LEARNING THEORIES IN ART EDUCATION: Piaget and Vygotsky

What is cognitive? Cognitive is how people thought and understand. What is cognitive learning? A cognitive learning theory is the function based on how a person processes and reasons information. It is revolves around many factors including problem-solving skills, memory retention, thinking skills and the perception of learned material.

The cognitive learning had his cycle that was called the cognitive triangle which is, thought, behavior and feeling for example a positive situation where the person see a dog, he say (thought) ; what are nice dog! He automatically pet the dog (behavior), both was happy (feeling) but remembered! What are we thought, it is good or bad, and it was influence our behavior and feeling. The psychologist named Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky was the first develop cognitive development theories.

Jean Piaget developed his methods of understanding children by observation and analyzed behavior through his children. Piaget introduced four basic concept identified by the terms schema, assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. Schema is the formation of specific structure in minds which responses to stimuli. While assimilation is the cognitive process by which the person integrates new perceptual matter or stimulus events into existing schemata or patterns of behavior while accommodation is encounter new stimulus, they may try to assimilate it into an existing schema. Thus, after steps of assimilate and accommodation, Piaget named it, equilibration which is cognitive balance whereas the development of abilities process on children so, that’s why the children had different thinking ability. While for intellectual development, Piaget divided intellectual development into four steps. These include sensimotor intelligence (0-2 years), preoperational thought (2-7 years), concrete operations (7-11 years) and formal operations (11-15 years).

While through Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, he was introduced sociocultural cognition. Vygotsky believed that mental activity is uniquely human beings to develop their superior nervous activity that was derived from the cultural activity of human beings for example, children experiencing their social learning with adult as guidance. Vygotsky focused on connection between people and the social cultural in which they act and interact in shared experience. Vygotsky introduced three major themes which are social interaction towards parents, siblings, peer and teachers. The second theme is the more knowledgeable other (MKO) which is someone who has better understanding and had higher ability such as teachers, coach, older adult, peers or computer and the last theme is the zone of proximal development (ZPD) which means the distance between a student’s ability to perform under guidance and the students ability to solve independently. Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a scaffolding to be accepted in community and develop social interaction.

Conclusion is, the comparison of approaches to children’s learning, cognitive development and intelligence are, through Piaget, the maturation of children interact with environmental experiences while through Vygotsky, children being interactionist with skilled people but much stronger for culture. Furthermore, Piaget’s development theory has stages while Vygotsky doesn’t. Through cognitive process by sight of Piaget towards children are, the children often do assimilation, accommodation, equilibration, organization, conservation and hypothetical- deductive reasoning skills instead of Vygotsky’s sight which children be more on discussion and reasoning through social interaction within skilled people. 

LEARNING THEORIES IN ART EDUCATION: Ivan Pavlov & Edward Thorndike

According to slide presented by Siti Nurulhuda last week, she referred to two behavioral theory of learning by Ivan Pavlov and Edward Thorndike. The slide also mentioned about what is learning? According to Siti Nurulhuda, learning was always defined as a change in an individual caused by experience.

Learning theory was divided into three items whereas behaviorism, cognitive and constructivism. Behaviorism is a learning process through observation for example; the children always imitate what they had seen through their parent as well as the girls playing by pretend to be moms that manage their baby such as feeding a baby, change their nappy and so on. The conclusion is, behaviorism is a process of indirect learning that can be taught by experience and environment.

Next, cognitive learning theories was focus on mental process whereas children used to think about something that they get from observation for example, the children want to look at the sun but sunrays was not safe to them so, they think for how to look at the sun safely, means they need a protection! They will think what the protection should be? They should think and this is how they find a solution which means they used a critical thinking to solve problem, then critical thinking is a mental process.

While the constructivism is the combination of behaviorism and cognitive whereas the children was observed and think for example, the situation of one children want to touch the hot kettle but their mom against it due to it was hot and may hurt that children so the children will think what they can used to prevent the hot and at the same time they want to touch it, so they come out with cloth then touch the kettle, so they may know that kettle was hot and touch with cloth can prevent them from getting hurt.

Last but not least, the behavioral learning theories show us the proof about what happen in our life. Ivan Pavlov use   classical conditioning that emphasis on observation using psychomotor such as neutral stimuli through five steps which are unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimuli, conditioned stimulus and classical conditioning while Edward Thorndike through imitation but through three laws which is law of effect, law of readiness and law of exercise.  

Conclusion is, the theoretical learning process had their own advantages and dis-advantages but can implemented to person due to their behavior.