Developmental Perspectives - Piaget VS Vygotsky

Jean Piaget is best known for his research on children's cognitive development. He suggested that children are active and motivated learners. They organize what they learn by sorting the knowledge that they acquired through their experiences. When new information is acquired, children adapt through process either assimilation or accommodation. Assimilation process, children organize that information by into existing schemas that has been formed previously whereas accommodation is through revising and existing schema or creating an entirely new category of information.

In his study regarding intellectual development of his own three children, he created a theory that identified the four stages that children experienced in the development of intelligence and formal thought processes.

Lev Vygotsky focused on influenced of child's social and cultural worlds on cognitive development. Cognitive development is mostly results of interactions and experiences. It involves a transition between elementary mental function and higher mental function. 

One of the major theories developed by Vygotsky was Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It is a region of sensitivity for learning characterized by the difference between actual development level when a child is capable of doing without assistance and potential development where a child is capable of doing something with assistance. According to Vygotsky, actual development level determined by determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers." Parents and teachers can foster learning by providing educational opportunities that lie within a child's zone of proximal development.

What I can't do: not ready or able to learn, do not teach too difficult.
What I can do with help: what the learner can understand with proper guidance, do teaching and challenged.

What I can do: What is known, do not reteach. Too boring. 

Thus, Vygotsky has been suggested that a child's interactions with the social world would produce advance thinking. 

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done”.
-Jean Piaget

"Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialised abilities for thinking about a variety of things." 

- Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, 1978