Developmental Psychology: Incorporating Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s Theories in Classrooms

principles relevant in different applications,” mattered to Piaget (Garner, 2008, p. 32). He believed in operative knowledge, which implies that change and transformation produce knowledge. While working at Alfred Binet’s laboratory, he became interested in studying students’ wrong responses. Piaget wanted to study the errors children made, and the possibility that the errors were not random. His theory purports the process of coming to know, and the stages we move through as we gradually acquire this ability. Piaget Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 2008) 59 67 60 “belongs to the constructivism perspective that sees learning as construction (Dahl, 1996, p. 2). Piaget identified four stages in cognitive development: sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete, and formal. Children in the sensori-motor stage, also called infancy, are likely to learn by using their five senses, object permanence, and actions that are goal-directed. Infants and children do not think the way adults do. Young children experience egocentrism because they fail to understand how someone else's point of view might be different from their own--or they fail to coordinate their point of view with that other person's (Campbell, 2006, p. 5). The preoperational stage spans ages two through seven. During this period, children are able to do one-step logic problems, develop language, continue to be egocentric, and complete operations. Children in this stage, however, struggle with centering and conservation. The concrete stage occurs during ages seven through eleven. From age twelve to adulthood, children enter the formal operations stage, which allows them to think logically and show lingering egocentrism.