Vygotsky Flashcards
Who was Vygotsky heavily influenced by?
Karl Marx
What are the four infant elementary functions that they are born with?
- Attention
- Sensation
- Perception
- Memory
How do they come higher mental functions?
Through interaction with other people, the environment and language
What are the key elements of Vygotsky’s theory?
- The importance of socio-culture
- Inner speech
- Instruction at the heart of learning
How does socio-culture influence play?
Socio-culture determines the type of practical activity we engage in, as children often imitate in play.
One big difference between cultural groups is that Guatemalan children imitated adult work in their play more than American children
How does socio-culture influence problem solving?
Socio-culture influences how familiar we are with thinking and reasoning about certain problems or topics
Liberian people are better at estimating quantities of rice, than length in general compared to US people.
How does socio-culture influence language?
It determines the language we speak and subtle differences in language can lead to noticeable differences in cognition
Some languages don’t have words for quantities larger than 5, which can influence numerical skills.
What did Vygotsky describe self-speech as?
A transition from language as a tool for communicating to language as a tool for thought
It is essential for children’s cognitive development
These monologues become internalised at around 7 years to become inner speech
What evidence is there for self-speech?
Children engage in more self-speech if a task is challenging
Children who use self-speech when facing challenging tasks are more attentive and perform better than quiet children
What is the zone of proximal development?
the increase in development that a child can reach through assistance by a more competent person compared to the development without this help
Vygotsky thought that children learn best when they are in this zone
What is scaffolding?
An idea to describe how children’s learning is enhanced when more competent people provide a framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than they could manage by themselves
How can people assist children using scaffolding?
By:
- Modelling an action
- Suggesting a strategy to solve a problem
- Restructuring it into parts that are more manageable
What is the evidence that supports scaffolding?
Parents who provide a supportive learning environment have children who generate more private speech and are therefore more successful than children with a less supportive environment
What are the 5 important aspects of scaffolding?
- Recruitment - need to engage a child’s interest
- Reduction in degrees of freedom - reduce number of acts that are needed to arrive at a solution
- Direction maintenance - maintain a child’s motivation
- Marking critical features
- Demonstration - model the solution or parts of the task to stimulate the learner to imitate this
What is a typical “Vygotskian” classroom?
- Structured learning activities
- Helpful hints carefully tailored to the child’s current abilities
- Monitoring the learners progress
- Collaborative learning exercises where the students assist each other
Why does collaborative learning help?
Motivation is enhanced
Cooperative learning means the child has to explain their ideas which requires them to examine and articulate them clearly
It also increases self-speech
But peers need to be competent and modify their behaviour for any less skilled peers otherwise it is no more effective than working alone
How are improvements from group learning linked to poor memory?
Many 5 year olds in collaborative conditions later incorrectly think that they made certain actions/decisions and make attribution errors
This led to greater learning, children that made attribution errors had greater memory
Outline similarities between Piaget and Vygotsky
They agreed that children are active learners and believed that interaction with the world is important for development
They were both constructivists
Outline differences between Piaget and Vygotsky
For Piaget - all about the child and their own efforts to understand their world
For Vygotsky - takes place in their social world and between the child and other people
Vygotsky’s stages are more flexible and continuous compared to PIaget’s
Interaction is necessary for Vygotsky but not for Piaget
Self-speech for Piaget means the child is self-centred but Vygotsky sees it as a transition
