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.