Vygotsky’s theory

• Vygotsky was influenced by Piaget’s work. They both agreed that children’s reasoning abilities develop in a particular sequence, and that such abilities are quantitatively different at different ages.
• The major difference is that Vygotsky saw cognitive development as a social process of learning from more experienced others.
• If reasoning abilities are acquired from the more experienced individuals with whom a child has contact, it follows that the child will acquire the reasoning abilities of those particular people. This means there may be cultural differences in cognitive development, with children picking up the mental ‘tools’ that will be most important for life within the physical, social and work environments of their culture.
• Vygotsky identified a gap between a child’s current level of development (what they can understand and do alone) and what they can potentially understand after interaction with more expert others. This gap is known as the zone of proximal development.
• Expert assistance allows a child to cross the ZPD and understand as much of a subject or situation as they are capable- children are still to some extent limited by their developmental stage.
• Vygotsky was not just saying that children can learn more facts during social interaction but also that they acquire more advanced reasoning abilities. In fact he believed higher mental functions, such as formal reasoning, could only be acquired through interaction with more advanced others.
• Scaffolding refers to all the kinds of help adults and more advanced peers give a child to help them cross the zone of proximal development.
• Wood, Bruner and Ross noted the particular strategies of that experts use when scaffolding. In general, as a learner crosses the ZPD, the level of help given in scaffolding declines from level 5 (most help) to level 1 (least help). An adult is more likely to use a high level of help strategies when first helping, then to gradually withdraw the level of help as the child grasps the task.
• Vygotsky did not focus much on scaffolding in his writing so most of what we know about scaffolding is from psychologists influenced by hai theory, such as Bruner -sometimes called ‘the Vygotsky-Bruner model’.
• There is clear evidence to show there is indeed a gap between the level of reasoning a child can achieve on their own and what they can achieve with help from an expert. Roazzi and Bryant gave children aged 4-5 years the task of estimating the number of sweets in a box. In one condition the children worked on their own in another they worked with the help of an older child. Most children working alone failed to give a good estimate. In the other condition, the older children were observed to offer prompts. Most 4-5 year olds receiving this kind of help successfully mastered the task.
• There is research support for scaffolding. Research shows the level of help given by an expert declines during the process of learning, as predicted by the principle of scaffolding. Conner and Cross used a longitudinal procedure to follow up 45 children, observing them in problem-solving tasks with the help of their mothers at 16, 26, 44 and 54 months. Distinctive changes in help were observed over time - the mothers used less and less direct intervention and more hints and prompts as children gained experience. Mothers also increasingly offered help when it was needed rather than constantly.
• Vygotsky's ideas have been influential in education. The idea that children can learn more and faster with scaffolding has raised expectations of what they should be able to achieve. Social interaction in learning, through group work, peer tutoring and individual adult assistance from teachers, has been used to scaffold children through their ZPD. Van Keer and Verhaeghe found 7 yr olds tutored by 10 yr olds progressed further in reading than controls who just had whole-class teaching. A review of usefulness of teaching assistants are very effective at improving the rate of learning in children
• Although Vygotsky's ideas about the role of social interaction have had useful applications, these may not be universal. Liu and Matthews point out that in China classes of up to 50 children learn very effectively in lecture-style classrooms with very few individual interactions with peers or tutors. This should not be possible if Vygotsky were entirely correct. This means Vygotsky may have overestimated the importance of scaffolding in learning.