Vygotsky Vs Piaget Essay

The main difference with Vygotsky and Piaget’s views on the relationship between instruction and development is that Vygotsky was a social constructivist and that social learning is the forefront of a child’s learning whereas Piaget was a cognitive constructivist and believed that children have to go through 4 stages of cognitive development. Vygotsky believed that learning occurs before development. “Unlike Piaget's notion that childrens' development must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued, "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function" (1978, p. 90). In other words, social learning tends to precede (i.e., come before) development.” Mcleod, S (2014)This theory translates into the classroom in the way that Vygotsky would believe that students would learn more from their peers and thrive in a situation that group work is more emphasized in a classroom. Vygotsky also put an emphasis on his concept of zone of proximal development. Vygotsky belived that every task given to a child falls on a part of this zone. The lower limit of ZDP would be the task that a child can complete on their own, while an upper limit level task would be one that needed the assistance of an instructor or skilled classmate. The whole time the child would be developing who they are …show more content…
Therefore in the classroom, Piaget would want students to work individually on a problem and have that children explore ways to solve on their own. It would be up to the teacher to ask questions that help the student come up with the answer to a problem. Piaget’s views of a teacher is to facilitate, facilitate, facilitate. Piaget’s believed that cognitive development has to take place first and that children may not be capable to solve certain problems based the cognitive stage they are in rather that looking at a child’s capability beyond their