What role does Piaget's Cognitive development theory and Vygotskys social approach play in children with autism?
Piaget stresses that children actively construct knowledge
through experiences while Vygotsky stresses that adults and the
wider society creates the context for those experiences. A reading
of Piaget's thesis would suggest that humans gradually learn to be
more logical as they get older and can move from concrete to
abstract thinking. His concern is with epistemology or how
knowledge is possible and leads to considering that a child orders
experience much like a scientist exploring the world and
establishing rules and laws. Vygotsky makes us aware that such pure
abstract knowlege is constrained or guided or structured by the
social environment in which learning takes place.