Compare and contrast the perspectives on cognitive development from Piaget, Vygotsky, and the information-processing approach.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Piaget's passion was to understand the structure of unfolding cognition. He found that preschoolers focus on how objects immediately appear and have other strange ideas about the world. According to Piaget, adults can't talk children out of these qualitatively different perceptions and hurry up a child's inner cognitive timetable. Children come to think in more adult ways when they are developmentally ready, through simply acting in the world. Vygotsky, in contrast, believed that teaching is vital to cognitive growth, and he focused on targeting the activities that foster learning: entering a child's zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding. Information theorists have their own agenda: to decode the specific steps by which cognition—memory, learning, self-control or the ability to reason—take place. Information-processing theorists heavily focus on executive functions, such as inhibition and selective attention, and conduct experiments to find out how these abilities gradually develop over time.