Critical essay on lenses on child development
The Aspect of Child Development
Children’s first years of life are highly critical for their healthy growth and development. For them to be considered healthy, all their aspects of development, such as cognitive, social, emotional, moral, and physical development, have to be nurtured. All these aspects have crucial needs that should be met by their parents or guardians. This implies that it’s significant to provide children with homes where they experience love and security. They need to freely play, sing, read, and talk without fear of being denied their rights. Furthermore, experiencing their optimal health includes providing them with adequate sleep, proper nutrition, and a chance to perform some simple physical tasks and movements. For this reason, when parents employ such practices mentioned above, they assist their children in leading healthy and safe lives characterized by success in most areas of development, which include social, emotional, cognitive, and physical.
In physical development, children experience changes in shape, size, including the body’s physical maturity. The child also gains abilities to do various physical activities and can coordinate his or her body well. Cognitive development involves the ability to learn and use language (Malik, 2020). It also consists of the ability to reason, solve problems, as well as organize ideas. On the other hand, in social development, children gain the skills and insights required for successful interaction with other people in their environment. Children gain emotional development as they grow; this includes the feels they have and how they respond to events. In this aspect, they learn to understand changes in their feelings, as well as how to express them appropriately. In moral development, they learn to differentiate between wrong and right. They also gain a conscience, which makes them behave based on some understanding of the implication of their actions. Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget have made contributions to education by providing justifications for the different styles and capabilities in children’s cognitive learning.
Piaget Vs. Vygotsky on Cognitive Development
Despite Piaget and Vygotsky differing in their views, both of them provide educationists with reliable recommendations on effectively teaching particular material according to the development level of children. Piaget came up with four stages of cognitive development that runs from infancy to adulthood. The first stage is known as sensorimotor, which involves children in the infancy period. During this stage, children use their senses and movement to experience their worlds. Towards the end of this stage, children gain a concept known as object permanence. This is an understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight (Malik, 2020).
From two years to seven years of age, children are within the preoperational stage, where they have not grasped the capacity to perform mental operations. During this period, children are unable to reason through actions; they are also often egocentric, implying they only consider their perspectives (Babakr, Mohamedamin, and Kakamad, 2019). They also frequently engage in monologue, which involves talking to oneself due to egocentrism. Conservation is another skill acquired during this stage. Children develop an insight that the quantity of an item does not change, although its appearance may differ. However, at this stage children lack reversible thinking, they cannot think backward
The next stage, known as concrete operations, happens between seven to eleven years old. Children, at this point, learn best by engaging in discovery by doing practical activities with tangible items (Lourenço, 2016). Their reasoning ability also starts to gain shape. They acquire three primary reasoning skills, namely, reversibility, identity, and compensation. Moreover, children can also classify objects by focusing on particular features and group them appropriately.
Formal operations are the last stage, which occurs from eleven years until maturity. Individuals at this stage can reason abstractly and possess the deductive and inductive reasoning capabilities. Persons in this stage employ various strategies, as well as resources to solve problems. They can handle complex issues by thinking profoundly and are good at applying theoretical thinking. Meta-cognition is also another characteristic of this stage. People at this stage can come up with excellent potential principles or solutions for problems (Lourenço, 2016).
Vygotsky came up with the Sociocultural Theory of Development, which states that students learn by interacting in their social circles and from their culture. His theory conflicts from Piaget’s, which said that children learn by interacting with their environment (Addison, 2017). Vygotsky claimed that people use dialogues to interact and learn about their societal, cultural principles. He profoundly believed that human activity mainly occurs within cultural contexts; hence culture is responsible for shaping people’s cognition.
In his theory, he mentioned a principle known as scaffolding that involves offering learners with suggestions for solving problems to enable them to handle issues easily in the future. While Piaget assumed that such learners lack the mental structures to solve a particular problem, Vygotsky offered inspiration or mechanisms through scaffolding for the learners to tackle the problem.
Vygotsky considered language development very essential in his theory. He purported that language helps a particular group of individuals to indicate their cultural ideologies, as well as the value systems. Vygotsky suggested that language development included private speech where children talk to themselves, although adults can guide their actions and help them in reasoning (Marwaha, 2017). On the other hand, Piaget perceived self-talk as egocentric, but Vygotsky thought this speech was vital since it involved self-regulation and communication whose internalizations occur after nine years.
Vygotsky stressed that social tools had great significance in cognition. These tools can be any symbolic or technological instrument that assists in communication. Such tools include computers and the media, among others. The zone of proximal development is another principle in Vygotsky’s theory. He believed that children would understand not all problems, some were beyond their level of comprehension (Veer and Zavershneva, 2018). Nevertheless, in contrast, he claimed that with proper assistance, children would solve problems that Piaget would deem beyond the children’s mental abilities. In this zone, children may perform challenging tasks with appropriate assistance.
