The three main cognitivist theories are those promulgated by Piaget, Bruns, and Vygotsky. Piaget's theory of cognitive development focuses upon the changes that occur in children and adolescents' and attempts to explain the changes in logical thinking that occur throughout the life cycle. The theory is placated upon four stages that are predicated upon maturation and experience wherein each stage produces a different level of logical and critical thinking by children. According …show more content…
According to Vygotsky, language and speech represent the preeminent psychological tool responsible for how children develop and learn. He promulgated that children progressively adapted to more complex speech development as they aged, and he placed heavily influence on six different areas regarding developmental processes in children. These included his belief that children developed the ability to construct knowledge through informal and formal conversations with adults during their formative years of life, which are the most critical for development because this is the stage wherein children first begin to establish independent thought and language that progressively becomes more independent and complex. The children must engage in mental activities such as basic social activities before they can cognitively develop the skills to perform more difficult tasks. As the child progresses throughout their lifecycle, they are able to develop more advanced individual skills to complete increasingly more difficult tasks that are able to promote cognitive development growth, and challenge children to stretch themselves …show more content…
Therefore, he championed a curriculum that education fosters the development of problem-solving skills wherein children are given the autonomy to learn through the processes of inquiry and discovery. Under his theory, educators must provide children with subject matter that is taught in terms of how a child's views world. Integrated curriculum that is be designed so to allow each stage of the process to flow into each other is recommended wherein children who master one skill are able to utilize this skill to master more powerful skills. Similar to Vygotsky and Piaget, he also believed that the child's social environment and culture should shape notions of how children learn predicated upon cultural norms in which people have organized views of themselves and others and the world in which they live. Bruner focused on three stages of cognitive representation including enactive, which is the representation of knowledge through actions, iconic, which represents visual summarization of images, and symbolic representation, that is placated upon the use of words and other symbols to describe