vigoŢchi Flashcards
What did VigoŢchi say in addition to Piset?
In addition to the importance of interactions with the world, VigoŢchi emphasised the importance of culture and social context for development
What are the 2 planes of development?
The natural line - spontaneous discovery that comes from our own cognitive processing
The cultural line
What is the concept of psychological tools?
VigoŢchi described a number of psychological processes that enable us to master our own behaviour.
What is one psychological tools?
Speech is the most important psychological tool because it enables children to participate in social life.
Language plays an important role in the development of problem solving skills, decision making and planning.
What is self directed speech?
A psychological tool
Children of 3 to 4 use it
Piset thought self directed speech reflects a child’s egocentrism
VigoŢchi believed that self directed speech is important for emerging problem solving skills.
What is an example of self directed speech?
A child is drawing and a colour is missing so they say “Where is my pencil? I need a blue pencil. Never mind I’ll draw with the red one and wet it with water and it will become dark blue.”
Through this articulation of the problem, the child appears to solve the problem.
What are other psychological tools?
Writing and numbering systems.
What are writing and numbering systems?
VigoŢchi believed these have a major impact on cognitive development of individuals.
Writing requires detaching from physical expressive speech in order to use abstract symbols for words.
Numbering systems emerged when people could not quantify large numbers of animals by sight alone.
On which plane are psychological tools acquired?
They are acquired on the natural plane. They can only be widespread in technologically advanced societies.
What is yet another psychological tool?
Memory.
Children up to age 8 assumed that they would be able to remember anything. In a memory task, they were not interested in memory aids and VigoŢchi suggested that they don’t yet know their capacity and limitations.
Children aged 9 to 12 were willing to use memory aids.
Adults memory performance was not helped by aids. VigoŢchi said that adults could make mental notes to themselves so they did not need to rely on external cues.
Play as a psychological tool.
According to VigoŢchi, play facilitates cognitive, social and emotional development. VigoŢchi believed play was a psychological tool designed to acquire new cognitive skills.
In contrast, Piaget defined play as assimilation, he believed that play was an expression of child’s attempts to make environmental stimuli match their own concepts.
What are the zones of proximal development?
The distance between the developmental level and the level of potential development.
What are the different zones?
“What I can do” given my current intellectual development
“What I can do with help” - what a child is capable of following interactions with someone more expert
“What I can’t do” even with the help of others
What do intelligence tests measure according to VigoŢchi?
He believed that standardised achievement and intelligence tests only measure a child’s actual level of development.
These tests do not tell us how well a child can learn beyond their current level given additional support.
What is scaffolding? Jerome Bruner
Developed based on ZPD
Scaffolding is the process that enables a child to solve a problem that would otherwise be beyond their unassisted efforts.
