How did Piaget
view Cognitive Development?
Jean Piaget, born in Switzerland in 1896, is the most
influential developmental psychologist in the history of psychology (see
Flavell, 1996). After receiving his doctorate in biology, he became more
interested in psychology, basing his earliest theories on careful observation
of his own three children. Piaget thought of himself as applying biological
principles and methods to the study of human development, and many of the terms
he introduced to psychology were drawn directly from biology.
Piaget explored both why and how mental abilities change over
time. For Piaget, development depends in large part on the child's manipulation
of and active interaction with the environment. In Piaget's view, knowledge
comes from action (see Langer & Killen, 1998; Wadsworth, 1996). Piaget's
theory of cognitive development proposes that a child's intellect, or
cognitive abilities, progresses through four distinct stages. Each stage is
characterized by the emergence of new abilities and ways of processing
information. Many of the specifics of Piaget's theories have been challenged in
later research. In particular, many of the changes in cognitive functioning he
described are now known to take place earlier, under certain circumstances.
Nevertheless, Piaget's work forms an essential basis for understanding child
development.
How Development
Occurs
Schemes: Piaget believed that all children are born with an innate tendency to interact with and make sense of their environments. He referred to the basic ways of organizing and processing information as cognitive structures. Young children demonstrate patterns of behavior or thinking, called schemes that older
children and adults
also use
in dealing with objects in the world. We use schemes to find out about and act in the world; each scheme treats all objects and events in the same way. For example, most young infants will discover that one thing you can do with objects is bang them. When they do this, the object makes a noise, and they see the object hitting a surface. Their observations tell them something about the object. Babies also learn about objects by biting them, sucking on them, and throwing them. Each of these approaches to interacting with objects is a scheme. When babies encounter a new object, how are they to know what this object is all about? According to Piaget, they will use the schemes they have developed and will find out whether the object makes a loud or soft sound when banged, what it tastes like, whether it gives milk, and maybe whether it rolls or just goes thud when dropped.
Assimilation and
Accommodation: According to Piaget, adaptation is the process of adjusting schemes in response to the environment by means of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process of understanding a new object or event in terms of an existing scheme. If you give young infants small objects that they have never seen before but that resemble familiar objects, they are likely to grasp them, bite them, and bang them. In other words, they will try to use existing schemes to learn about these unknown things (see Figure 2.lb). Similarly, a high school student may have a studying scheme that involves putting information on cards and memorizing the cards' contents. She may then try to apply this scheme to lean difficult concepts such as economics, for which this approach may not be effective. Sometimes, when old ways of dealing with the world simply don't work, a child might modify an existing scheme in light of new information or a new experience, a process called accommodation. For example, if you give an egg to a baby who has a banging scheme for small objects, what will happen to the egg is obvious (Figure. Less obvious, however, is what will happen to the baby's banging scheme. Because of the unexpected consequences of banging the egg, the baby might change scheme. In the future the baby might bang some objects hard and others softly. The high school student who studies only by means of memorization might learn to use a different strategy to study economics, such as discussing difficult concepts with a friend.
The baby who banged the egg and the student who tried to memorize rather than comprehend had to deal with situations that could not be fully handled by existing schemes. This, in Piaget's theory, creates a state of disequilibrium, or an imbalance between what is understood and what is encountered. People naturally try to reduce such imbalances by focusing on the stimuli that cause the disequilibrium and develop new schemes or adapting old ones until equilibrium is restored. This process of restoring balance is called equilibration. According
to Piaget, learning depends on this process. When equilibrium is upset, children have the opportunity to grow and develop. Eventually, qualitatively new ways of thinking about the world emerge, and children advance to a new stage of development. Piaget believed that physical experiences and manipulation of the environment are critical for developmental change to occur. However, he also believed that social interaction with peers, especially arguments and discussions, helps to clarify thinking and, eventually, to make it more logical. Research has stressed the importance of confronting students with experiences or data that do not fit into their current theories of how the world works as a means of advancing their cognitive development (Chinn & Brewer, 1993).
Piaget's theory of development represents constructivism, a view of cognitive development as a process in which children actively build systems of meaning and understandings of reality through their experiences and interactions (Berk, 2003; Cook & Cook, 2005). In this view, children actively construct knowledge by continually assimilating and accommodating new information.
