Compare Piaget's and Vygotsky's views on children's make-believe play

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Piaget believed that through pretending, children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes. However, today, Piaget's view of make-believe as mere practice of representational schemes is regarded as too limited. Play not only reflects but also contributes to children's cognitive and social skills. Sociodramatic play has been studied most thoroughly. Compared with social nonpretend activities (such as drawing or putting puzzles together), during sociodramatic play preschoolers' interactions last longer, show more involvement, draw more children into the activity, and are more cooperative.
Vygotsky regarded make-believe play as a unique, broadly influential zone of proximal development in which children advance themselves as they try out a wide variety of challenging skills. In Vygotsky's theory, make-believe is the central source of development during the preschool years, leading development forward in two ways. First, as children create imaginary situations, they learn to act in accord with internal ideas, not just in response to external stimuli. While pretending, children continually use one object to stand for another—a stick for a horse, a folded blanket for a sleeping baby—and, doing so, change the object's usual meaning. Gradually they realize that thinking (or the meaning of words) is separate from objects and that ideas can be used to guide behavior.
Second, the rule-based nature of make-believe strengthens children's capacity to think before they act. Pretend play, Vygotsky pointed out, constantly demands that children act against their impulses because they must follow the rules of the play scene. For example, a child pretending to go to sleep obeys the rules of bedtime behavior. A child imagining himself as a father and a doll as his child conforms to the rules of parental behavior. Through enacting rules in make-believe, children better understand social norms and expectations and strive to follow them.
Vygotsky questioned Piaget's belief that make-believe arises spontaneously in the second year of life. Vygotsky argued that, like other higher cognitive processes, the elaborate pretending of the preschool years has social origins.