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Piaget Vs Vygotsky

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From the beginning of time and still to present day, people have always been curious as to how we develop from little tiny helpless humans into the fully functioning members of society. Two psychologists, Piaget and Vygotsky, developed different theories about cognitive and language development. Piaget’s theory says that children try to understand the world around them in different phases as they grow. As children, they want to make sense of everything that is going on around them. Piaget says that there are four stages of cognitive development that we go through as we age; sensory motor period, pre-operational period, concrete operational period, and finally the formal operational theory. According to Piaget, we should be through all of these …show more content…

The strengths of Piaget’s theories are that many parents and teachers use his theory to develop ideas on how to improve upon a child’s development. The different stages Piaget explained in his theory can help a teacher or parent judge where they think children are at developmentally. It can also help them see what areas the child needs to work on in order to move to the next stage (Cherry, 2017). The teachers can teach and remediate students based on what level or stage they are at. Thanks to Piaget’s theory now we can better understand children, so now we can communicate with them better since we know how they are thinking and developing (Kail, 2016). Piaget’s theory also inspired other researchers to further study child development and improve upon the research that he …show more content…

The first one being that his research was biased. He only used a very small sample of children to complete the study, and he also used his own kids in his experiments (Cherry, 2017). Piaget also did not take into account what children are capable of. He often asked the children too difficult of questions and/or made them very confusing for children to understand. Piaget also did not realize that many people never reach the final stage (formal operational period), he stated that we should all reach that stage between age 11 and adulthood (Kail, 2016). He also thought that the social environment and culture that someone is raised in did not affect the cognitive and language development of a child, this is a big weakness since he did not explore all options for why we develop the way we do. Piaget was also flawed in thinking that language comes after thought, when most other psychologists think development is a combination of both. Piaget said that developing thought was more important than developing language, which caused his findings to be skewed and biased (McLeod,

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