Cognitive Development: Sociocultural View

Question 1

Lev Vygotsky

Answer 1

• Born in Belorussia in 1896
• Of Jewish background/culture
• Graduated from university during the year of the Russian Revolution
• Was a Marxist;
• worked at the Psychological Institute of Moscow; charged with developing a Marxist
psychology
• Died of TB at 38 yrs and was relatively unknown
• Work was banned under Stalin regime
• After Stalin’s death, work began to be disseminated

Question 2

Sociocultural View of

Cognitive Development

Answer 2

Cognitive development depends upon culture and social interactions

Question 3

Vygotsky’s Theory

Answer 3

• Children actively construct their knowledge
• Social interaction and culture guide cognitive
development
• Learning is based upon inventions of society
• Knowledge is created through interactions with other
people and objects in the culture
• Less skilled persons learn from the more skilled
- Cognitive structures (schemes) develop
through interaction with language of
culture

Question 4

Speech/language

Answer 4

is the vehicle through which concepts are learned
• Social speech: the speech we hear around us
• Social plane
• Private speech: the speech children say to themselves aloud, which later
becomes internalized
• Psychological plane

Question 5

Internalization

Answer 5

process through which private or external speech
becomes truly silent speech, or an internal mental process
• SILENT SPEECH=THOUGHT

Question 6

Mediation

Answer 6

process used by adults/more skilled peers to introduce

concepts to children

Question 7

Zone of Proximal Development

Answer 7

distance between current maximum
independent performance of a child and tasks child can perform if
guided or helped by adults
• Optimal level of difficulty for true LEARNING
• Range of problems that child could solve
with help
• Bottom boundary: most difficult problem
child can solve independently
• Top boundary: problem child cannot solve;
lacks cognitive structures to do it

Question 8

Implications for teaching

Answer 8

• Children benefit from being given challenging

material, along with guidance and help

Question 9

Scaffolding

Answer 9

Support given to a child during the learning process, or as he/she
develops a new cognitive structure or mental function

Question 10

Criticisms: Piaget

Answer 10

- Possible validity problems in early
experiments
• Stages are rigid, don’t allow for
individual differences and aren’t
always true for all individuals
• What about emotional
development?
• What about developmental delays?

Question 11

Criticisms: Vygotsky

Answer 11

- Little scientific support
• Why do some children not respond
to teaching?
• How do we account for learning in
absence of teaching?
• What about emotional
development?
• What about developmental delays?