{"id":156,"date":"2019-08-23T14:11:20","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T14:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/?post_type=chapter&p=156"},"modified":"2019-08-23T19:37:28","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T19:37:28","slug":"vygotskys-developmental-theory","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/chapter\/vygotskys-developmental-theory\/","title":{"raw":"Lev Vygotsky","rendered":"Lev Vygotsky"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n\r\nLev Vygotsky\u00a0was born in\u00a01896\u00a0in Czarist\u00a0Russia. He grew up in\u00a0Gomel\u00a0a mid-sized city that is in what is now the independent nation of\u00a0Belorussia\u00a0about 400 miles west of\u00a0Moscow. As Jews\u00a0the Vygotsky family however prosperous were outsiders in\u00a0Russia\u00a0under\u00a0Czar Nicolas. They were strict laws on what jobs Jews could hold.\u00a0What regions of the country they could live in.\u00a0And limits on how many could be formally educated. That\u00a0odds were great but miraculous\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0gained a place.\u00a0Almost immediately he changed his major from medicine to law.\u00a0Graduating just as the first world war was ending and the Russian revolution\u00a0changed all institution and expectations.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0returned to\u00a0Gomel\u00a0and taught. Initially he taught literature in a secondary\u00a0school and after few years taught teacher education in the local\u00a0training institution. Thus, he had much practical experience in that\u00a0field of education. He also became interested in psychology\u00a0and began to do research in this field. He moved to\u00a0Moscow\u00a0and entered the heady intellectual life of the pre-Stalin era of the\u00a0communist experiment. It was a time of relative openness for academic freedom.\u00a0During that almost frenzied last decade of his life\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0worked in a wide range of arenas. He worked with displaced refugees\u00a0with physically and mentally handicapped people in scientific\u00a0institutes and universities. He also managed to write seven books\u00a0and dozens of articles before dying at age 37 in\u00a01934.\r\n\r\nIn\u00a01936\u00a0Psychology became politicized and only certain psychologists were approved by Stalin regime\u00a0and it was not until the\u00a01960\u2019s\u00a0that the\u00a0thaw in political influences on academic life occurred after the death\u00a0of\u00a0Stalin.\u00a0Vygotsky\u2019s\u00a0ideas resurfaced in\u00a0Russia\u00a0and his\u00a0comments on\u00a0Piaget\u00a0were published in the west. It was then that professors became able to explore and elaborate the ideas of Vygotsky\u00a0and with glasnost of late\u00a01980\u2019s\u00a0Vygotsky\u2019s\u00a0ideas became increasingly popular in the\u00a0United States.\r\n\r\nThe essence\u00a0of\u00a0Vygotsky's\u00a0theory of learning and development can be grouped into four major ideas:\r\n
    \r\n \t
  • Children construct knowledge.<\/li>\r\n \t
  • Learning can lead development.<\/li>\r\n \t
  • Development cannot be separated from its social context.<\/li>\r\n \t
  • Language plays a central role in mental development.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nVygotsky\u00a0believed that children construct\u00a0knowledge and do not passively reproduce what is presented to them.\u00a0Learning is much more than the mirroring; it always involves the learners\u00a0creating their own representations of new information. In this\u00a0belief,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0is like his contemporary,\u00a0Jean Piaget.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0studied\u00a0Piaget's\u00a0early work avidly but\u00a0Piaget\u00a0did not read\u00a0Vygotsky's\u00a0until very late in his career.\u00a0For\u00a0Piaget,\u00a0construction of knowledge occurs primarily in the child\u2019s interaction with physical objects.\u00a0For\u00a0Vygotsky, knowledge is not\u00a0so much constructed as co-constructed; learning always involves\u00a0more than one human.\r\n\r\nVygotsky envisioned a more complex relationship between development and learning than either\u00a0the young\u00a0Piaget\u00a0or the elderly\u00a0Pavlov\u00a0had conceived. Like\u00a0Piaget,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0believed that there were maturational prerequisites for certain learning.\u00a0For example, you cannot master logic without having mastered language.\r\n\r\nVygotsky\u00a0argued that learning impacts development. With early math for instance,\u00a0learning skills can hasten development. Rather than viewing\u00a0this early counting as just wrote reciting,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0would argue that\u00a0it nudges the child towards a concept of the symbolic nature of number.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0gave great value to assisting children to use strategies\u00a0to further their intellectual capacities.\r\n\r\nIt is in this context that we will discuss\u00a0the best-known part of\u00a0Vygotsky's\u00a0work, the Zone of Proximal Development.\u00a0Take for example the relationship between counting and the concept\u00a0of number. When asked to count bears, a four-year boy\u00a0can count meaningfully to twelve and by rote memory to fifteen.\u00a0But when the teacher\u00a0structures the activity differently, the same child can perform at a higher level.\u00a0Counting meaningfully to seventeen without missing any bears.\u00a0Assistance may take the form of teacher\u00a0hints or clues, or otherwise setting up a situation so a higher level\u00a0of outcome can occur. This higher level which the child is\u00a0currently capable attaining only with help is called the level\u00a0of assisted performance.\r\n\r\nASSISTED PERFORMANCE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE\r\n\r\nThe area between the level of\u00a0independent performance and the level of assisted performance is the Zone of Proximal\u00a0Development. It is here where the teacher must focus attention. Not only\u00a0assistance used by the child needs to be intentionally provided by an adult,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0believed that a child can perform on a higher level through any type of the\u00a0social interaction, interaction with peers as equals, with imaginary partners,\u00a0or with children at other developmental levels.\u00a0The zone is not static. It\u00a0shifts as a child progressively attains the higher level. With each shift, the child\u00a0is capable of learning more complex concepts and skills. Obviously,\u00a0there are concepts and skills beyond a child\u2019s current zone of proximal development. For\u00a0instance, a four-year old cannot be taught calculus even by the most gifted teacher.\r\n\r\nThe concept of the zone of proximal development has at least three important implications for early childhood education.\r\n
      \r\n \t
    1. First, it causes us as educators to rethink how we intervene, what mediation or action on our part will help this particular child make the next step in his understanding. Do we give oral hints? Or do we pair him with the child who is slightly more advanced? Or do we have him teach a child who is just starting?<\/li>\r\n \t
    2. Second, the zone of proximal development has important implication for how we assess children.<\/li>\r\n \t
    3. The unassisted performance level is what we have traditionally examined in both standardized testing situations and even in the individual portfolios. What can a child perform alone?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\nWe turn now to the most pervasive of the Vygotskian tenants that development cannot be separated from its social context. For Vygotsky, the social context influences more than just attitudes and beliefs. It has a profound influence on how we think, as well as what we think. Vygotsky and his colleagues witnessed the rapid social changes in the Soviet Union that occurred when non-technical cultures, like Uzbeks of Central Asia, suddenly were expected to participate in the quite technically advanced western culture of the new empire.\r\n\r\nNot only was their knowledge based different but even their way of thinking about experience was different. Vygotsky and his colleagues developed studies to examine how the social context affected the thinking, perception, and memory of the Uzbeks. Like anthropologists, who have studied other preliterate cultures, Vygotsky discovered that Western logic is not universal. Other cultures have ways of classifying and describing experience that differ from ours but they are appropriate to their environments. These are scenes from Manus New Guinea in the early 1950\u2019s photographed by Lenora Forestell under the guidance of Margaret Mead.\r\n\r\nMENTAL FUNCTIONS\r\n\r\nVygotsky did believe that there is a similar structure of the mind in all humans. He believed that there are two levels of mental functioning, lower and higher. The lower mental functions consist of such abilities as reactive attention, reacting to a loud noise or bright-colored objects.\r\n\r\nAssociate memory as when we learn to stop at red lights and sensory-motor thought. These functions are innate, part of our biological heritage and shared with the higher animals. The higher mental processes are unique to humans passed down through generations by teaching and learning. Their form varies from culture to culture. Through the passing of cultural tools, such functions as focused attention, the ability to concentrate in spite of distractions, deliberate memory, the ability to remember on purpose. Responding to different environmental forces, different cultures have evolved different tools. Non-literate societies use very different means of storing information than literate ones. Internal mental tools are largely language-based; for instance, mnemonic devices or categories. Young children are in the process of developing internal mental tools and require adult assistance for this process. According to Vygotsky, the whole history of human culture is based on the development of mental tools primitive external ones to complex ones. We cannot elaborate in this program all the implications Vygotsky's theory has for cross-cultural studies. But they are many. Appreciation of the ingenuity humans have demonstrated in dealing with and trans\r\n\r\nLanguage plays a central role in mental development.\r\n\r\nLanguage is both the transmitter of these cultural tools and the most important of them. This brings us to our last proposition. Language place a central role in mental development.\r\n\r\nAccording to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language. It is through language that all cultures have passed on the higher mental functions that enable us to make sense of our world. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. According to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language.\r\n\r\nLearning always involves external experience being transformed into internal processes through the mediation of language. Language is the medium that carries the experience into the mind. Teaching a new skill, we tell the child what it is we want him to do. Children appropriate the rule and use it independently to regulate their own behavior. Thus, all learning goes through this cycle of exterior and interior prompts eventually becoming a part of the children\u2019s own repertoires.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
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      \"\"<\/p>\n