Piaget's Stages
of Development
Piaget divided the cognitive development of children and adolescents into four stages: Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. He believed that all children pass through these stages in this order and that no child can skip a stage, although different children pass through the stages at somewhat different rates (see de Ribaupierre & Rieben, 1995). The same individuals may perform tasks associated with different stages at the same time, particularly at points of transition into a new stage. Table 2.1 summarizes the approximate ages at which children and adolescents pass through Piaget's four stages. It also shows the major accomplishments of each stage.
Sensorimotor Stage
(Birth to Age
2): The earliest stage is called sensorimotor, because during this stage babies and young children explore their world by using their senses and their motor skills. Piaget believed that all children are born with an innate tendency to interact with and make sense of their environments. Dramatic changes occur as infants progress through the sensorimotor period. Initially, all infants have inborn behaviors called reflexes. Touch a newborn's lips, and the baby will begin to suck; place your finger in the palm of an infant's hand, and the infant will grasp it. These and other behaviors are innate and are the building blocks from which the infant's first schemes form. Infants soon learn to use these reflexes to produce more
interesting and intentional patterns of behavior. This learning occurs
initially through accident and then through more intentional trial-and-error
efforts. According to Piaget, by the end of the sensorimotor stage, children have progressed from their earlier trial-and-error approach to a more planned approach to problem solving. For the first time they can mentally represent objects and events. What most of us would call "thinking" appears now. This is a major advance, because it means that the child can think through and plan behavior. For example, suppose a 2-year-old is in the kitchen watching his
mother prepare
dinner. If the child knows where the step stool is kept, he may ask to have it set up to afford a better view of the counter and a better chance for a nibble. The child did not stumble on to this solution accidentally. Instead, he thought about the problem, figured out a possible solution that used the step stool, tried out the solution mentally, and only then tried the solution in practice.
Another hallmark of the sensorimotor period is the development of a grasp of object permanence. Piaget argued that children must learn that objects are physically stable and exist even when the objects are not in the child's physical presence. For example, if you cover an infant's bottle with a towel, the child may not remove it, believing that the bottle is gone. By 2 years of age, children understand that objects exist even if they cannot be seen. When children develop this notion of object permanence, they have taken a step toward more advanced thinking. Once they realize that things exist out of sight, they can start using symbols to represent these things in their minds so that they can think about them (Cohen & Cashon, 2003).
Preoperational Stage
(Ages 2 to 7): Whereas infants can learn about and understand the world only by physically manipulating objects, preschoolers have greater ability to think about things and can use symbols to mentally represent objects. During the preoperational stage,
children's language and concepts develop at an incredible rate. Yet much of their thinking remains surprisingly primitive. One of Piaget's earliest and most important discoveries was that young children lacked an understanding of the principle of conservation. For example, if you pour milk from a tall, narrow container into a shallow, wide one in the presence of a preoperational child, the child will firmly believe that the tall glass has more milk. The child focuses on only one aspect (the height of the milk), ignoring all others, and cannot be convinced that the amount of milk is the same. Similarly, a preoperational child is likely to believe that a sandwich cut in four pieces is more sandwich or that a line of blocks that is spread out contains more blocks line
that is compressed, even after being shown that the number of blocks is identical. Several aspects
of preoperational thinking help to explain the error on conservation tasks. One characteristic is centration: paying attention to only one aspect of a situation. An example can be illustrated where children might have claimed that there was less milk after pouring because they centered on the height of the milk, ignoring its width. In another example, children focus on the length of the line of blocks but ignore its density (or the actual number of blocks). Preschoolers' thinking can also be characterized as being irreversible.
Reversibility is a very important aspect of thinking, according to Piaget; it simply means the ability to change direction in one's thinking so that one can return to a starting point. As adults, for example, we know that if 7 + 5 = 12, then 12 - 5 = 7. If we add 5 things to 7 things and then take the 5 things away (reverse what we've done), we are left with 7 things. If preoperational children could
think this
way, then
they could
mentally reverse
the process of pouring the milk and realize that if the milk were poured back into the tall beaker, its quantity would not change.
Another characteristic of the preoperational child's thinking is its focus on states.
In the milk problem the milk was poured from one container to another. Preschoolers
ignore this pouring
process and
focus only
on the beginning state (milk in a tall glass) and end state (milk in a shallow dish). "It is as though [the child] were viewing a series of still pictures instead of the movie that the adult sees" (Phillips, 1975). You can understand how a preoccupation with states can interfere with a child's thinking if you imagine yourself presented with the milk problem and being asked to close your eyes while the milk is poured. Lacking the knowledge of what took place, you would be left with only your perception of the milk in the wide, shallow container and your memory of the milk in the tall, narrow glass. Unlike adults, the young preschooler forms concepts that vary in definition from situation to situation and are not always logical. How else can we explain the 2-year-old's ability to treat a stuffed animal as an inanimate object one minute and an animate object the next? Eventually, though, the child's concepts
become more consistent and less private. Children become increasingly concerned
that their definitions of things match other people's. But they still lack the
ability to coordinate one concept with another. Consider the following conversation:
Adult: Sally, how many boys are
m your play group?
