Socio-historic Theory by Lev Smanovich Vygotsky (1931) and Cognitive developmental theory by Jean Piaget (1954)

 Socio-historic Theory by Lev Smanovich Vygotsky (1931) and Cognitive developmental theory by Jean Piaget (1954)

Socio-historic Theory by Lev
Smanovich Vygotsky (1931) 

            Lev Vygotsky is regarded the
originator of the socio-historic theory which was propounded in the year 1931. Vygotsky
stressed the importance of environment and culture on the child’s development. He
proposed that social interaction and communication between adults who may be
teachers or (more knowledgeable individuals) is the mechanism through which
specific cultural values, customs and beliefs are transmitted from generation
to generation. The theory maintains that communication is important and helps
children to literally scaffold. Vygostky was particularly interested in how
young children develop complex thinking which he concluded by saying that the
mechanism through which culture is transmitted is the same model with complex
thinking development. He said that children gain knowledge and skills through
shared experiences between themselves and adults or more knowledgeable others.

            The child acquires new skills and
experiences which Vygotsky called zone of proximal development (ZPD). This
level is a level in which the child find a task difficult or impossible to accomplish,
but with the assistance of an adult, a teacher or more knowledgeable others the
child can accomplish the task. When an adult plays games with infant, it
encourages him to increase in participation. For instance, the teacher who
tells a child that is struggling to fit a puzzle piece into the frame “See what
happens if you turn the piece around”, or when a parent ‘helps’ an infant to
clap or roll his hands to a pat-a-cake rhymes. Until she can clap and roll her
hands herself, she is working within the ZPD. The theory is important in
describing children’s mental, language and social development. It equally has
many implications on how children’s play promotes language and social development.
The theory also promotes stimulating environment for exploration and
participation as well as promote discovery by modeling, explaining and
providing suggestions to suit the child’s zone of proximal development. Socio-historic
theory is very relevant to the present study because it acknowledges that the
environment and social interaction play important roles in the early childhood
development and help the child to adapt well. 

Cognitive developmental theory by
Jean Piaget (1954)

The
Cognitive theory propounded by Jean Piaget in 1954 postulates that children go
through four stages of cognitive development as they actively construct their
knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Two processes underline
the way the child construct knowledge of his environment: organization and
adaptation. To make sense of the world, we organize our experiences, we
separate important ideas from less important ones and we connect one idea to
another. In addition to organizing our observations and experiences, we adapt
and adjust to new environmental demands. Piaget also held that the child
undergoes four stages of cognitive development and in his construction of
knowledge. Each stage is related to age and consists of a distinct way of
thinking and a different way of understanding the world. To him the child’s
cognition is qualitatively different in the different stages. Here we are
concerned with the first two stages: sensorimotor and preoprational stages.

            The sensorimotor stage, which last
from birth to about two (0-2) years of age and is the first stage of cognitive
development of the child.
Children in this stage have a cognitive system that is limited to the motor
reflexes. Children at this stage learn from their parents and care- givers.
They imitate what they see and hear and experiment with muscle movements and
sounds that the mouth makes. Here infants construct an
understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences such as seeing,
hearing and touching.

             The preoperational stage is the second stage
which starts at about age two and lasts
until the child is about six or seven years old. This stage he called the
Pre-Operational Period. During this stage, children start to use mental
imagery, language (word) and drawings. Children here are very egocentric. These
children view things that are happening around them in only one point of
view...theirs. Piaget probably found that his own children at this age could
not reason why their parents felt the way they did, but only reasoned from what
the children knew. Children in this stage think in a non-logical and non-reversible
pattern.       

                This theory is relevant
to this work as it guides the selection of activities, methods of instruction
and materials at different stages according to the child’s ability. For
instance, the child at preoperational stage cannot be asked logical questions
about concrete events or to classify objects in different sets.  The question has to be within the age range
of the child. Another important aspect of this theory is how Piaget explained
organization and adaptation as a systematic organization of information that
enables the child’s cognitive structure to become more complex and
sophisticated. Adaptation allows the child to adapt to the new environment from
home to the school environment and from one ECCE class to another.