Human Growth and Development / Unit 5 HGD 0634 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Three Accounts of Early Learning
The idea
Three accounts describe how young children learn, and each captures something the others miss. Piaget describes qualitative change: the child moves through stages, each a different way of thinking, and preoperational thought has its own logic. Information processing describes quantitative change: attention, memory and executive function grow step by step, like a system becoming more efficient. Vygotsky describes learning as social: children master through interaction what they cannot yet do alone, with language and other cultural tools carrying knowledge between people. Barbara Rogoff extends that view to whole communities, where children learn by observing and pitching in to real work. Environments shape which skills develop: a child growing up amid conflict may sharpen visual-spatial mapping, while a child in a quiet suburb builds with blocks. In one widely reported experiment, a computer set into a wall facing a Delhi slum was used by children who taught themselves computer skills without instruction, a finding attributed to its author, Sugata Mitra.
In practice
One child learning to count: as a stage she passes through, as a memory system gaining capacity, and as a skill her grandmother models while they shop, each account explaining a different part of the same afternoon.
Where people slip
The misconception is that one of these theories must be right and the others wrong. They answer different questions: Piaget asks how thinking is organised at each age, information processing asks how its components grow, and Vygotsky and Rogoff ask how thinking is passed between people and shaped by culture. They do disagree on whether development is stage-like or continuous, and on how much it depends on others. Piaget's order of stages holds up well; his ages and his view of the child as a lone discoverer have been revised. Claims such as the hole-in-the-wall findings are best treated as their author's reports rather than settled results. On the exam, a question about culture and guidance points to Vygotsky, and one about gradual gains in memory to information processing.
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