The two most influential and important theorists when examining and studying cognitive development would most certainly be Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. The definition of cognitive development can be explained as the ability to think, reason and remember; it is a vital part and plays an important role in the development of children into adults. Piaget believed that children were responsible for their own learning through explicit instructional and discovery learning; whereas Vygotsky’s theory concentrated on children learning through their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolding. Vygotsky’s definition of the ZPD was the distance between the knowledge a child could gain on their own compared to what the child was able to learn with guidance (Duchesne, McNaugh, Bochrer and Krause, 2013). Although they take different approaches, both theorists agree that social interaction played a role in children’s development. This essay will link these theories and principles to the teaching strategies used in classrooms and in particular the practices used in the provided scenario of Ann’s Year 5 Science class.

Piaget’s constructivist method adopted the idea that children build their own knowledge individually through the initial instruction from the teacher followed by the exploration of their own environment. This method is a balanced teaching practice that can be used in classrooms as it allows learners to be responsible for their own knowledge development (Lourenco, 2012). Ann uses these principles in the indoor classroom where she provides the children with explicit instruction about seeds and then allows the children to explore the different seed types in what she likes to call the outdoor classroom. The indoor classroom is used predominantly as a starting point for her classes where she explicitly explains the task objectives to her children and then uses the