Principles of Development and Cognitive Theories: Piaget and Vygotsky

Growth is quantitative physical change (height, weight). Development is qualitative and quantitative change in skills, thinking, emotions and behaviour; it continues throughout life.

Principles:

• Cephalocaudal – development proceeds from head to toe (a baby controls the head before the legs).
• Proximodistal – from the centre of the body outward (arm control before finger control).
• General to specific – whole-body movements come before fine, specific ones.
• Development is continuous, sequential and predictable, but the rate differs between individuals.
• Development results from the interaction of heredity and environment (nature and nurture).
• All domains – physical, cognitive, social, emotional, moral – are interrelated.

Children actively construct knowledge. Key concepts:

• Schema – a mental framework for organising knowledge.
• Assimilation – fitting new experience into an existing schema.
• Accommodation – changing a schema to fit new experience.
• Equilibration – the drive to balance assimilation and accommodation.

Four stages:

1. Sensorimotor (0–2 years) – learns through senses and actions; develops object permanence.
2. Pre-operational (2–7 years) – symbolic thought and language; egocentrism, animism (believing objects are alive), centration, lacks conservation and reversibility.
3. Concrete operational (7–11 years) – logical thinking about concrete objects; conservation, reversibility, classification, seriation.
4. Formal operational (11+ years) – abstract and hypothetical reasoning, hypothetico-deductive thinking.

Classroom implications: use concrete materials for primary children, give hands-on discovery activities, match tasks to readiness, create cognitive conflict to promote accommodation, and introduce abstract reasoning gradually at secondary level.

Learning is social first and individual later; culture and language shape thinking.

• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – the gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with guidance.
• More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) – a teacher, parent or peer who knows more.
• Scaffolding – temporary support within the ZPD (term introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976, based on Vygotsky's ideas).
• Private speech – children talk to themselves to guide their actions; it later becomes inner speech.
• Language is the most important cultural tool for thinking.

Piaget vs Vygotsky: Piaget – development leads learning, the child is a "lone scientist". Vygotsky – learning (with others) leads development, the child is a "social apprentice".

Classroom implications: peer tutoring, cooperative group work, guided practice, modelling and think-alouds, gradually removing support.