Compare and Contrast Vygotsky, Piaget and Bruner - Essay Example

Bruner, on the other hand believed that acquisition of knowledge is primed by some knowledge about the world and some push to communicate”(Diaz, 1988, p.7). “Both Vygotsky and Piaget pointed out that our perceptions are the products of our interactions with our physical and cultural environment” (Nuthall, 1997, p.20). Bruner & Piaget believed that past experiences are the major pillars upon which knowledge is constructed. In other words, knowledge has no existence without past experiences.

Both of them were of the view that knowledge is acquired through numerous interactions with the physical and social environments. The understanding of this complex world cannot be taken place in the absence of experience. People who have more experiences with this world may have better knowledge than people with fewer experiences. Vygotsky stressed the importance of communication and acquisition of language in acquiring knowledge. “While Piaget was primarily concerned with the internalisation of the structure of active systems, relating to the physical world, Vygotsky, was more concerned with the internalisation of the structure of communication and language” (Nuthall, 1997, p.21). .

“Both Bruner and Vygotsky believed that higher cognitive functions develop more fully with the development of language” (Diaz, 1988, p.10). Both Piaget and Vygotsky believed that knowledge acquisition takes place in stages. In others words, it is difficult for a person to acquire sound knowledge about a topic in the first stage itself. Knowledge develops periodically and only in the final stages of development, it will attain full proportions. Vygotsky introduced the notion of zone of proximal development (ZPD) and argued that knowledge acquisition will be more effective if it takes place in that zone.

He also argued that social interactions are powerful only up to certain extent in promoting student’s learning and socio cognitive development (Cesar M, 2002, p.3) “The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a learner has already mastered (the actual level of development) and what he or she can achieve when provided with educational support (potential development)” (Coffey, n. d)There is a difference between what a person can do without any assistance and what he can do with somebody’s assistance.

This difference is labelled as zone of proximal development (ZPD) by Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that self-learning may acquire more knowledge than learning with the help of others. In other words, he has pointed out that social interactions are least important in the process of acquisition of knowledge. However Bruner and Piaget rejected this theory completely. In their opinion, social interactions play an important role in knowledge acquisition. Bruner introduced a new concept called discovery learning in order to make the knowledge acquisition process clearer.

“Discovery learning is an inquiry-based, constructivist learning theory that