vygotsky's theory of cognitive development

Question 1

Vygotsky basis

Answer 1

• influenced by Piaget’s work, agreed on basics of cognitive development
• agreed that reasoning abilities develop in a particular sequence
• major difference is that Vygotsky saw cognitive development as a social process of learning from more experienced others
• knowledge is first intermental, between the more and less experienced individual, then intramental, within the mind of less expert individual
• also saw language as a much more important part of cognitive development than Piaget did

Question 2

cultural differences in cognitive abilities

Answer 2

• if reasoning abilities are acquired from the more experienced individuals, it follows that a child would acquire the reasoning abilities of those particular people
• may be cultural differences in cognitive development, with children picking up mental tools that will be important for life within the physical, social and work environments of their culture
• for example, these mental tools include the hand-eye coordination needed to hunt with a bow and arrow

Question 3

the zone of proximal development

Answer 3

• Vygotsky put emphasis on role of learning through interaction with others
• identified gap between a child’s current level of development and what they can potentially understand after interaction with more expert others (zone of proximal development / ZPD)
• expert assistance allows child to cross ZPD and understand as much as they are capable (still limited to some extent by developmental stage)
• believed that children develop more advanced understanding of situation, and the more advanced reasoning abilities needed to deal with it, by learning from others, opposed to individual exploration
• Vygotsky was not just saying that children learn more facts during social interaction, but that they also acquire more advanced reasoning abilities
• he believed that higher mental functions such as formal reasoning could only be acquired through interacting with more advanced others

Question 4

scaffolding

Answer 4

• all the kinds of help adults and more advanced peers give a child to help them cross the ZPD
• Vygotsky didn’t focus too much on this in his writing, most of what we know about scaffolding is from psychologists influenced by his theory
• Wood, Bruner and Ross noted particular strategies that experts use when scaffolding
• as learner crosses ZPD, level of help given declines from level 5 (most help) to level 1 (least help)
• adult is more likely to use high level of help strategies when first helping, then to gradually withdraw the level of help as the child grasps the task

Question 5

evaluation strength - support for the ZPD

Answer 5

• clear evidence to show there is a gap between level of reasoning a child achieves on their own and what they can achieve with help from a more expert other
• Roazzi and Bryant gave 4-5 year olds the task of estimating the number of sweets in a box, in one condition they worked alone and in another condition they worked with help from an older child
• most children working alone failed to give a good estimate
• in the expert help condition the older children were observed to offer prompts, most children receiving this type of help mastered the task
• children can develop additional reasoning abilities when working with a more expert individual, ZPD is a valid concept

Question 6

evaluation strength - support for scaffolding

Answer 6

• been observed in many studies that adults and older children provide support for younger children learning to master new tasks
• research also shows that the level of help given declines during the process of learning
• Conner and Cross followed up 45 children, observing them engaged in problem solving tasks with the help of their mothers at 16, 26, 44 and 54 months
• distinctive changes were observed over time, mothers used less and less direct intervention and more hints and prompts, also increasingly offered help when it was needed rather than constantly

Question 7

evaluation strength - real-world application

Answer 7

• ideas have been highly influential in education
• idea that children can learn more and faster with appropriate scaffolding has raised expectations of what they should be able to achieve
• social interaction in learning through group work, peer tutoring and individual adult support has been used to scaffold children through their ZPD
• Keer and Verhaeghe found that 7 year olds tutored by 10 year olds progressed in reading than controls who just had standard whole-class teaching
• a review of the usefulness of TAs concluded that they are very effective at improving the rate of learning in children