SUMMARY OF PIAGET AND VYGOTSKY'S THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

A tabular comparison of Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories of cognitive development. This will illustrates the similar factors and non-similar factors between both the theories.

SN	Educational Issue	Piaget’s Cognitive- Developmental Perspective	Vygotsky’s Socio-cognitive Developmental Perspective
1	What does during cognitive development?	Domain-general mental operations that can be used to solve problems in various contexts.	Domain specific skill knowledge and expertise that is specific to a culturally valued problem.
2	How does learning occur?	Through discovery, invention. Learning is internal process of making sense of the external World.	Through social transmission. Learning is cognitive apprenticeship in which knowledge is passed from more able members of the culture to less able ones.
3	Is cognitive development universal or is it culturally specific?	Universal cognitive development unfolds in an invariant sequence.	Culturally-specific. Students develop skills and understandings that are valued by the culture but do not develop skills and understandings in non-valued domains.
4	What is the source of gains in cognitive development?	Rich, stimulating, challenging and responsive environments. Given these conditions and active, independent exploration, students construct knowledge.	Social interaction and guidance from highly competent   members of the culture. Students co-construct knowledge with competent partners through a process of guided participation
5	What is the role of the teacher?	To provide students with rich, stimulating, challenging, and responsive environments. Create cognitive conflicts. Ask questions about relationships (same? different?).	To select culturally valued problems to solve, introduce the tools of the culture, provide scaffolding within the student’s zone of proximal development, probe-question-scaffolding students’ thinking during dialogue.
6	What is the role of peers?	To stimulate cognitive conflict so act as to create disequilibrium.	To act as a mentor and guide, in much the same ways as the teacher.
7	How important is language development to cognitive development?	Largely unimportant.  Language is a by-product of thought.	Crucial.  Language is the most important tool of thought.
8	Recommended instructional strategies	Discovery-based learning;          Montessori classrooms; interest areas; project-based learning; curiosity-inducing strategies.	Scaffolding in the zone of proximal development (model—coach—fade); dialogue within an instructional conversation; cooperative learning.

Conclusion

One theory is cognitive developmental perspective while the other one is social cognitive perspective. In Piaget's the learning process occur through identification or finding out the subject matter, more on research work. but in Vygotsky's theory leaning process depends on social transmission, where knowledge is passed from more able members to less able members of the culture. 

In the first theory the role of the teacher is to provide a well designed suitable learning environment to stimulate the response to learning matters. However in the second theory the teacher play a mediator role to introduce cultural tools and valued problems related to the culture. So teacher provide maximum support to the students to gain their cognitive development. The role of the students (peers) is to develop discussions, negotiation to learn the subject matter thoroughly. Meanwhile in the Vygotsky's theory the students (peers) acts as mentors and guide the instruction by the teacher.

Therefore in the Piaget's theory students learning process depend on the findings, observations, creativity etc. While in the Vygotsky's theory students learning process depend on scaffolding (support) in the zone of proximal development.