Problem-Solving Behavior From Three Different

¶ … 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.

Vygotsky: Socialcultural Theories

Lev Vygotsky worked at the same time as Piaget and is one who built his body of work on and in contrast to Piaget. Vygotsky postulated that values, beliefs, skills and traditions that are transmitted from one generation to the next are the most important factors in growth of understanding one's world. Vygotsky agreed with Piaget that learning is active and constructed but he also believed that interaction and direct teaching played a critical role in a child's cognitive development. He also forwarded the concepts of relationships and private speech.

By Vygotsky's ideas, even Sara at the age of 2 could have enough of an understanding of the values of her world to know how important it was to make/keep mommy happy. This could influence her to seek assistance from someone in the family, in keeping with the precepts of the zone of proximal or potential development. This concept says that the low zone represents what the child already knows and can handle alone, and the high zone represents what the child needs mentoring for. With help, Sara could very well pick a gift appropriate to her mother's interest and taste. Because Jane at 10 has a broader experience of the world and more experience with her mother's likes and dislikes, her zone of proximal or potential development will be much larger, however she might very well take advantage of the more complete knowledge of people around her and try to buy or possibly make something really special.

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.