As you learned in this module's text material, Piaget and Vygotsky shared some similarities in their developmental theories, but they also have some marked differences. Describe one area in which their views are similar and one in which they differ. Include an example for each of those areas. It can either be something you personally observed or a hypothetical example.

Both Piaget and Vygotsky conceive the child as an active, attentive being, who constantly creates hypotheses about his environment. There are, however, great differences in the way of knowing the development process.

Piaget favors biological maturation; Vygotsky, the social environment. Piaget, for accepting that internal factors prevail over external factors, postulates that development follows a fixed and universal sequence of stages. Vygotsky, emphasizing the social environment in which the child was born, recognizes that, if this environment varies, development will also vary. In this sense, for this theorist, one cannot accept a single, universal vision of human development.

Piaget believes that knowledge is spontaneously developed by the child according to the stage of development he is in. The particular and peculiar (egocentric) view that children kill about the world progressively approaches the conception of adults: it becomes socialized, objective. Vygotsky disagrees that the construction of knowledge proceeds from the individual to the social. In his view, the child is born in a social world and, since birth, is forming a vision of that world through interaction with more experienced adults or children. The construction of the real is then measured by the interpersonal before being internalized by the child. In this way, it proceeds from the social to the individual, throughout development. Piaget believes that learning is subordinate to development and has little impact on it. In doing so, he minimizes the role of social interaction. Vygotsky, on the contrary, postulates that development and learning are processes that influence each other, so that the more learning, the more development.