Sally: Eight.
Adult: How many girls are in
your play group?
Sally: Five.
Adult: Are there more boys or
girls in your play group?
Sally: More boys.
Adult: Are there more boys or
children in your play group?
Sally: More boys.
Adult: How do you know?
Sally: I just do!
Sally clearly understands the concepts of boy, children, and
more. However, she lacks the ability to put these separate pieces of
knowledge together to correctly answer the question comparing boys and
children. She also cannot explain her answer, which is why Piaget used the term
intuitive to describe her thinking. Finally, preoperational children are
egocentric in their thinking. Children at this stage believe that
everyone sees the world exactly as they do. For example, Piaget and Inhelder
(1956) seated children on one side of a display of three mountains and asked them
to describe how the scene looked to a doll seated on the other side. Children below
the age of 6 or 7 described the doll's view as being identical to their own,
even though it was apparent to adults that this could not be so. Because
preoperational children are unable to take the perspective of others, they
often interpret events entirely in reference to themselves. A passage from A.
A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh illustrates the young child's egocentrism.
Winnie-the-Pooh is sitting in the forest and hears a buzzing sound. That
buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that just
buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there is a buzzing-noise,
somebody's making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a
buzzing-noise that I know of is because you're a bee . . . Then he thought for another
long time, and said: And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is for
making honey . . . And then he got up, and said: And the only reason for making
honey is so as I can eat it.
Concrete Operational
Stage (Ages 7 to 11): Although the differences between the mental abilities of preoperational preschoolers and concrete operational elementary school students are dramatic, concrete operational children still do not think like adults. They are very much rooted in the world as it is and have difficulty with abstract thought. Flavell describes the concrete operational child as taking "an earthbound, concrete, practical-minded sort
of problem-solving approach, one that persistently fixates on the perceptible and inferable reality right there in front of him. A theorist the elementary-school child is not" (198 5, p. 103). The term concrete operational stage
reflects this earthbound approach. Children at this stage can form concepts, see relationships, and solve problems, but only as long as they involve objects and situations that are familiar.
During the elementary school years, children's cognitive abilities undergo dramatic changes. Elementary school children no longer have difficulties with conservation problems, because they have acquired the concept of reversibility. For example, they can now see that the amount of milk in the short, wide container must be the same as that in the tall, narrow container, because if the milk were poured back in the tall container, it would be at the same level as before. The child is able to imagine the milk being poured back and can recognize the consequences-abilities that
are not evident in the preoperational child.
Another fundamental difference between preoperational and concrete operational children is that the younger child, who is in the preoperational stage, responds to perceived appearances, whereas the older, concrete operational child responds to inferred reality. Flavell (1986) demonstrated this concept by showing children a red car and then, while they were still watching, covering it with a filter that made it appear black. When asked what color the car was, 3-year-olds responded "black," and
6-year-olds responded
"red." The
older, concrete
operational child
is able to respond to inferred reality, seeing things in the context of other meanings; preschoolers see what they see, with little ability to infer the meaning behind what they see. One important task that children learn during the concrete operational stage is seriation, or arranging things in a logical progression; for example, lining up sticks from smallest to largest. To do this, they must be able to order or classic objects according to some criterion or dimension, in this case length. Once this ability is acquired, I children can master a related skill known as transitivity, the ability to infer a relationship between two objects on the basis of knowledge of their respective relationships
with a third object. For example, if you tell preoperational preschoolers that Tom is taller than Becky and that Becky is taller than Fred, they will not see that Tom is taller than Fred. Logical inferences such as this are not possible until the stage of concrete operations, during which school-age children develop the ability to make two mental transformations that require reversible thinking. The first of these is inversion (+A is reversed by -A), and the second is reciprocity (A c B is reciprocated by B > A). By the end of the concrete operational stage, children have the mental abilities to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide; to place numbers in order by size; and to classify objects by any number of criteria. Children can think about what would happen if. . . , as long as the objects are in view (e.g., "What would happen
if I pulled this spring and then let it go?"). Children can understand time and space well enough to draw a map from their home to school and are building an understanding of events in the past.