      Lev Vygotsky\u00a0was born in\u00a01896\u00a0in Czarist\u00a0Russia. He grew up in\u00a0Gomel\u00a0a mid-sized city that is in what is now the independent nation of\u00a0Belorussia\u00a0about 400 miles west of\u00a0Moscow. As Jews\u00a0the Vygotsky family however prosperous were outsiders in\u00a0Russia\u00a0under\u00a0Czar Nicolas. They were strict laws on what jobs Jews could hold.\u00a0What regions of the country they could live in.\u00a0And limits on how many could be formally educated. That\u00a0odds were great but miraculous\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0gained a place.\u00a0Almost immediately he changed his major from medicine to law.\u00a0Graduating just as the first world war was ending and the Russian revolution\u00a0changed all institution and expectations.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0returned to\u00a0Gomel\u00a0and taught. Initially he taught literature in a secondary\u00a0school and after few years taught teacher education in the local\u00a0training institution. Thus, he had much practical experience in that\u00a0field of education. He also became interested in psychology\u00a0and began to do research in this field. He moved to\u00a0Moscow\u00a0and entered the heady intellectual life of the pre-Stalin era of the\u00a0communist experiment. It was a time of relative openness for academic freedom.\u00a0During that almost frenzied last decade of his life\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0worked in a wide range of arenas. He worked with displaced refugees\u00a0with physically and mentally handicapped people in scientific\u00a0institutes and universities. He also managed to write seven books\u00a0and dozens of articles before dying at age 37 in\u00a01934.<\/p>\n

