To apply Piaget’s theory in education, teachers should realize their role as a facilitator, aiming towards the indirect imparting of knowledge and not direct tuition. As Piaget said, ‘every time we teach a child something we prevent him from discovering it on his own’. Teachers should focus on the child’s learning process and not the end product. The teacher should also assess the level of each student’s development to be able to attend to individual needs of each student. Based on the readiness approach each child is different and it would not be effective for the teacher to give a standard output to the entire class with the assumption that each student would process the information in the same way. The teacher should focus on the ability of the students in learning, and setting tasks that are self-motivating for the child could encourage such learning processes. Tasks set should be challenging enough to set the child in disequilibrium so he/she can accommodate and create new schema.
To summarize Piaget’s views, learning is what results from physical and mental maturation from experience. That is, development preceded learning. There are a few pros and cons in applying Piaget’s theory in education. On one hand, focus is shifted onto the child’s learning process and many schools have incorporated Piaget’s ideas into math and science. Teachers provide practical and experimental work before moving onto more abstract and deductive reasoning. However, criticisms for Piaget’s theory include the unreliability of his research method. Piaget’s major source of inspiration was his three children and the other children in his small research sample were from well-educated professionals of high socio-economic status. Because of this unrepresentative sample it is difficult to generalize his findings into a larger population as the development of mental processes in children may differ at a larger scale. Also when applying his theories in education teachers may underestimate the abilities of children as they may possess certain abilities at an earlier time than suspected. According to Piaget if development preceded learning, teachers would have to make their own judgment as to when their students have reached a certain ‘stage’ of mental development for further learning to take place and poor judgment may hinder educational development in lessons.
Another cognitive psychologist with a theory which could be applied to education is Lev Vygotsky who believed that adults who know more than children should provide the support the child needs until the child has learned. Such support has been labeled ‘scaffolding’ and it is in this aspect that Vygotsky disagrees with Piaget’s concept of readiness. He believed that intervention was necessary to prompt the learning process. An example that backs up this theory is an experiment carried out by Freund (1990) where 3-5 year olds had to place furniture into a dollhouse either with or without the help of their mothers. The children who performed the task initially with their mothers proved to be better at subsequent tasks than those who were left to carry out the initial task alone. He believed that instruction was an important component of the learning process as the more knowledgeable other provides the tools needed for cognitive development.
In education, Vygotsky proposes the idea of a spiral curriculum which opposes Piaget’s idea of readiness as it proposes that complex information is presented to students at simplified levels first and then re-visited at a more complicated level later on. A hypothetical support structure, ‘scaffolding’ is adopted in the education system to allow the child to climb to higher levels of development in manageable amounts. In contrast to Piaget who sees learning as something which follows development, Vygotsky believes that learning processes lead development. In other words learning is what leads to the development of higher order thinking. The idea of a zone of proximal development is central to Vygotsky’s view on how learning takes place. The zone of proximal development is the difference between what a student can accomplish with help (from the teacher, parent, fellow students), and what he or she can do alone without help. Vygotsky believed in learning through assisted performance--such as "look do" teaching methods, where the child imitates something the teacher has done. Of course assisted-performance learning will only work within the zone of proximal development (what the child can do with assistance). As an example a teacher demonstrates how to solve a math problem to a student, and repeats if required until the student masters the skill. However Vygotsky noted that if the teacher works on a problem in higher mathematics outside the zone of proximal development the student would never learn it no matter how many times it was repeated. Teachers should work sensitively and contingently within the ZPD.
Vygotsky received support from Wood and Middleton (1975) about the idea of contingency by watching mothers who offered different levels of help to their children while building blocks depending on how much difficulty the child was having. Vygotsky’s approach to education is more flexible than Piaget’s. Some criticism of Vygotsky’s work includes the fact that he did not pay enough attention to the biological factors in his work, particularly in his empirical research. He exclusively focused on the socio-cultural forces in his studies and neglected the biological line of development especially the physical maturation of a child within its first few years. Biology may have an influence on a child’s zone of proximal development.
In conclusion, both Piaget and Vygotsky as cognitive psychologists have contributed greatly to the field of education. While their theories bear similarities, Piaget believes that a child develops in stages, and development occurs before the child is ready to learn things in varying difficulty or depth. Vygotsky however believes in intervention of more knowledgeable parties which would provide a support framework for a child to learn and therefore further develop as a result of learning. Education bodies around the world have incorporated both ideas into education systems.