Children in the elementary grades also are moving from egocentric thought to decentered or objective thought. Decentered thought allows children to see that others can have different perceptions than they do. For example, children with decentered thought will be able to understand that different children may see different patterns in clouds. Children whose thought processes are decentered are able to learn that events may be governed by physical laws, such as the laws of gravity. A final ability that children acquire during the concrete operational stage is class inclusion. Recall the example of Sally, who was in the preoperational stage and believed that there were more boys than children in her play group. What Sally lacked was the ability to think simultaneously about the whole class (children) and the subordinate class (boys, girls). She could make comparisons within a class, as shown by her ability to compare one part (the boys) with another part (the girls). She also knew that boys and girls are both members of the larger class called children. What she could not do was make comparisons between classes. Concrete operational children, by contrast, have no trouble with this type of problem, because they have additional tools of thinking. First, they no longer exhibit irreversibility of thinking and can now re-create a relationship between a part and the whole. Second, concrete operational thought is decentered, so the child can now focus on two classes simultaneously. Third, the concrete operational child's thinking is no longer limited to reasoning about part-to-part relationships. Now part-to-whole relationships can be dealt with too. These changes do not all happen at the same time. Rather, they occur gradually during the concrete operational stage.
Formal Operational
Stage (Age 11 to Adulthood): Sometime around the onset of puberty, children's thinking begins
to develop into the form that is characteristic of adults. The preadolescent begins to be able to think abstractly and to see possibilities beyond the here and now. These abilities continue to develop into adulthood. With the formal operational stage
comes the ability to deal with potential or hypothetical situations; the form is now separate from the content. Inhelder and Piaget (1958) described one task that will be approached differently by elementary school students in the concrete operational stage and by adolescents in the formal operational stage. The children and adolescents were given a pendulum consisting of a string with a weight at the end. They could change the length of the string, the amount of weight, the height from which the pendulum was released, and the force with which the pendulum was pushed. They were asked which of these factors influenced the speed at which the pendulum swings back and forth. Essentially, the task was to discover a principle of physics, which is that only the length of the string makes any difference in the speed of the pendulum (the shorter the string, the faster it swings). This experiment is illustrated in Figure 2.4. The adolescent who has reached the stage of formal operations is likely to proceed quite systematically, varying one factor at a time (e.g., leaving the string the same length and trying different weights). For example, in Inhelder and Piaget's (195 8) experiment, one 15 - year-old selected 100 grams with a long string and a medium-length string, then 20 grams with a long and a short string, and finally 200 grams with a long and a short string and concluded, "It's the length of the string that makes it go faster and slower the weight doesn't play any role" (p. 75). In contrast, 10-year-olds (who can be assumed to be in the concrete operational stage) proceeded in a chaotic fashion, varying many factors at the same time and hanging on to preconceptions. One boy varied simultaneously the weight and the impetus (push); then the weight, the impetus, and the length; then the impetus, the weight, and the elevation; and so on. He first concluded, "It's by changing the weight and the push, certainly not the string." "How do you know that the string has nothing to do with it?" "Because it's the
same string."
He had not varied its length in the last several trials; previously, he had varied it simultaneously with the impetus, thus complicating the account of the experiment (adapted from Inhelder and
Piaget, 1958,
p. 71). The transitivity problem also illustrates the advances brought about by formal thought. Recall the concrete operational child who, when told that Tom was taller than Becky and Becky was taller than Fred, understood that Tom was taller than Fred. However, if the problem had been phrased in the following way, only an older child who had entered the formal operational stage would have solved it: "Becky is shorter than Tom, and Becky is taller than Fred. Who is the tallest of the three?" Here the younger concrete operational child, lost in the combinations of greater-than and less than relationships, might reason
that Becky and Tom are "short," Becky and Fred are "tall," and
therefore Fred
is the tallest, followed by Becky, and then Tom, who is the shortest. Adolescents in the formal operational stage may also get confused by the differing relationships in this problem, but they can imagine several different relationships among the heights of Becky, Tom, and Fred and can figure out the accuracy of each until they hit on the correct one. This example shows another ability of preadolescents and adolescents who have reached the formal operational stage: They can monitor, or think about, their own thinking.
Generating abstract relationships
from available information and then comparing those abstract relationships to each other is a general skill underlying many tasks in which adolescents' competence leaps forward.
