abilities learned in the previous stage in order to be able to reconstruct concepts (Ginsburg, 1982).
Jean Piaget believed himself to be a genetic epistemologist. In his mind, that meant that in order to define knowledge as one learns it, it should be on the basis of its history, sociogeneisis and psychological origins. He is alike with Vygotsky in that way.
Piaget saw cognitive structures and development separate from biological processes. His structuralist approach excited many psychologists at the time. Piaget described four theories of development: sensorimotor stage, properational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage (Santrock, 1998).
In the sensorimotor stage (age 0-2 years), the infant explores the world through direct sensory and motor contact. This is usually when object permanence and speration anxiety develop (Santrock, 1998).
In the preoperational stage (age 2-6 years), the child uses symbols to represent objects but does not reason logically, even though they develop the skill to pretend. This is also when egocentrism is at its peak (Santrock, 1998).
In the concrete operational stage (age 7-12 years), the child can think logically about concrete object and understands conservation (Santrock, 1998).
In the formal operational stage (age 12- adult) the adolescent can reason abstractly and think in hypothetical terms (Santrock, 1998).
Impact
Through his theory of cognitive development, Piaget was able to impact the area of developmental psychology. He changed the way people approach education. He paved the path to better curriculum that enhances student logical and conceptual process. He provided guidelines for instruction, emphasizing interaction with the environment. He also influenced how they hold children accountable for moral obligations. He altered perspectives on evolution and even philosophy. Even though artificial intelligence was something that came way after his time, through Piaget’s structural breakdown of how learning happens, he provided a model for AI scientists to use.
Personal life
Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896 in Switzerland. He only took on child psychology late in his career and identified for the world the four stages of mental development. He found his theory by studying his own children. His early work with Binet testing led him to believe that children had different thinking processes than adults (Zigler and Gilman, 1998). His research in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology both sought to answer his question of how one grows.
Historical and social conditions
Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century was a time of exuberant culture. It had a regime soaked in autocracy but ruled by one who did not know how to carry that out. Many times brutal oppression was the government’s go-to when faced with protest of any kind (Kotik-Friedgut and Friedgut, 2007). It was also the Golden Decade, one where industrialization was blooming and social changes were happening. This environment created a society that was accepting of theories and ways (psychological) to understand the new structures of social relations. However, it was not all acceptance for Vygotsky.
A telling of his personal narrative should highlight the suppression that came with the Stalinist government he endured. From 1936 to 1956, it was illegal to explore any of Vygotsky’s work within the Soviet Union (Veer and Valsiner, 1991). Still, his work was preserved and was able to persevere until more forgiving times.