Vygotsky’s socio-cultural Theory

Piaget emphasises biological side of cognitive development.  Social and cultural context emphasised in Vygotsky. Child is active learner as in piaget, but rejects individualistic view of developing the child.

Basic idea- Individuals are endowed with basic perceptual, attention and memory capacities like all animals which grows in first 2 years. Aquisition of language leads to profound change in thinking through participation in social dialogues and masters culturally important tasks. As a result basic mental capacities are transformed into uniquely human higher cognitive processes.

 Private speech- Piagets ego centric speech reflects childs difficulty in taking perspectives of others. Changes as cognitive develpment. Sees others have diff. Openions, so changes it into social speech. But vygotsky objects it, calls it self guidance. Tasks difficult at begining so self talk to keep motivated, decision making etc. Later it goes off coz task easy. Accepted version.

Social Orgin of Cognitive development- learning of new cognitive skills happens in zone of proximal development- tasks too difficult for child to do alone but possible with help of adults or more skilled.  To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have certain features-

(a)  Intersubjectivity- process by which two paricipants who begin a task with different understanding arrived at a shared understanding. Common ground for communication

(b)  Scaffolding- adjusting the support offered during teaching session to fit child’s current level of performance. Also called guided participation

Make believe play-  its important source of development during preschool days.- learns in two ways- (i) create imaginary situation,learn to act acoording any internal ideas, and not just react to external stimuli. (ii) its rule-based nature, also strengthens childs capacity to think before they act.  Make believe play serves as a zone of proximal development, supporting emergence and refinement of many competencies.

Vygotsky and Education-

Emphasises the importance of social context. Vygotskian classroom is similiar to Piagetian in terms of accepting individual differences and promote active participation, yet goes beyond a step by promoting assisted discovery. Teachers intervent in each students zone of proximal development. Two typical Vygotskian educational innovations are-

(a)  Reciprocal Teaching- a  teacher and two to four children take a group and takes turn leading dialogues on content of text passage. Within dialogues, group members apply four coginitive strategies- questioning, summarizing, clarifying and predicting.  (Reading Comprehension)

(b)  Cooperative Learning- among more expert children. Peeers help fellow being to fit less mature child’s zone of proximal development.

Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory

Vygostsky’s theory includes cultural variation in cognitive skills unlike Piaget who spoke of universal . Undervalues role of teaching in coginitive development.

 -ves- Over emphasis on language, Overseeing biologivcal contribution to childs cognition.