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Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes
The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky's important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English. The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky's relevance to modem psychological thought.
159 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky
83 books199 followersLev Semenovich Vygotsky (Russian: Лев Семёнович Вы́готский or Выго́тский, born Lev Simyonovich Vygodsky) was a Soviet developmental psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.
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May 30, 2017
This is another book I’ve gotten from the list of the 25 most quoted books in social science. Oddly, I’ve read and reviewed another of Vygotsky’s books (his ‘Thought and Language’) and that is known as his most famous book – and yet this one is his most cited. The world’s a funny place, isn’t it?
I’m just going to tell you the bits of this I found particularly interesting. The first was how important it is for children to get to play. He says that from about 3 children start to realise that they are not going to get instant gratification for all of their desires. They learn that they need to side-step the frustration of this by engaging in play. The play may not always be immediately related to their desire – but it serves the purpose of both distraction, while also preparing the way for increasing abstract thought.
The abstract thought side of play is particularly important. Vygotsky says that we generally think of play as being a manifestation of a child’s imagination – but his point is that play in young children is often very concrete, that is, it is a concrete expression of children beginning to learn how to access abstract thinking (imagination), not just engaging with the concrete world around them. Play provides ways to step outside of the concrete world of the child, but it does so first by remaining quite tied to that world. So that, for instance, much of the child’s games involve some form of imitation of the world they already know. He says that children are generally ‘older’ in the games they play (a head taller than their actual age) – their narratives have them a bit older or, for instance, they may play at being their mother and so significantly older than they are. While the differences here between the ‘real’ world and the ‘imagined’ world are significant, what is also significant is the idea that the imagined world follows strict rules. The games are imaginary, but they remain tied to the concrete in so far as mum doesn’t suddenly get to be able to fly or have a super long tongue that she can use to catch flies.
There is a lovely game he discusses that helps make this much clearer. It involves two sisters who decide to play a game of being sisters. That is, the ‘game’ is their actual life. Except, this isn’t at all an acting out of their life. Not that they do things in the game they wouldn’t do in life – it isn’t as if they became the boxing sisters or grew imaginary beards. The difference is in the noticing of the rules in the game they play, even when it is what they live unthinkingly in life. Here is a step toward abstract thought in the sense of being able to see the guiding rules behind the sort of behaviours that constitute being sisters. Another game involved a mother and son being mother and son – again, what was being performed may have not looked terribly different from everyday life, except it is completely different since ‘the rules’ are being made clear.
The games these children play are externalised – that is, they actually play them – but by adolescence children have stopped externalising their play and are able to run through the same process ‘in their heads’ – that is, as pure imagination. For Vygotsky, imagination is basically ‘silent play’. And since imagination is increasingly abstract it is learnt later and from play. So, rather than play being the external manifestation of imagination – actually imagination is internalised play.
The point that drives Vygotsky’s ideas here is that human thinking is social in character. Now, that is too easy to confuse with not saying very much at all. He means this quite literally and not at all superficially. As a Marxist, he believes that humanity makes its own world and that it does this by how it makes tools. The tools we make shape the way we interact with the world and this fundamentally changes our brains (not necessarily the literal structure of our brains, but the mental processes that allow us to interact with the world and think). These changes in the tools we use and the changes they make to how we think change what it means to be human across history. If society is in a constant process of development, and this development is impacted by the tools society uses (what Marx called the ‘means of production’) then human cognition needs to be understood within this changing process.
All of that might sound a bit off the point – but Vygotsky uses this in a number of ways that really change how we can understand children’s learning and how we can go about conceiving cognitive development.
Prior to Vygotsky most psychology considered childhood to be a process of natural development – but if humans are different according to the level of the development of the productive forces (different according to the tools we use) then talk of ‘natural development’ or ‘natural phases of development’ misses the main point of what it is to be human. This is Vygotsky’s criticism of Piaget – that Piaget saw childhood development as being around fixed stages that occurred though maturation – whereas Vygotsky saw the creation of the human child as something that happens in society and as a function of the requirements of society. This all probably sounds a bit over the top, but having these ideas in mind might help to explain his core ideas and how he came to them.
His main idea is his ZPD – Zone of Proximal Development. But to understand it you have to understand what everyone else was working on first. Basically, if you wanted to know what stage of development children were up to prior to Vygotsky you would give them something that looked a lot like an IQ test. This might say that two 10 year olds you are studying have the IQ of the average 8 year old. And this would have been as much as we would need to say – this would sum up their learning and cognitive level.
Vygotsky didn’t like this because it presents something that is both asocial and dead. The children can only show you what they already know – which doesn’t really tell you very much about what they are ready to learn. But how can you test what they are ready to learn? Well, the ZPD tests what the child can do with assistance from those around them – that is, rather than giving them an IQ test, the person giving the test might also provide the child with some hints.
