Piaget and Vygotsky’s Developmental Theories
Education Foundations, Week 3
 Piaget:
o Bio and context
o Developmental stages
o The learning process
o Piaget’s classroom
 Vygotsky:
o Bio and context
o Development and social relation
o ZPD
o The role of language
o Vygotsky’s classroom
 Started as a zoologist
 Worked with Binet on standardising IQ tests
 Clinical method
 Sensori-motor thinking
 Preoperational thinking
 Concrete operational thinking
 Formal operation thinking
 Universal stages
 Invariant sequence
 Individual differences in age limits
 Developmental milestones:
o Object permanence
o Goal-directed actions
o Immediate and deferred imitation
o Emergence of pretend play
 Developmental milestones:
o Acquisition of language
o Emergence of symbolic thought
o Blossoming of pretend play
 Animism
 Centration
(lack of conservation)
 Precausal reasoning
“I haven’t had a nap,
so it’s not afternoon yet”
 Egocentricism
 Developmental milestone -- conservation
o Identity;
o reversibility;
o compensation;
o seriation;
o classfication
 Concrete specificity rather than abstract reasoning
 Developmental milestones:
o Propositional thinking
o Hypothetical-deductive reasoning
• Not every individual reaches this stage
• Context matters
• Formal schooling plays a key role
 Schemes: a cluster or structure of ideas organising
existing knowledge to make sense of new experiences
 Disequilibrium
 Adaptation:
1) assimilation
2) accommodation
 Students as ‘solitary scientists’
 Constructivism; discovery learning; inquiry-based
learning
 Peers as thought provokers
 Teachers as assessors and experience providers
 Research methods
 Later research findings
 Stage-like development
 Tendencies rather than potentials
 Universal vs differences
 Born in Orsha and raised in
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
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Gomel, Russia
Superior intellect shown in early
schooling
Entered university through Jewish
lottery
Philosophy, art, psychology
Oppressed by the Stalin regime,
his publications were prohibited
till 50 years after his death
 Teaching and learning lead development; teaching
cannot lag behind development
 From lower (first-order) to higher (mediated) mental
functions
 "The central fact about our psychology is the fact
of mediation”
 Interpsychology --
intrapsychology
 "We can formulate the genetic law of cultural development in the following
way... Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice, or on
two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological
plane. First it appears between people as an inter-psychological category and
then within the individual child as an intra-psychological category... but it
goes without saying that internalisation transforms the process itself and
changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relations among
people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships”.
(Vygotsky 1978)
 The meaning of ‘Hello’
 The origin of the indicative function of finger
pointing
 Enabling thinking development and transformation
 The ‘square bamboo’ story
 Realising the knowledge potential in apparently
wrong, illogical and nonsensical remarks
 Distance between what students can do independently
and what they can do with others
 Measuring the size of the child’s mind by the shadow it
casts vs. understanding the child’s mind by the
assisted light it emits
 Role of teacher
Guide and mentor
 Role of peers
Guide and mentor
 Dynamic assessment