Piaget (1952a)
described a task
in which students in the concrete operational stage were given a set of 10 proverbs and a set of statements that meant the same thing as the proverbs. They were asked to match each proverb to the equivalent statement. Again, concrete operational children can understand the task and choose answers. However, their answers are often incorrect because they often do not understand that a proverb describes a general principle. For example, asked to explain the proverb "Don't cry over spilled milk," a child might explain that once milk is spilled, there's nothing to cry about but might not see that the proverb has a broader meaning. Adolescents and adults have little difficulty with this type of task.
Hypothetical Conditions: Another ability that Piaget and others recognized in the young adolescent is the ability to reason about situations and conditions that have not been experienced. The adolescent can accept, for the sake of argument or discussion, conditions that are arbitrary, that are not known to exist, or even that are known to be contrary to fact. Adolescents are not bound to their own experiences of reality, so they can apply logic to any given set of conditions. One illustration of the ability to reason about hypothetical situations is found in formal debate, in which participants must be prepared to defend either side of an issue, regardless of their personal feelings or experience, and their defense is judged on its documentation and logical consistency. For a dramatic illustration of the difference between children and adolescents in the ability to suspend their own opinions, compare the reactions of fourth- and ninth-graders when you ask them to present an argument in favor of the proposition that schools should be in session 6 days a week, 48 weeks a year. The abilities that make up formal operational thought-thinking abstractly,
testing hypotheses, and forming concepts that are independent of physical reality-are critical in the learning of higher-order skills. For example, learning algebra or abstract geometry requires the use of formal operational thought, as does understanding difficult concepts in science, social studies, and other subjects.
The thinking characteristic of the formal operations stage usually appears between ages 11 and 15, but there are many individuals who never reach this stage (Niaz, 1997). Individuals tend to use formal operational thinking in some situations and not others, and this remains true into adulthood. According to Piaget, the formal operational stage brings cognitive development to a close. However, intellectual growth may continue to take place beyond adolescence. According to Piaget, the foundation has been laid, and no new structures need to develop; all that is needed is the addition of knowledge and the development of complex schemes.
How did Vygotsky view Cognitive Development?
Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who, though
a contemporary of Piaget, died in 1934. His world was not widely read in
English until the 1970s, however, and only since then have his theories become influential in North America. Vygotskian theory is now a powerful force in developmental psychology, and many of the critiques he made of the Piagetian perspective more than 60 years ago have come to the fore today (see Glassman, 2001; John-Steiner & Mahn, 2003).
Vygotsky's work is based on two key ideas. First, he proposed that intellectual
development can be understood only in terms of the historical and cultural
contexts children experience. Second, he believed that development depends on
the sign systems that individuals grow up with: the symbols that cultures
create to help people think, communicate, and solve problems-for example, a
culture's language, writing system, or counting system. In contrast to Piaget,
Vygotsky proposed that cognitive development is strongly linked to input from
others. Like Piaget, however, Vygotsky believed that the acquisition of sign
systems occurs in an invariant sequence of steps that is the same for all
children.
How Development Occurs
Recall that Piaget's theory suggests that development precedes learning.
In other words, specific cognitive structures need to develop before certain
types of learning can take place. Vygotsky's theory suggests that learning precedes
development. For Vygotsky, learning involves the acquisition of signs by means
of instruction and information from others. Development involves the child's
internalizing these signs so as to be able to think and solve problems without
the help of others. This ability is called self-regulation. The first step in the development of
self-regulation and independent thinking is learning that actions and sounds
have a meaning. For example, a baby learns that the process of reaching toward
an object is interpreted by others as a signal that the infant wants the
object. In the case of language acquisition, children learn to associate certain
sounds with meaning. The second step in developing internal structures and self-regulation involves practice.
The infant practices gestures that will get attention. The preschooler will
enter into conversations with others to master language. The final step involves using signs
to think and solve problems without the help of others. At this point, children
become self-regulating, and the sign system has become internalized.
Private Speech: is a mechanism that Vygotsky emphasized for turning shared knowledge into personal knowledge Vygotsky
proposed that
children incorporate the speech of others and then use that speech to help themselves solve problems. Private speech is easy to see in young children, who frequently talk to themselves, especially when faced with difficult tasks (Flavell et al., 1997). Later, private speech becomes silent but is still very important. Studies have found that children who make extensive use of private speech learn complex task more effectively than do other children (Emerson & Miyake, 2003; Schneider, 2002).
