Untitled Flashcards Set

Lev Vygotsky’s Scaffolding

As Piaget was forming his theory of cognitive development, Russian psychologist

Lev Vygotsky was also studying how children think and learn. He noted that by

age 7, they increasingly think in words and use words to solve problems. They do

this, he said, by internalizing their culture’s language and relying on inner speech

(Fernyhough, 2008). Parents who say “No, no!” when pulling a child’s hand away

from a cake are giving the child a self - control tool. When the child later needs to

resist temptation, he may likewise say “No, no!” Second graders who muttered to

themselves while doing math problems grasped third - grade math better the fol-

lowing year (Berk, 1994). Whether out loud or inaudibly, talking to themselves helps

children control their behavior and emotions and master new skills.

Where Piaget emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with

the physical environment, Vygotsky emphasized how the child’s mind grows through

interaction with the social environment. If Piaget’s child was a young scientist, Vy-

gotsky’s was a young apprentice. By mentoring children and giving them new words, par-

ents and others provide a temporary scaffold from which children can step to higher levels of

thinking (Renninger & Granott, 2005). Language, an important ingredient of social mentor-

ing, provides the building blocks for thinking, noted Vygotsky (who was born the same year

as Piaget, but died prematurely of tuberculosis).

Effective mentoring occurs when children are developmentally ready to learn a new

skill. For Vygotsky, a child’s zone of proximal development was the zone between what a

child can and can’t do—it’s what a child can do with help. When learning to ride a bike,

it’s the developmental zone in which a child can ride with training wheels or a steadying

parental hand.

“Assessing the impact of Piaget

on developmental psychology

is like assessing the impact

of Shakespeare on English

literature.” -DEVELOPMENTAL

PSYCHOLOGIST HARRY BEILIN (1992)

“Childhood has its own way of

seeing, thinking, and feeling, and

there is nothing more foolish than

the attempt to put ours in its

place.” -PHILOSOPHER JEAN - JACQUES

ROUSSEAU, 1798

Reflecting on Piaget’s Theory

What remains of Piaget’s ideas about the child’s mind? Plenty—enough to merit his being

singled out by Time magazine as one of the twentieth century’s 20 most influential scien-

tists and thinkers and rated in a survey of British psychologists as the last century’s great-

est psychologist (Psychologist, 2003). Piaget identified significant cognitive milestones and

stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind develops. His emphasis was less on the ages

at which children typically reach specific milestones than on their sequence. Studies around

the globe, from aboriginal Australia to Algeria to North America, have confirmed that hu-

man cognition unfolds basically in the sequence Piaget described (Lourenco & Machado,

1996; Segall et al., 1990).

However, today’s researchers see development as more continuous than did Piaget. By

detecting the beginnings of each type of thinking at earlier ages, they have revealed con-

ceptual abilities Piaget missed. Moreover, they see formal logic as a smaller part of cognition

than he did. Piaget would not be surprised that today, as part of our own cognitive develop-

ment, we are adapting his ideas to accommodate new findings.

Implications for Parenting and Teaching

Future parents and teachers remember: Young children are incapable of adult logic. Preschool-

ers who block one’s view of the TV simply have not learned to take another’s viewpoint. What

seems simple and obvious to us—pestering a cat will lead to scratches—may be incompre-

hensible to a 3-year-old. Also remember that children are not passive receptacles waiting to be

filled with knowledge. Better to build on what they already know, engaging them in concreteInfancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development Module 47 485

demonstrations and stimulating them to think for themselves. And, finally, accept children’s

cognitive immaturity as adaptive. It is nature’s strategy for keeping children close to protective

adults and providing time for learning and socialization (Bjorklund & Green, 199