SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

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SOCIO-CULTURAL THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• LEV VYGOTSKY (1896 - 1934)

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BACKGROUND

• Born in Gomel, Belarus a few 100 miles from the
  Polish Border to middle class Jewish parents
• Tutored at home by a progressive tutor who used
  advanced teaching techniques
• Greatly affected by the Russian politics of the
  time.
• The Czarist Government subjected the Jews to
  periodic pogroms which his family survived.

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YOUNG ADULTHOOD POLITICS

• Admitted to University of Moscow despite the 3
  quota system where he studied law.
• When he graduated in 1917 Vygodsky had turned
  into Vygotsky, Marxist politics was rampant and
  the Bolsheviks controlled Russia.
• Lev returned home to his hometown to teach in
  what was at this point a state school.
• 1920 he contracted tuberculosis, and this
  affected the rest of his short life.

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POLITICS PSYCHOLOGY

• 1924 the year Stalin took power after Lenins
  death, Vygotsky fell in Love married and moved to
  Moscow.
• In the upheaval of the revolution life conditions
  were miserable lived in 1 room with family.
• Travelled back and forth from Moscow, Leningrad
  and Kharkow with teaching and publishing jobs.
• Founded the Institute of Defectology, where he
  directed the department of education for
  physically defective and mentally retarded
  children.

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POLITICS PSYCHOLOGY

• Gathered together a large group of young
  scientists interested in Defectology, mental
  abnormality and psychology.
• His ideas gained power and influence in Russia
  and his students became some of the paragons of
  Soviet Psychology.
• Within the decade he became the leader of Soviet
  Psychology championing a New Science.
• This Science was radically different to existing
  ideas of the nature of Psychology.

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A NEW SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY

• Both Soviet and American psychology presumed
  psychology to be a Science of Behaviour.
• Secondly American Psychology reflected its
  national history of rugged individualism.
• Vygotsky railed against both these traditions, as
  seen with many great psychologists his personal
  experiences exerted an identifiable influence on
  theory.

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A MARXIST PSYCHOLOGY

• Vygotsky and his followers re-invented Soviet
  psychology.
• They studied education, illiteracy, remediation
  and cultural differences among hundreds of ethnic
  groups comprising of the new nation.
• As a Marxist Psychologist his agenda was to
  understand how individuals incorporate the social
  (collective) consciousness into their own
  activities.
• He died in 1934, his short professional life was
  very productive and he left behind several books,
  many articles and drawers full of unpublished
  books manuscripts.

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FRAMEWORK FOR THEORY

• Vygotsky's works were suppressed after his death,
  e.g. Thought and Language, was unpublished in the
  West until 1962. Consequently, the impact of his
  ideas is only beginning to be felt in Western
  psychology.
• For Vygotsky, mental processes can only be
  understood by looking at what they develop from
  and what they develop into. Of particular
  importance was the role of interpersonal (social)
  interaction.

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VYGOTSKIAN ASSUMPTIONS

• First, that children are born with fundamental
  cognitive and perceptual abilities, including
  capacity for memory and attention.
• Second that an infant is an active agent in its
  quest for understanding an knowledge.
• Third, that the characteristics of human nature
  was tied up in the collective structure as both
  product and servant.

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THEMES IN THEORY

• Wertsch (1985) has identified three main themes
  in Vygotsky's theory(i) reliance on a genetic
  method(ii) the social origin of the higher
  mental functions(iii) the principle of semiotic
  mediation.

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GENETIC METHOD

• Vygotsky's assumption was that human mental
  functioning can only be understood in terms of
  its development from more primitive forms.
• Distinction between the elementary mental
  functions (EMF) and the higher mental functions
  (HMF). Specific to each type of mental function
  is a particular line of development.

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ELEMENTARY HIGHER MENTAL FUNCTIONS

• The EMFs develop along the natural line of
  development (sometimes referred to as the
  biological line), e.g. natural (non-mediated)
  memory, non-voluntary attention, etc.
• The HMFs develop along the cultural line of
  development (sometimes referred to as the
  social/historical line), e.g. mediated memory,
  voluntary attention, problem-solving, etc.
  Example of EMF/HMF distinction

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FEATURES OF EMF HMF

• Elementary mental functions
• Environmentally determined
• Inaccessible to consciousness
• Development determined by interaction with
  physical environment
• Non-mediated

• Higher mental functions
• Individually determined
• Accessible to consciousness
• Development determined by interpersonal
  interaction
• Mediated by culturally derived sign systems

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4 GENETIC DOMAINS

• Phylogenetic
• sociocultural history
• ontogenetic
• microgenetic.

