PIAGET vs. VYGOTSKY

Compared: Piaget and Vygotsky

Piaget vs. Vygotsky: The role of language in cognitive development

Jean Piaget's theory of human development is fundamentally a biological one: Piaget believed that all human beings go through a series of developmental stages, and the ability to understand certain concepts such as volume and mass is determined by the biological and developmental stage of the brain, more so than culture. If the child is not yet ready to learn certain spatial principles, he cannot do so, even with the best of teachers. The child interacts with the environment and is shaped by its contents to some extent, but there are natural constraints based upon the child's mentality.

In contrast, "unlike Piaget's notion that children's development must necessarily precede their learning," Lev Vygotsky argued, "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological functions" (McLeod...
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