Piaget V's Vygotsky

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Criterion 1 The article given was written by Donald Christie, Andrew Tomie, Christine Howe and Keith Topping and focuses on supporting group work in Scottish primary classrooms: improving the quality of collaborative dialogue. This explored whether the students possessed the skills of collaboratively working with other children in a group setting, Six hundred children took part in this study over twenty four schools/classes and thirty one teachers volunteered to take part. The aims of the project were to find how the influence of the school context (urban/rural) and class ages (primary 6 and primary 7) could improve the quality of collaborative dialogue and support group work. The study aimed to gather data on the effects of the study on students, to assess the effectiveness of study, and to think about how the findings could be used in practice in the future. Piaget had a clear impact on developmental psychology. He believed that progressive changes in cognitive structures in stages of development was how children progress. Piaget believed that the creation of new schemas or the alteration of existing schema’s to cope with information developed through the stages of development he arrived at. In the article the students were in Primary 6 or 7 making the students about the ages of 10 or 11. These students according to Piaget’s theory were at the concrete operational stage where they were in the process of becoming more logical, objective and deductive. The study undertaken for the article showed that having older children as part of the group work session benefited all children in the group. Piaget would have argued that the older students were in the early stages of the formal operational stage where the students have a greater sense of abstract thinking. As Piaget believed development was a universal process, his initial sample sizes were limited,
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