      In\u00a01936\u00a0Psychology became politicized and only certain psychologists were approved by Stalin regime\u00a0and it was not until the\u00a01960\u2019s\u00a0that the\u00a0thaw in political influences on academic life occurred after the death\u00a0of\u00a0Stalin.\u00a0Vygotsky\u2019s\u00a0ideas resurfaced in\u00a0Russia\u00a0and his\u00a0comments on\u00a0Piaget\u00a0were published in the west. It was then that professors became able to explore and elaborate the ideas of Vygotsky\u00a0and with glasnost of late\u00a01980\u2019s\u00a0Vygotsky\u2019s\u00a0ideas became increasingly popular in the\u00a0United States.<\/p>\n

      The essence\u00a0of\u00a0Vygotsky’s\u00a0theory of learning and development can be grouped into four major ideas:<\/p>\n

        \n
      • Children construct knowledge.<\/li>\n
      • Learning can lead development.<\/li>\n
      • Development cannot be separated from its social context.<\/li>\n
      • Language plays a central role in mental development.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        Vygotsky\u00a0believed that children construct\u00a0knowledge and do not passively reproduce what is presented to them.\u00a0Learning is much more than the mirroring; it always involves the learners\u00a0creating their own representations of new information. In this\u00a0belief,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0is like his contemporary,\u00a0Jean Piaget.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0studied\u00a0Piaget’s\u00a0early work avidly but\u00a0Piaget\u00a0did not read\u00a0Vygotsky’s\u00a0until very late in his career.\u00a0For\u00a0Piaget,\u00a0construction of knowledge occurs primarily in the child\u2019s interaction with physical objects.\u00a0For\u00a0Vygotsky, knowledge is not\u00a0so much constructed as co-constructed; learning always involves\u00a0more than one human.<\/p>\n

        Vygotsky envisioned a more complex relationship between development and learning than either\u00a0the young\u00a0Piaget\u00a0or the elderly\u00a0Pavlov\u00a0had conceived. Like\u00a0Piaget,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0believed that there were maturational prerequisites for certain learning.\u00a0For example, you cannot master logic without having mastered language.<\/p>\n

        Vygotsky\u00a0argued that learning impacts development. With early math for instance,\u00a0learning skills can hasten development. Rather than viewing\u00a0this early counting as just wrote reciting,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0would argue that\u00a0it nudges the child towards a concept of the symbolic nature of number.\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0gave great value to assisting children to use strategies\u00a0to further their intellectual capacities.<\/p>\n

        It is in this context that we will discuss\u00a0the best-known part of\u00a0Vygotsky’s\u00a0work, the Zone of Proximal Development.\u00a0Take for example the relationship between counting and the concept\u00a0of number. When asked to count bears, a four-year boy\u00a0can count meaningfully to twelve and by rote memory to fifteen.\u00a0But when the teacher\u00a0structures the activity differently, the same child can perform at a higher level.\u00a0Counting meaningfully to seventeen without missing any bears.\u00a0Assistance may take the form of teacher\u00a0hints or clues, or otherwise setting up a situation so a higher level\u00a0of outcome can occur. This higher level which the child is\u00a0currently capable attaining only with help is called the level\u00a0of assisted performance.<\/p>\n

