Piaget And Vygotsky: Similar Differences

Piaget and Vygotsky: Similar Differences People recognize that Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are two of the most influential thinkers in the world of developmental psychology. These two theorists are similar in several ways but are also different in at least one key area (Lourenço, p. 282). It is important for educators to understand the philosophies of each in order to become familiar with how children develop so that their students can receive the most benefit from instruction.
Piaget: A Brief Introduction Swiss scientist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) believed that children get knowledge of their environment by being active. As they move, they absorb information from the people, things, sights and sounds around them. This step is called assimilation.
He observed many subjects including his own children, nieces and nephews in order to reach conclusions for how children independently. In stage one, the sensory motor stage, children learn most from their movements and the sensations that they experience from these movements. Looking at this stage, you see children from birth to about the age of two years, touching, tasting, and examining closely, many items. They store the knowledge that they gain and use that for the future. In the second stage, the preoperational stage, the now aged two to seven year old, is building language and associating words with objects. The third stage, the concrete operational stage, brings the child to the age of eleven. The child is now able to associate different points of view and is able to sort items by size, color and pattern but is not able to apply this thinking to abstract topics. Finally in the fourth stage, which takes the child from the onset of puberty into adulthood, he or she can grasp abstract reasoning and test hypotheses, apply logic and form conclusions (Psychology Notes Headquarters,
Children are actively involved in their learning and are curious about their surroundings (McLeod, 2014). Piaget believed in independent discovery that happens in stages. Vygotsky believed that learning was something that continued all throughout life. Vygotsky differs from Piaget in the idea of the influence of social factors. He feels that with an adult helper, children can learn more and use their new knowledge to direct choices yet to come. Surprisingly, however, Piaget admits that social interactions are a necessary and vital part of many steps of cognitive development (Lourenço, p.