Answers for Module 5

Q1: Explain in your own words the principal contributions of Vygotsky's cognitive constructivist theory as a theory of learning and compare and contrast the work of Piaget and Vygotksy. Make a list of questions you still have and discuss them with your partner. Send me an email if you need more clarification.

Vygotsky and Piaget both as constructivist share basic ideas about learning.  They believe the existence of minds which work between behaviors and environments.  Children construct the meaning of knowledge in their mind base on their developmental levels and interaction with environments.  They both agree that children have their own learning progress based on their cognitive development and children’s learning interests should be respected.  Hence, learners rather than teachers are the center of learning.

However, they have different view about the procedure of meaning construction.  According to Piaget, children construct their meaning in an independent way in which children discover and explore the world in their own pace; whereas, Vygotsky believes that social and cultural interaction between adults and children results in cognitive development.  Vygotsky points out that from current cognitive level to potential cognitive level is the zone of proximal development, in which teachers’ scaffoldings play important roles.  Compare to independent thinking, Vygotsky cherish assisted learning more.

Vygotsky and Piaget also disagree with each other on the relationship between learning and development.  From the viewpoint of Piaget, learning and development are two independent procedures.  Learning builds on development, which is mainly decided by children themselves.  Vygotsky raises different ideas.  He believes that learning is the cause of development.  During learning, children interact not only with the objective world or environment, but also with the adult and peers around them.  It is the learning and facilitation from others help children improve their current cognitive level to potential level. 

Vygotsky also stress the importance of language.  He argues that private speeches develop into cognition.  But Piaget deems that private speech will be replaced by social speech and it is cognition controls language.

Q2: What connections do you see between this article and the chapter you read by Lev Vygotsky?

The first connection I considered is how social and cultural factors influence children’s development levels.  The changes of play in people’s mind from activities to toys in the past decades are due to social and cultural changes.  Because of the well-made advertisement, new types of toys began to be accepted gradually.  Correspondingly, children’s learning development and styles changed.  Although Piaget stresses the interaction between children and environments, children’s independent roles are more important in Piaget’s theory and the four developmental stages are relatively general.  However, the changes of cognitive and emotional development in children shown in this article tell us that children or human’s learning cannot be fully understood without considering the social, cultural and historical factors.

Another connection is the importance of play, or more precisely, activities in which children involved.  Those unstructured or free activities are beneficial for children’s private speeches.  It is believed that private speech would develop into cognition based on Vygotsky.  In this article, the authors mentioned that children losing opportunities to control and regulate their behaviors because when playing highly structured  games they need less private speech than playing unstructured games.

Q3: How are Bruner's ideas (as stated here and in the excerpt you read from Culture in Education) related to those of the other two constructivist theorists we've read (i.e., Piaget and Vygotsky)? 

Bruner believes that we can never know how the world really is (which I suspect) and we construct meaning of the world in our mind, which I believe is the shared fundamental philosophy underlying constructivism.  Bruner’s viewpoints of how children develop conceptual structure in their mind from specific concepts towards abstract are similar to Piagets’ opinion about the process of adaptation.  Bruner states the importance of interests and exploratory learning of children, which takes the same position with other tow constructivist, Piaget and Vygotsky.  Similar to Piaget, Bruner’s theory are influenced by evolution theory deeply.  Further, Bruner stresses the role of culture in education, by which he means a broad definition of culture.  He believes that not only the general culture differences among nations, but also the classroom, family, and community culture would influence children’s cognitive development differently.  This part of idea is similar to Vygotsky’s social-historical cognitive theory.