Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Development

• Social Interaction and Culture

  • Vygotsky focused on the role of social interaction and culture in the development of cognition
  • through interaction with others, a child develops the tools of culture (such as language)
  • language enables elementary mental functions (e.g. attention and memory) to develop into higher mental functions (e.g. logical thinking)
• Zone of Proximal Development

  • learning through interaction with others
  • identified a gap between a child's current level of development
  • expert assistance (more knowledgeable other) allows the child to cross the ZPD and understand as much of a subject or situation as they are capable
  • children develop a more advanced understanding of a situation and hence the more advanced reasoning abilities needed to deal with it by learning from others, as opposed to through individual exploration of the world
  • children can learn more facts during social interaction but also that they acquire more advanced reasoning skills
• scaffolding

  • refers to all the kinds of help adults and more advanced peers give a child to help them to cross the ZPD
  • recruitment -engaging the child's interest in the task
  • reduction of degrees of freedom - focusing the child on the task and where to start with solving it
  • direction maintenance - encouraging a child in order to help them stay motivated and continues trying to complete the task
  • marking critical features - highlighting the most important parts of the task
  • demonstration - showing the child how to do aspects of the task
• evidence for ZPD

  Roazzi and Bryant (1998)

  • 4-5 year old children the task of estimating the number of sweets in a box
  • in one condition the children worked alone and in another they worked with the help of 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, pointing the younger children in the right direction to work out how to arrive at their estimate
  • most 4-5 year olds receiving this help successfully mastered the task
  • supports the idea that children develop additional reasoning abilities when working with a MKO
• evidence for scaffolding

  Conner and Cross (2003)

  • longitudinal procedure where they followed up to 45 children, observing them engage 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 - mothers used less and less direct intervention and more hints and prompts as children gained experience
  • they also increasingly offered help when it was needed rather than constantly
• real world application

  • highly influential in education - the 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 assistance from teachers and teaching assistants, has been used to scaffold children through their ZPD

  Van Keer and Verhaeghe (2005)

  • 7 year olds tutored by 10 year olds, in addition to their whole class teaching, progressed further in reading than controls who just had standard whole-class teaching
  • a review of the usefulness of teaching assistants concluded that they're very effective at improving the rate of learning in children provided they've received appropriate training