Chapter 2 Case Study

1.From the perspective of Piaget's theory, in which stage of cognitive development is Laura? Justify your response.

Knowing that Laura is 14 years old, Piaget would say that she is in the Formal operations stage. I would say she is just staring out in the stage because she still has some work to do on her understanding of logic but is trying to figure things out. She is critically and trying to logical come up with how to solve the pollution problem within her schemes.

2.How is Laura's reasoning affected by her knowledge base--that is, by what she does and doesn't know about pollution?

It seems that Laura’s reaction to what pollution is only air pollution. In her argument she says that, "Well, I think the government shouldn't allow people to sell gasoline. That way, we wouldn't have any more air pollution from car exhaust or other machines." Here this shows that what she knows about pollution is that gas affects the air. When her teacher tries to bring the topic to the garbage landfills and how that is also pollution she brushes it off like it can be easily taken care of showing once again that her knowledge base is limited.

3.By posing a series of questions, Mr. Marculescu continually challenges Laura to reconsider her thinking about the pollution problem. What are potential benefits of this strategy? Use terminology from Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories in your response.

According to Piaget what Mr Marculescu is doing is causing Laura to be in a state of disequilibrium. Since she isn’t too familiar with pollution putting her up in front of her peers and asking her hard questions forces her to try very hard to make sense of what he wants her to understand about the content. According to Vygotsky he is helping her to be in the Zone of Proximal development. He is helping her by asking her questions and putting her in that Zone which is not too easy and not too hard for her.

4.How does this scenario represent Piaget's and Vygotsky's conceptions of play?

It is important to Piaget to have students think about things according to what they already know. Piaget would have liked this type of play because she had to think and associate things so while Laura was giving her debate she had to, according to Piaget, assimilate and accommodate her scheme of thinking to come up with answers to her teacher’s questions. Her teacher kept asking her questions and she had to think through her answers and assimilate how to answer the best she could.

Vygostskys would say that it was this was a great example of play because it was two people who were pretending to be at a debate with another school. Therefore she had to adhere to social rules to guide how she was acting and it gave her practice for a time she would be in a similar situation. It also was a good social interaction. The talking back and forth is a great way to help in her cognitive development. This was a challenging task for Laura and therefore it helped maximize the cognitive growth she was getting