Piaget and Vygotsky - Essay Example

Both Piaget and Vygotsky have deeply influenced the techniques and approaches to teaching. Furthermore, they have explained the childrens cognitive learning styles and capabilities. Jean Piaget’s theory on children’s cognitive development, particularly with quantitative concepts, has gained a lot of attention within the field of education. Piagetian ideas on student’s quantitative growth have offered teachers teaching mathematics with significant understandings of how individuals acquire mathematical models and phenomenon.

Piaget asserted that the development of a child takes place in the course of a constant change of thought processes. A developmental stage entails a period of months or years when a particular development occurs. Even though students are frequently classified by chronological age, their development levels might vary considerably, also the rate at which each child goes through each stage. This variation may be due to maturity, knowledge, society, and the capacity of the child. Piaget further suggested that children develop progressively and slowly throughout the different stages and that the experiences in one stage form the basis for shift to the next.

Piaget presented four main stages of development; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Ojose, 2008). In the sensorimotor stage, an infant’s mental and cognitive characteristics evolve from birth until the emergence of language. This stage is featured by the gradual attainment of object permanence in which the child is able to locate objects after they have been moved, even if the objects have been completely removed from his or her field of vision. Another feature of children at this stage is their capacity to associate numbers to objects (Piaget, 1977).

To widen the mathematical ability of a child in this stage, he is permitted sufficient opportunities to take action on the