        ASSISTED PERFORMANCE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE<\/p>\n

        The area between the level of\u00a0independent performance and the level of assisted performance is the Zone of Proximal\u00a0Development. It is here where the teacher must focus attention. Not only\u00a0assistance used by the child needs to be intentionally provided by an adult,\u00a0Vygotsky\u00a0believed that a child can perform on a higher level through any type of the\u00a0social interaction, interaction with peers as equals, with imaginary partners,\u00a0or with children at other developmental levels.\u00a0The zone is not static. It\u00a0shifts as a child progressively attains the higher level. With each shift, the child\u00a0is capable of learning more complex concepts and skills. Obviously,\u00a0there are concepts and skills beyond a child\u2019s current zone of proximal development. For\u00a0instance, a four-year old cannot be taught calculus even by the most gifted teacher.<\/p>\n

        The concept of the zone of proximal development has at least three important implications for early childhood education.<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. First, it causes us as educators to rethink how we intervene, what mediation or action on our part will help this particular child make the next step in his understanding. Do we give oral hints? Or do we pair him with the child who is slightly more advanced? Or do we have him teach a child who is just starting?<\/li>\n
        2. Second, the zone of proximal development has important implication for how we assess children.<\/li>\n
        3. The unassisted performance level is what we have traditionally examined in both standardized testing situations and even in the individual portfolios. What can a child perform alone?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          We turn now to the most pervasive of the Vygotskian tenants that development cannot be separated from its social context. For Vygotsky, the social context influences more than just attitudes and beliefs. It has a profound influence on how we think, as well as what we think. Vygotsky and his colleagues witnessed the rapid social changes in the Soviet Union that occurred when non-technical cultures, like Uzbeks of Central Asia, suddenly were expected to participate in the quite technically advanced western culture of the new empire.<\/p>\n

          Not only was their knowledge based different but even their way of thinking about experience was different. Vygotsky and his colleagues developed studies to examine how the social context affected the thinking, perception, and memory of the Uzbeks. Like anthropologists, who have studied other preliterate cultures, Vygotsky discovered that Western logic is not universal. Other cultures have ways of classifying and describing experience that differ from ours but they are appropriate to their environments. These are scenes from Manus New Guinea in the early 1950\u2019s photographed by Lenora Forestell under the guidance of Margaret Mead.<\/p>\n

          MENTAL FUNCTIONS<\/p>\n

          Vygotsky did believe that there is a similar structure of the mind in all humans. He believed that there are two levels of mental functioning, lower and higher. The lower mental functions consist of such abilities as reactive attention, reacting to a loud noise or bright-colored objects.<\/p>\n

          Associate memory as when we learn to stop at red lights and sensory-motor thought. These functions are innate, part of our biological heritage and shared with the higher animals. The higher mental processes are unique to humans passed down through generations by teaching and learning. Their form varies from culture to culture. Through the passing of cultural tools, such functions as focused attention, the ability to concentrate in spite of distractions, deliberate memory, the ability to remember on purpose. Responding to different environmental forces, different cultures have evolved different tools. Non-literate societies use very different means of storing information than literate ones. Internal mental tools are largely language-based; for instance, mnemonic devices or categories. Young children are in the process of developing internal mental tools and require adult assistance for this process. According to Vygotsky, the whole history of human culture is based on the development of mental tools primitive external ones to complex ones. We cannot elaborate in this program all the implications Vygotsky’s theory has for cross-cultural studies. But they are many. Appreciation of the ingenuity humans have demonstrated in dealing with and trans<\/p>\n

          Language plays a central role in mental development.<\/p>\n

          Language is both the transmitter of these cultural tools and the most important of them. This brings us to our last proposition. Language place a central role in mental development.<\/p>\n

          According to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language. It is through language that all cultures have passed on the higher mental functions that enable us to make sense of our world. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. According to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language.<\/p>\n

          Learning always involves external experience being transformed into internal processes through the mediation of language. Language is the medium that carries the experience into the mind. Teaching a new skill, we tell the child what it is we want him to do. Children appropriate the rule and use it independently to regulate their own behavior. Thus, all learning goes through this cycle of exterior and interior prompts eventually becoming a part of the children\u2019s own repertoires.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":142000,"menu_order":8,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[]","CANDELA_OUTCOMES_GUID":"","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-156","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/142000"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/revisions\/245"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-canton-echd250\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}