Development Case Study

1. According to Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Laura is just entering the Formal Operational Stage. Laura is taking her ability to think concretely and attempting to apply it to hypothetical situation. Her limited experience forces her to assimilate her understanding of how the world works with the dilemma she is faced with. When her teacher begins to question her schema, she accommodates her previous explanations with new dilemma's that she is presented with. She is trying not to disrupt her cognitive equilibrium and the result is that her jump into the formal operational stage is tentative. Her teacher is guiding her through the process of hypothetical deductive reasoning by allowing her to test different variables against her hypothesis. She seems to be trying to apply concrete reasoning to this process. She is able to apply transitivity to her reasoning by reevaluating and regrouping her hypothesis, but she is afraid to let go of the equilibrium she is grasping to withdraw her hypothesis and consider an alternative.

2. It is likely that Laura has never seen the effects of pollution or even completely defined what pollution is. She narrowly defines it as consumed gasoline. When her teacher introduces her to landfill pollution she seems to vaguely understand the connection and has to accommodate her previous schema to this new idea. Ironically enough she does this by solving the problem with more pollution, chemicals. When this contradiction is presented to her she struggles to assimilate the concept into her recently expanded schema. It is at this point that her prior knowledge base limits her ability to engage in a rational discussion of an unfamiliar topic.

3. Laura's teacher is attempting to expand her zone of proximal development by allowing her to develop theories that she is comfortable with and then slowly challenging them to broaden her range of cognitive reasoning. He is using a scaffolding technique that expands her reasoning one step at a time instead of dumping a lot of challenging information into a semi-permeable schema. Through this type of guided participation all of the students are benefiting from the scaffold of information. By using a scaffolding technique, Laura's teacher allows her and her peers to assimilate and accommodate new ideas as they try to maintain equilibrium. By disrupting their state of schema equilibrium, he encourages cognitive development because they have to regain their equilibrium.

4. Piaget's theory discusses how learners acquire schema and adapt them by manipulating their environment and piecing information together into understandable cognitive pathways. He suggests that this happens independently as a child figures out the world around him. Vygotskii would take this process and intercede with an experienced learner to guide the learning process. This can be seen as Laura is allowed to develop her own hypothesis about how the world operates, or should operate, and then her teacher guides her through the rest of the play experience by guiding her reasoning processes though his own experience and understanding.