As such, Vygotsky outlined three main concepts related to cognitive development: i culture is significant in learning, ii language is the root of culture, and iii individuals learn and develop within their role in the community. Culture can be defined as the morals, values, and beliefs of its community members, which are held in place with systems and establishments.
Acceptable attitudes and conduct are communicated by the use of language. Culture is shaped over time as the result of specific events, whose messages are then conveyed to its members. Vygotsky explained that culture consistently affects cognitive development by affecting human behavior. He wanted others to realize that there is a complex relationship between culture and human development. It is a cycle; at the same time that the culture is influencing an individual, that individual is in turn creating culture.
Vygotsky used the stages of childhood development to further explain the relationship between culture and learning. These displays gradually fade out as a result of external stimuli: imitating, consequences, and conditioning by others. It is replaced with problem-solving skills such as reflection, bargaining, and reasoning. This higher-level thinking is influenced by cultural factors. The values and beliefs of a community, including models of acceptable behavior, create pressure for others to adopt the preferred attitudes and protocol of that society.
Etiquette is communicated orally and by example. The development of speech occurs in three stages: external, egocentric, and inner speech. External or social speech occurs from birth until the age of three. Babies use language to communicate their feelings, express their emotions, and share simple words. You can begin to see the social influence on behavior as early as this stage based on the reactions to their demands. Even though babies use language to control their needs, the people around them express approval or disapproval based on their behavior.
This leads to cognitive development within the individual. The next stage, egocentric speech, occurs between the ages of three and seven. As they begin to rationalize internally their actions or behavior, children begin to talk to themselves. This inner speech helps them control their reasoning and organize their thoughts. They continue to interpret meaning from the reactions of others, further integrating the cultural beliefs into their own cognitive development.
Without language, Vygotsky believed that we would be limited to a more primitive function. Language is ultimately the tool by which we communicate the desired behaviors and therefore enable the development of a society and its culture. Similar to inner speech is the idea of internalization. Internalization should not be confused with introjection, which involves minimal participation from the individual themselves. It is the conditioning put forth by others, for example, the consequences or reactions toward a behavior.
Internalization is where the cognitive development of an individual is influenced by society as they adopt the morals and ethics of a community for themselves. Internalization should not be confused with socialization, where individuals develop attitudes due to a need to belong to a community and not the actual obligation to do so. We can observe key skills develop on the social level then again within an individual as they internalize cultural influences. External influences are adopted as intrapersonal characteristics throughout the internalization process.
It is important to note that the education system influences the thoughts and belief systems of the children within. Individuals are actively engaging within their learning environments, continuously analyzing the reactions of others and modifying their responses as they adopt or reject accepted standards as their own.
Both learning and culture are depended on the other: individuals are constantly determining what is acceptable in society, and the environment is continuously confirming what would be considered appropriate behavior. Secondly, Vygotsky specified that the conclusions should be made based on the behavior of a student in a social setting. He did not place emphasis on intelligence itself. Instead, Vygotsky proposed the idea of the zone of proximal development, which distinguishes between what a child is able to accomplish independently and what they achieve under close guidance from a teacher.
In order to capitalize on this growth, Vygotsky encouraged testing based on the social context. He disagreed with the notion of independent intelligence assessments, preferring to focus on the potential of each student within the learning environment.
The zone of proximal development is affected by the unique attributes of each individual, including personality, self-regulation, and previous knowledge. As the zone of proximal development cannot be clearly defined, it is challenging to explain the link between social interaction and learning.
For example, memory in young children this is limited by biological factors. However, culture determines the type of memory strategy we develop. For example, in western culture, children learn note-taking to aid memory, but in pre-literate societies, other strategies must be developed, such as tying knots in a string to remember, or carrying pebbles, or repetition of the names of ancestors until large numbers can be repeated.
Vygotsky, therefore, sees cognitive functions, even those carried out alone, as affected by the beliefs, values, and tools of intellectual adaptation of the culture in which a person develops and therefore socio-culturally determined. The tools of intellectual adaptation, therefore, vary from culture to culture - as in the memory example. However, Vygotsky placed more emphasis on social contributions to the process of development, whereas Piaget emphasized self-initiated discovery.
According to Vygotsky , much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful tutor. Vygotsky refers to this as cooperative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor often the parent or teacher then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate their own performance. Shaffer gives the example of a young girl who is given her first jigsaw. Alone, she performs poorly in attempting to solve the puzzle.
As the child becomes more competent, the father allows the child to work more independently. According to Vygotsky, this type of social interaction involving cooperative or collaborative dialogue promotes cognitive development. The more knowledgeable other MKO is somewhat self-explanatory; it refers to someone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept.
Although the implication is that the MKO is a teacher or an older adult, this is not necessarily the case. Many times, a child's peers or an adult's children may be the individuals with more knowledge or experience.