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SOCIAL ORIGIN

• Vygotsky's main claim about the HMF was that they
  emerge in context of interpersonal interaction.
  This gave rise to his general genetic law of
  cultural developmentAny function in the
  child's cultural development appears twice, or on
  two planes. First it appears on the social plane,
  and then on the psychological plane. First it
  appears between people as an inter-psychological
  category, and then within the child as an
  intra-psychological category... Social relations
  or relations among people genetically underlie
  all higher functions and their relationships.
  (1981, p. 163)

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SEMIOTIC MEDIATION

• Mediation of thought processes by words and other
  culturally derived signs can be seen as an
  example of a characteristic carried over from the
  inter-psychological to the intra-psychological
  plane.
• Our social interactions are mediated by words
  Vygotsky makes the same claim about our socially
  derived thought processes.

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SEMANTICS

• For Vygotsky, signs fulfil the role of
  psychological tool. A crucial feature of the HMF
  is 'the creation and use of artificial stimuli
  which become the immediate causes of behaviour'
  (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 39).
• Instead of mental activity being entirely driven
  by environmental stimuli (EMF), it is mediated by
  artificial, conventional signs such as words in
  natural language. Certainly, the idea of thinking
  as a 'conversation in the head' has great appeal

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NEO-VYGOTSKY

• The psychologist with most responsibility for the
  recent upsurge of interest in Vygotsky's ideas is
  Wertsch (1985, 1991). Recent developments in
  linguistics and semiotics have highlighted many
  of Vygotsky's claims as standing in need of
  revision.

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DEVELOPMENTS OF SCT 1

• We now know much more about how children acquire
  language, particularly how individuals might
  grasp important grammatical categories before
  they understand the words themselves (Bruner,
  1975).

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DEVELOPMENTS OF SCT 2

• Theoretical advances have improved our
  understanding of how inner speech derives from
  private speech.

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DEVELOPMENTS OF SCT 3

• The notion of the psychological tool has been
  modified to that of the 'toolkit' (Wertsch,
  1991), allowing us to understand how different
  contexts elicit usage of a range of mediational
  devices. This is particularly interesting in
  light of recent demonstrations of
  context-sensitivity in demonstrations of
  intellectual ability (e.g. Donaldson, 1978
  Light, 1988).

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DEVELOPMENTS OF SCT 4

• The theory of cultural learning (Tomasello et
  al., 1993) has provided an exciting illustration
  of how a Vygotskian 'sociocultural' approach can
  make sense of much of the recent evidence on
  normal and abnormal development.

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SCAFFOLDING

• The concept of scaffolding is a way of thinking
  about social relationships involved in learning
  from another person.
• A scaffold is a temporary structure that gives
  the necessary support to accomplish a task.

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SCAFFOLDING CONTD.

• An effective Caregiver- teacher will provide such
  a structure in a learning/ problem solving
  situation.
• Ex Learning Outcomes, explaining end result,
  bigger picture

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THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

• The span or disparity between what children are
  able to do without assistance of others, and what
  they are often able to accomplish by having
  someone more expert assist them at key points.
• Vygotsky claimed the most affective assistance
  from the teacher was when it was over estimating
  student.

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GUIDED PARTICIPATION

• In all communities adults provide a scaffolding
  for children to begin engaging in mature
  activities.Ex going to shops, church, cooking
  looking after younger children etc.

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CULTURAL GAP IN GUIDED PARTICIPATION

• SOCIETIES OF ROUTINE ADULT CHILD COMPANY
  supportive of observations and less
  instructional, children took more responsibility
  for attention and interest
• SOCIETIES OF NON-ROUTINE ADULT CHILD COMPANY
  children took LESS responsibility for attention
  and interest. Needs more directed instructional
  lessons.

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INTERSUBJECTIVITY

• The mutual attention and shared communication
  between expert student.

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QUESTIONS TO ANSWER

• How does the socio-cultural approach differ from
  'maturation' and 'processing speed' accounts of
  development?
• How does the socio-cultural approach require a
  rethinking of the notion of the 'individual' in
  development?
• How are Vygotskys three themes illustrated by
  the ZPD?
• What implications does the ZPD have for parenting
  and education?