Problem-solving behavior in two children through Piaget and Vygotsky

¶ … problem-solving behavior from three different developmental perspectives. I will be handling the material as though the two children are from different families since if they were sisters, each of them, especially two-year-old Sara, could be influenced by the problem-solving process of the other.

Piaget: Constructivist Theories

Jean Piaget must be considered the father of developmental psychology. Even if many of his theories have shown weaknessess, the important thing is he created theories about how people learn. His stages of development helped to provide shape and order in thinking about learning. In the course of providing that shape and order he gave others something to focus their work on. This is, in many ways, the heart and soul of research: each worker uses the work of others as the baseline to see how their own work is coming. The four stages of development provide something to measure observations against.

Constructivist theories state that thinking and learning are a process of interaction between a person and the environment. These theories also state that all species inherit basic tendencies to organize their lives and adapt to their environment. The theories also go on to state the ideas that by a combination of innate cognitive structures and experience cause the constant revision of one's own knowledge. There area three major aspects of constructivist theories. Assimilation: is the acquisition of new knowledge and organizing it to fit what is already known. Accommodation: the new information changes what the person thinks about a given subject. Equilibration: the attempt that is constantly made to make sense of and seeming differences of experience and perceptions.

One of the stages of development Piaget postulates involves what he calls a characteristic of egocentrism which is defined roughly as an unawareness of any point-of-view but one's own. Sara, at age two is in this stage and might very well buy her mother the same kind of present she herself would like to receive -- the mentioned doll, or maybe a teddy bear. Jane, however, at the age of 10 is in the stage Piaget labels concrete operations and Jane is more likely to observe what kinds of things her mother buys for herself and is also more likely to perform the very concrete operation of asking the advice of an adult.

Siegler: Information Processing Theories

Information processing theories have much the same foundations as constructivist or socialcultural theory but seem to focus more on exactly how attention and memory work and grow and change in the child. Attention improves a lot in early childhood although with the younger child, focus can get stuck on the most noticeable feature of an issue, the term is salient, rather than the most important aspects. An example used was that the young child may be more likely to notice a brightly colored clown in a message, than the message itself. A fairly simple measure of attention in children is how long they can watch TV before they chose to do something else. Further, memory also is shown to improve greatly during early childhood. Children learn to use rehearsal as a tool and the speed of processing also improves. Information processing theorists believe that if individual parts of tasks are analyzed so that they can be made more interesting and simple, that various aspects of cognitive development can occur earlier than previously thought possible.

If Sara lives in a stable, safe environment where she is provided with the kinds of learning opportunities and materials to help her make the most of her natural maturation processes, it is possible that she might be observant and attending enough to notice her mother's activities enough to buy her mother a gift that focuses on something her mother does all the time. For example, she may see her mother performing an activity such as knitting and seeing knitting needles at the local Wal-Mart decide that purchasing a new pair of knitting needles would be just the thing. There are plenty of reasons why such an item might attract her attention both at home and in the store. First, they would be something she would associate with her mother, second, they are usually brightly colored.

It would probably make very good sense even to one so young.

Jane, whose attention and memory will be almost approaching adult development might very well be more likely to think in terms of more personal items such as clothing or jewelry. She's had more time to study her world and her mother, and she has had the opportunity to see how her mother has responded to various types of presents in the past. She can make an informed choice that will include attention, memory and task analysis.