Piaget believed action is used by the child in order to understand and construct their knowledge base. "To understand is to invent." In contrast, Vygotsky believed that understanding comes only through social interaction.
Role of Culture
Vygotsky believed that cultural artifacts pla a major role in illiciting an account of where the mind is. The ZPD reflects Vygotsky's view that learning is distinct from development, as the ZPD has been defined as "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky 86). Piaget, on the other hand, does not have a clear set of issues and phenomena that appear because of culture, so it is hard to compare the two at this point.
Role of the Instructor
In North American education Vygotsky's idea has been interpreted in a more controlled and top-down fashion, where a teaching adult is believed to be needed for a child's development. This is known as scaffolding. The best-known ZPD programs are Reciprocal teaching and Fostering communities of learners. The ZPD concept was also used by Lidz, Brown and Campione in the research and development of Dynamic assessment, where practical intelligence and speech development are often interwoven.
Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of ideas. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals (Vygotsky, 57).
Piaget, on the other hand, believed that young children are as smart as their elders, but they just think differently....
His background of being a biologist made him focus on adaptation to the environment. Piaget believed there were four stages of cognitive development: Sensorimotor stage (Infancy), Pre-occupational Stage (Toddler and Early Childhood), Concrete Occupational Stage (Elementary and Early Adolescence) and Formal Operational Stage (Adolescence and Adulthood) (Saettler, 331).
Whereas Vygotsky looked more to social interaction as the primary source of cognition and behaviour, Piaget felt that biological influences on development determined our ability to do abstract symbolic reasoning, and that a gradual learning experience based on the early childhood ability to think in complex strategies are the keys to maturation and successful learning and functioning. Piaget believed that we have the biological makeup to develop mental organizations called schemes, while Vygotsky believed that social influences are stronger and determine how children begin and develop their mental problem-solving and social abilities, as they continue to learn.
Works Cited
Crawford, Kathryn. Vygotskian Approaches to Human Development in the Information Era. Educational Studies in Mathematics. (31) 43-62, 1996.
Driscoll, Marcy P. (1994). Psychology of Learning for Instruction. Needham, MA: Allyn, Bacon.
Hausfather, Samuel J. "Vygotsky and Schooling: Creating a Social Contest for learning." Action in Teacher Education. (18) 1-10, 1996.
Riddle, Elizabeth M., Lev Vygotsky's Social Development Theory, March, 1999. http://chd.gmu.edu/immersion/knowledgebase/theorists/constructivism/vygotsky.htm.
Saettler, P. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Egnlewood, Co: Libraries Unlimited. 1990.
Vygotsky, Lev S. Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1978.