How Vygotsky’s Views on Cognitive Development informs Quality Programming for the Aspect of Child Development
The acquisition of developmental milestones is unique to every child, meaning that it’s quite difficult to determine when a child can master a particular skill exactly. However, by knowing the developmental milestones that children acquire as they grow, allows parents to have a general concept of the changes that they should look out for as their children age. Based on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, teachers can benefit from knowing the different levels of this zone because they indicate the level of a child during a specific instance (Vasileva and Balyasnikova, 2019). Vygotsky argues that it’s essential to use a developmentally appropriate curriculum. Hence, the teacher should plan activities that entail the children’s capacity to perform individually and what they can learn from other people’s assistance. He also taught that not all things should be taught to children. They only require instruction, as well as activities that lie within their zones to enhance development. For instance, if children are not able to recognize the sounds in a certain word despite several prompts, they may not gain instantly from instruction in this ability. Furthermore, if teachers concentrate on practicing past known skills, including the introduction of highly complex ideas, that may lead to little positive impact.
Vygotsky’s theory also emphasized on the significance of using play to enhance learning. Parents, including teachers, should embrace this idea and offer children many opportunities to play. Parents wonder how they can effectively raise their children. Nonetheless, some practices are common to positive parenting, and they work for families in diverse cultures. For example, parents need to employ consistent ways of responding to their children’s behavior. They also need to be warm and sensitive to the needs and feelings of their children. Research shows that developing routines and regulations within the house can also help in promoting healthy growth and development of children. Creating time to share books and talk to them is vital for their cognitive development. Parents should also consider using suitable discipline measures, although it’s prudent to avoid excessive harshness (Bodrova and Leong, 2017).
According to Vygotsky’s theory, as children play, they also engage in various activities that involve their imagination. Such play helps in stretching their conceptual capacities and awareness of the world. They also learn how various things operate within their environment. Imagination helps in reinforcing what the children already know and opens their minds to gain insight into some complex things in their environment. The types of play in this case that enhance learning include role-playing, acting out real events, and fantasy play (Veer and Zavershneva, 2018). Therefore, such activities assist in fostering the development of abstract thought. Moreover, there is the principle of reciprocal teaching, which can be used in the classroom to promote the students’ capacity to learn. Four skills should be practiced in this approach. They include the use of summarizations, questions, clarifications, and predictions.
Based on this theory, teaching can be organized to offer practice within the zone of proximal development for individual learners or groups of learners. Moreover, teachers can consider organizing cooperative learning activities with sets of children at various levels who may assist each other in learning. Scaffolding can be used by teachers whereby they provide the scaffold to assist the child move from aided to unaided success at a given task (Scott, 2020). For example, when learning about sounds in pre-school, the teacher can first pronounce a certain sound to the children, then he or she assists them in pronouncing the sound and finally allow the children to pronounce the sound.
Before applying Vygotsky’s theory, it is essential first to assess students to establish their present level of ability in a given area. For example, some children may be performing well in number work but poorly in language, particularly in recognition and articulation of sounds. Consequently, it is crucial to know the exact ability of the learner and pinpoint the areas of weakness that require assistance. However, teachers can benefit from this theory if they apply it without generalizing since learners have varying capacities (Bodrova and Leong, 2017). Providing individualized assessment and attention to learners may seem challenging, but it goes a long way in eventually giving the teachers an appropriate concept of handling the problem at hand. This also saves time and ensures the curriculum provided to learners is developmentally appropriate.
His theory applies to the present concentration in collaborative learning, which suggests that members of a group should not have similar ability levels. Instead, they should have varying degrees of capability. After ascertaining the learner’s level of ability, the teachers can provide instruction that expands the boundaries of every learner’s abilities. Initially, the learner may rely highly on help provided by adults or a more skilled peer, but ultimately, their zone of proximal development increases. For this reason, teachers can consider re-organizing their classes into sets allowing the more skilled learners to help the less skilled ones. On the other hand, reminders, clues, as well as direct teaching, may be employed to assist children to enhance their capacity levels (Scott, 2020). Hints and reminders help in such situations because some children may be knowledgeable in something but require some few suggestions to ignite their memories and bring to the surface what they seem not to know. Furthermore, it’s quite entertaining to realize how quickly learners remember something when prompted. The idea of scaffolding also allows the teacher to propel learners forward toward attaining a particular goal by providing prompts to them.
I believe that Vygotsky and Piaget provide crucial perspectives on cognitive development. Piaget suggested that children advance through the phases of this development through discovery approaches, maturation, including social broadcasts through accommodations and assimilation. On the other hand, Vygotsky emphasized the significance of culture and dialect on a person’s intellectual development.
References
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Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (2017). The Vygotskian and Post-Vygotskian Approach. Theories of Early Childhood Education, 58–70. doi: 10.4324/9781315641560-5
Lourenço, O. M. (2016). Developmental stages, Piagetian stages in particular: A critical review. New Ideas in Psychology, 40, 123–137. doi: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.002
Malik, F. (2020, February 21). Cognitive Development. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537095/
Marwaha, S. (2017). Prevalence of Principles of Piaget’s Theory Among 4-7-year-old Children and their Correlation with IQ. Journal Of Clinical And Diagnostic Research. doi: 10.7860/jcdr/2017/28435.10513
Scott, H. K. (2020, February 18). Piaget. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448206/
Vasileva, O., & Balyasnikova, N. (2019). (Re)Introducing Vygotsky’s Thought: From Historical Overview to Contemporary Psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01515
Veer, R. V. D., & Zavershneva, E. (2018). The final chapter of Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech: A Reader guide. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 54(2), 101–116. doi: 10.1002/jhbs.21893