Understanding Piaget
Swiss biologist Jean Piaget eventually came to think that intelligence is a form of adaptation, in which each individual, through the two processes of assimilation and accommodation, constructs knowledge. He theorized that as children interact with their physical and social environments, they organize information into groups of interrelated ideas called schemes. When children encounter something new, they must either incorporate it into an existing scheme or create an entirely new scheme to deal with it. Piaget also believed that intellectual development occurs in four distinct stages. The sensorimotor stage begins at birth, and lasts until the child is approximately two years old. At this stage, the child cannot form mental representations of objects that are outside his immediate view, so his intelligence develops through his motor interactions with his environment. The preoperational stage typically lasts until the child is 6 or 7. According to Piaget, this is the stage where true "thought" emerges. Preoperational children are able to make mental representations of unseen objects, but they cannot use deductive reasoning. The concrete operations stage follows, and lasts until the child is
In general, a child can only become more linguistically mature, if he is in the company of others, therefore broadening the child's knowledge. Vygotsky's ideas of self-talk and inner-speech seem to be very similar in theory to this idea of constructivism. Its most significant feature is the ability to think conceptually. Piaget's idea of cognitive development was that a child constructs his own understanding of the world. It is defined as an idea of development and problem solving strategies that are at the embryonic stage; more easily defined as tasks children can perform with the help of adults. An infant's physical explorations of his environment form the basis for the mental representations he develops during his preoperational stage, for example. It represents the amount of learning possible by a student given good conditions. An important concept in Vygotsky's theory is the zone of proximal development. It is this adaptive capacity that distinguishes humans from other less intelligent animals. There have been many reoccurring subject matters in both analyses of Piaget and Vygotsky. Vygotsky theorized that when language first appears it us used strictly as simple communication; but somewhere around age two, thought and language becomes one function. A central belief of Piaget's theory of epistemology (origins of knowledge) is that increasingly more complex intellectual processes are built on the basic foundations laid in earlier stages of development. During the same time of Piaget's studies in Switzerland, Russian scientist Lev Vygotsky was researching in children's cognitive development. You can challenge a kid to confront new ideas, but you cannot necessarily teach him out of one stage and into another.
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