Vygotsky's Theory Of Cognitive Development

Vygotsky placed a great deal of importance on the position played by culture in an infant’s development. He accepted that infants were born with established mental abilities like the capacity to focus on specific items. However, according to his theory, infants don 't have the capacity to do thing such as problem solving. Infants are able to learn through guided learning from more intelligent people. One of the key ideas of Vygotsky 's theory is the zone of proximal development. This is the difference between what a child can achieve when working by themselves and what the same child can achieve when given assistance from someone with the necessary knowledge. Another idea of how children learn is by the idea of scaffolding. This was suggested by Bruner et al in 1976 as a development of Vygotsky 's zone of proximal development. It refers to the context provided by knowledgeable people including parents and teachers to help children develop their cognitive skills. The 'scaffolding ', or support, provided by these adults is gradually removed as the child becomes more confident. The concept of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding has proved very efficient in teaching which only go’s to prove how accurate and appropriate these theories are. A dominate persuading element of children 's cognitive development according to Vygotsky is language. He hypothesise that there are four phrases to the development of language. These consist of the first phrase, during which language and thought are independent and children have only pre-verbal and pre-intellectual language; the second during which language and thought run alongside each other but have little effect on each other; the third during which children begin to make use of speech with others as well as private speech to make sense of things; and finally the fourth phrase during which language becomes increasingly central to cognitive development. At first private speech is spoken out loud but increasingly becomes internal in this last phrase. An important achievement developed during the third stage is that of intersubjectivity. This refers to the process by which two people whose original opinions on a subject are opposing move toward an agreement of what is involved. For example, a child listens to both their own view and that of someone else and comes to an understanding. Evidence to support Vygotsky 's theory of social context being important can be found in the observations of Wertch et al in 1980. Wertch observed that young children were more likely to construct a particular truck out of a selection when the child 's mother was looking at it showing that these young children were very much influenced by their mothers as can be expected from Vygotsky 's theory. However, the same did not apply with older children …show more content…
Piaget believed that cognitive development consists of four main stages; sensor motor, pre-operational, concrete-operational and formal-operational, these stages finish when adulthood is reached. Piaget 's theory suggests that development has an endpoint. There are two points to consider when examining these stages; firstly there is the validity of the ages put to them along with the fact that maybe not every person would indeed reach the formal-operational stage. Secondly, this would suggest that we did not continue to develop through adulthood, but as human beings do we not evolve and change constantly whether it is physically or …show more content…
Piaget saw morality as a structure of rules, which governs communication between people. The methods of examination he used to develop his theories were, he looked at the way children in forced the rules in their games. He used games to study the development of children’s moral development as he thought that by studying rules in the situation of a game, he could study the child’s spontaneous more directly.
Piaget recognised phrases of moral development. His theories of the way children think and their moral interpretation goes through a series of phrases, as they are acclimating to the world, these are also known as the procedures of accommodation and assimilation. He concluded that as children’s interpretation about the world changes when they grow older and gain more experience, so does their interpretation about morality. Their competence to think about the world in more complicated ways is what causes them to move on from one phrase to the next. Piaget believed that children do not comprehend much about morality until they are about three years of