For example, who is more likely to know more about the newest teenage music groups, how to win at the most recent PlayStation game, or how to correctly perform the newest dance craze - a child or their parents? In fact, the MKO need not be a person at all. Some companies, to support employees in their learning process, are now using electronic performance support systems. Electronic tutors have also been used in educational settings to facilitate and guide students through the learning process.
The key to MKOs is that they must have or be programmed with more knowledge about the topic being learned than the learner does. The concept of the More Knowledgeable Other is integrally related to the second important principle of Vygotsky's work, the Zone of Proximal Development.
This is an important concept that relates to the difference between what a child can achieve independently and what a child can achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner.
For example, the child could not solve the jigsaw puzzle in the example above by itself and would have taken a long time to do so if at all , but was able to solve it following interaction with the father, and has developed competence at this skill that will be applied to future jigsaws. Vygotsky sees the Zone of Proximal Development as the area where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be given - allowing the child to develop skills they will then use on their own - developing higher mental functions.
Vygotsky also views interaction with peers as an effective way of developing skills and strategies. He suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers - within the zone of proximal development.
Freund conducted a study in which children had to decide which items of furniture should be placed in particular areas of a dolls house. Some children were allowed to play with their mother in a similar situation before they attempted it alone zone of proximal development while others were allowed to work on this by themselves Piaget's discovery learning.
Freund found that those who had previously worked with their mother ZPD showed the greatest improvement compared with their first attempt at the task. Vygotsky believed that language develops from social interactions, for communication purposes. Vygotsky differentiates between three forms of language: social speech which is external communication used to talk to others typical from the age of two ; private speech typical from the age of three which is directed to the self and serves an intellectual function; and finally private speech goes underground, diminishing in audibility as it takes on a self-regulating function and is transformed into silent inner speech typical from the age of seven.
For Vygotsky, thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age. At this point speech and thought become interdependent: thought becomes verbal, speech becomes representational. When this happens, children's monologues internalized to become inner speech.
The internalization of language is important as it drives cognitive development. It still remains speech, i. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words dies as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. Vygotsky was the first psychologist to document the importance of private speech.
He considered private speech as the transition point between social and inner speech, the moment in development where language and thought unite to constitute verbal thinking. Thus private speech, in Vygotsky's view, was the earliest manifestation of inner speech.
Indeed, private speech is more similar in its form and function to inner speech than social speech. Private speech is 'typically defined, in contrast to social speech, as speech addressed to the self not to others for the purpose of self-regulation rather than communication.
Unlike inner speech which is covert i. Through private speech, children begin to collaborate with themselves in the same way a more knowledgeable other e. Vygotsky sees "private speech" as a means for children to plan activities and strategies and therefore aid their development.
Private speech is the use of language for self-regulation of behavior. Vygotsky believed that children who engaged in large amounts of private speech are more socially competent than children who do not use it extensively.
Children use private speech most often during intermediate difficulty tasks because they are attempting to self-regulate by verbally planning and organizing their thoughts Winsler et al. The frequency and content of private speech are then correlated with behavior or performance. For example, private speech appears to be functionally related to cognitive performance: It appears at times of difficulty with a task.
Berk provided empirical support for the notion of private speech. She found that most private speech exhibited by children serves to describe or guide the child's actions. Berk also discovered than child engaged in private speech more often when working alone on challenging tasks and also when their teacher was not immediately available to help them.
Furthermore, Berk also found that private speech develops similarly in all children regardless of cultural background. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that there exist high positive correlations between rates of social interaction and private speech in children. Children raised in cognitively and linguistically stimulating environments situations more frequently observed in higher socioeconomic status families start using and internalizing private speech faster than children from less privileged backgrounds.
Indeed, children raised in environments characterized by low verbal and social exchanges exhibit delays in private speech development. This is due to changes in ontogenetic development whereby children are able to internalize language through inner speech in order to self-regulate their behavior Vygotsky, Vygotsky's approach to child development is a form of social constructivism , based on the idea that cognitive functions are the products of social interactions.
Vygotsky emphasized the collaborative nature of learning by the construction of knowledge through social negotiation. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context. Vygotsky believed everything is learned on two levels. A contemporary educational application of Vygotsky's theory is "reciprocal teaching," used to improve students' ability to learn from text. In this method, teachers and students collaborate in learning and practicing four key skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting.
The teacher's role in the process is reduced over time. Also, Vygotsky theory of cognitive development on learners is relevant to instructional concepts such as "scaffolding" and "apprenticeship," in which a teacher or more advanced peer helps to structure or arrange a task so that a novice can work on it successfully. Vygotsky's theories also feed into the current interest in collaborative learning, suggesting that group members should have different levels of ability so more advanced peers can help less advanced members operate within their ZPD.
Vygotsky's work has not received the same level of intense scrutiny that Piaget's has, partly due to the time-consuming process of translating Vygotsky's work from Russian. Also, Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective does not provide as many specific hypotheses to test as did Piaget's theory, making refutation difficult, if not impossible.
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