Psychology Express: Developmental Psychology (Undergraduate Revision Guide) by Penney Upton & Dominic Upton

Author:Penney Upton & Dominic Upton [Upton, Penney]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780273759690
Publisher: Pearson Education Limited
Published: 2014-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

One important distinction between Piagetian and Vygotskian approaches concerns what can be taught. Piaget believed children had to have the right mental structures in place for learning to occur (for example, reversibility is needed to learn about conservation). Vygotsky, however, believed that anything could be taught as long as it was within the child’s ZPD. If Vygotsky is right, then would it be possible to teach a skill such as conservation to children who are not yet at the operational stage of development?

Field (1981) found that three- and four-year-old preschoolers who are not yet able to conserve can be taught this skill.

However, four-year-olds were better conservers than the three-year-olds and were more likely to retain this skill over time.

The short-term nature of the conservation shown by the younger children suggests that they had not actually learnt a new thinking skill, but had simply rote learnt the ‘correct’ answers.

This suggests that new ways of thinking can be taught, but a child has to be ready to learn those skills.

But is school essential to the development of advanced cognitive skills such as hypothetical thinking? Cross-cultural studies of children who do not experience formal schooling suggest that cognitive skills develop at different rates and manifest themselves in different ways, depending on the context in which a child lives (Cole, 1990). Nunes, Schliemann and Carraher (1993) showed that Brazilian child street traders who had not been exposed to formal schooling had difficulty finding the correct solution to maths problems presented in written form, but were successful when the same problem was presented in oral form. This demonstrates that children possess the ability to solve hypothetical problems, but, because of a lack of experience and training in written mathematical problems, they fail when these problems are presented as they would be in a formal school setting.

This suggests that development of logical thought is not influenced by schooling – it will develop anyway, but school influences how those skills develop and are manifest, by teaching the language and expectations of a specific cultural setting in relation to cognitive tasks (Cole, 1990).

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