The Zone
of Proximal Development: Vygotsky's theory implies that cognitive development and the ability to use thought to control our own actions require first mastering cultural communication systems and then learning to use these systems to regulate our own thought processes. The most important contribution of Vygotsky's theory is an emphasis on the sociocultural nature of learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Karpov & Haywood, 1998). He believed that learning takes place when children are working within their
zone of proximal development. Tasks
within the
zone of proximal development are ones that a child cannot yet do alone but could do with the assistance of more competent peers or adults. That is, the zone of proximal development describes tasks that a child has not yet learned but is capable of learning at a given time. Some educators refer to a "teachable moment" when a child or group of children is exactly at the point of readiness for a given concept. Vygotsky further believed that higher mental functioning usually exists in conversation and collaboration among individuals before it exists within the individual.
Scaffolding: A key idea derived from Vygotsky's notion of social learning is that of scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976): the assistance provided by more competent peers or adults. Typically, scaffolding means providing a child with a great deal of. , support during the early stages of learning and then diminishing support and having the child take on increasing responsibility as soon as she or he is able (Rosenshine & Meister, 1992). Parents use scaffolding when they teach their children to play a new game or to tie their shoes (Rogoff, 2003). A related concept is cognitive apprenticeship, which describes the entire process of modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and evaluation that is typically seen whenever one-to-one instruction takes place (John-Steiner & Mahn, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). For example, in Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how he was taught to be a steamboat pilot. At first the experienced pilot talked him through every bend in the river, but gradually he was left to figure things out for himself, with the pilot there to intervene only if the boat was about to run aground.
Cooperative Learning: Vygotsky's theories support the use of cooperative learning strategies in which children work together to help one another learn (Slavin, Hurley, & Chamberlain, 2003). Because peers are usually operating within each others' zones of proximal development, they provide models for each other of slightly more advanced thinking. In addition, cooperative learning makes children's inner speech available to others, so they can gain insight into one another's reasoning process. Vygotsky (1978) himself recognized the value of peer interaction in moving children forward in their thinking.
Applications of Vygotskian Theory in
Teaching: Vygotsky's theories of education have
two major implications. One is the desirability of setting up cooperative
learning arrangements among groups of students with differing levels of
ability. Tutoring by more competent peers can be effective in promoting growth
within the zone of proximal development (Das, 1995). Second, a Vygotskian approach
to instruction emphasizes scaffolding, with students taking more and more responsibility
for their own learning. (See Figure 2.5.) For example, in reciprocal teaching, teachers
lead small groups of students in asking questions about material they have read
and gradually turn over responsibility for leading the discussion to the
students (Palincsar, Brown, & Martin, 1987). Tharp and Gallimore (1988)
emphasized scaffolding in an approach they called "assisted
discovery," which calls for explicitly teaching students to use private
speech to talk themselves through problem solving.
Classroom Applications of Vygotsky's
Theory: Vygotsky’s concept
of the zone of proximal development is based on the idea that development is
defined both by what a child can do independently and by what the child can do
when assisted by an adult or more competent peer (John Steiner & Mahn, 2003). Knowing
both levels of Vygotsky's zone is useful for teachers, for these levels indicate where the child is at a given
moment as well as where the child is going. The zone of proximal development
has several implications for teaching in the classroom.
According
to Vygotsky, for the curriculum to be developmentally appropriate, the teacher
must plan activities that encompass not only what children are capable of doing
on their own but what they can learn with the help of others (Karpov &
Haywood, 1998). Vygotsky's theory does not mean that anything can be taught to
any child. Only instruction and activities that fall within the zone promote
development. For example, if a child cannot identify the sounds in a word even
after many prompts, the child may not benefit immediately from instruction in
this skill. Practice of previously known skills and introduction of concepts
that are too difficult and complex have little positive impact. Teachers can
use information about both levels of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development in
organizing classroom activities in the following ways:
·
Instruction can be planned to provide
practice in the zone of proximal development for individual children or for
groups of children. For example, hints and prompts that helped children during
the assessment could form the basis of instructional activities.
·
Cooperative learning activities can be
planned with groups of children at different levels who can help each other
learn (Slavin et al., 2003).
·
Scaffolding (John-Steiner & Mahn,
2003) provides hints and prompts at different levels. In scaffolding, the adult
does not simplify the task, but the role of the learner is simplified “through
the graduated intervention of the teacher.”
For
example, a child might be shown pennies to represent each sound in a word
(e.g., three pennies for the three sounds in "man"). To master this
word, the child might be asked to place a penny on the table to show each sound
in a word, and finally the child might identify the sounds without the pennies.
When the adult provides the child with pennies, the adult provides a scaffold
to help the child move from assisted to unassisted success at the task
(Spector, 1992). In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might
provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out
experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure
experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their
own.
