Piaget's Theory And Practice-Based Experience Analysis

Human development refers to our development throughout our life from birth to death, which includes the processes of Nature and Nurture that control our development and effect our biological and physical growth as well as cognitive and social development. Aspects that change during the course of our development include our emotions, human growth, and also intellectual and personality development. In this essay, I will analyse two practice based experiences to demonstrate my understanding of how theory and practice come together in teaching students. I will do this by drawing on Piaget’s theory and key concepts of classification and adaption and Vygotsky’s theory and key concepts of scaffolding and the zone of proximal development.

Vygotsky’s

ZDP is evident as through the help and interaction she had with her teacher she was able to solve the problem, this refers to the idea of ZDP which is the difference between what a learner can do without the help and what she can do with help. Before the student would have taken a long time to figure out the equation without the skills and strategies, however now that she is capable she will be able to solve future problems. The ZDP is closely related to the idea of scaffolding which is apparent in this example as it is used to help out the student, for example using materials which supports the child’s thinking and it helps them to figure out how to proceed through the problem. As the student understands how it is figured out the scaffolding, e.g. materials are taken away and the child is able to work it out without the help of the teacher telling her what to do, as she has now learnt the strategy to do it. These examples Reflect, highlight, suggest that teaching/the enviro/learning

Cognitive development is about our ability to think, reason and remember as well as organising and making sense of information that includes processes such as reasoning and remembering (Duchesne, McMaugh, Bocher, Krause, 2013). Piaget believed that children learn by individual discovery as he called them mini scientists and this is one of the ways children’s cognitive development advances as they learn through experience (Duchesne et al, 2013). Piaget believed that cognitive development is cumulative; that is, understanding a new experience grows out of a previous learning experience (Duchesne et al, 2013). (Development precedes learning)

Piaget’s theory is based on his four cognitive stages which include the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations stage and the formal operations stage. In his stages children’s cognitive development is discontinuous which means..... Piaget believed that the stages identified had two very important properties, first they were universal (apply to everyone) invariant (unchanging) meaning that the order in which children pass through the stages can't be varied e.g. children must progress through them in sequence starting from stage