This sounds like cheating, but the point is that I can give you all the hints in the world, but you are probably not likely to be able to solve a complex problem in quantum theory. You know, my saying, ‘you might want to try using Schrödinger’s equation there’ probably isn’t going to really help you all that much, even if Schrödinger ‘s equation is exactly what you should be using.
But if the 10 year old is quite confident with adding, but can’t multiply, then hinting to them that 4 times 4 is four lots of fours that can then be added together, that might be enough of a hint to allow them to solve ‘with assistance’ what they couldn’t solve without assistance.
And so what? Well, what they can do with assistance today is what they are on the cusp of learning to be able to do without assistance tomorrow. That is, it tells you what they are ready to learn. Whereas, unless you have studied quite a bit of physics, then solving a problem in quantum mechanics using Schrödinger’s equation is going to be beyond most of us and ‘hints’ aren’t really going to be of much help. In Vygotsky’s terms, Schrödinger is outside of our zone of proximal development.
The ZPD shows cognitive development as something alive – rather than the ‘fossilised’ version of what is ‘already known’ that comes with IQ tests. Our two 10 year olds with the IQs of 8 year olds might be able to solve problems with assistance of 10 year olds and 12 year olds respectively – so, rather than these two kids being at equal stages of development (which their IQs would suggest) they are really quite different in what they are ready to learn.
For Vygotsky language is a tool in much the same way that tools are – that is, we use language to help us solve problems. He tells us of a young girl given a complex problem to solve involving knocking sweets with a stick, and using some chairs. He listens in as she solves this problem. While she is solving it, she talks to herself – something, like playing before, we later learn to internalise and not say out loud. Language becomes a way for us to hear what we are thinking and also a way to structure our thoughts in more abstract ways and thus language helps us to solve problems we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
He shows this again with children who are not yet able to write. He gets them to draw a story and then asks them to ‘read’ him the story from what they have drawn. It is clear that many children’s drawings are a first step along the road to understanding the process of abstraction necessary for symbolic representation and this is the first step in learning to read and write. He also shows that very young children are tied to the concrete even in their drawings – so that if they are drawing a child running they might do so by making running movements with their hand with the pen in it, and therefore only produce short lines on the page.
This link to the concrete is shown nicely earlier in the book when he asks a child to say something like ‘John is standing’ – but if the child saying this can see John and John is sitting, the child finds it almost impossible to say ‘John is standing’. Instead, the child will end up saying ‘John is sitting’. The level of abstraction necessary to say the opposite of what is externally the case is beyond the child.
As is said at one point here, the idea of children having natural phases of learning development is a dangerous idea because if a child is ‘behind’ in this phase of learning we have too often separated them out from the other children and given them tasks that we think will ‘give them the basics’ so they can ‘catch up’. The problem is, according to Vygotsky, that learning only makes sense socially, and so this isolated learning makes the learning meaningless for the child and takes away the structures and supports that they might otherwise have been able to rely upon to learn. Our trying to help causes more harm than good.
I’m just going to tell you the bits of this I found particularly interesting. The first was how important it is for children to get to play. He says that from about 3 children start to realise that they are not going to get instant gratification for all of their desires. They learn that they need to side-step the frustration of this by engaging in play. The play may not always be immediately related to their desire – but it serves the purpose of both distraction, while also preparing the way for increasing abstract thought.
The abstract thought side of play is particularly important. Vygotsky says that we generally think of play as being a manifestation of a child’s imagination – but his point is that play in young children is often very concrete, that is, it is a concrete expression of children beginning to learn how to access abstract thinking (imagination), not just engaging with the concrete world around them. Play provides ways to step outside of the concrete world of the child, but it does so first by remaining quite tied to that world. So that, for instance, much of the child’s games involve some form of imitation of the world they already know. He says that children are generally ‘older’ in the games they play (a head taller than their actual age) – their narratives have them a bit older or, for instance, they may play at being their mother and so significantly older than they are. While the differences here between the ‘real’ world and the ‘imagined’ world are significant, what is also significant is the idea that the imagined world follows strict rules. The games are imaginary, but they remain tied to the concrete in so far as mum doesn’t suddenly get to be able to fly or have a super long tongue that she can use to catch flies.
There is a lovely game he discusses that helps make this much clearer. It involves two sisters who decide to play a game of being sisters. That is, the ‘game’ is their actual life. Except, this isn’t at all an acting out of their life. Not that they do things in the game they wouldn’t do in life – it isn’t as if they became the boxing sisters or grew imaginary beards. The difference is in the noticing of the rules in the game they play, even when it is what they live unthinkingly in life. Here is a step toward abstract thought in the sense of being able to see the guiding rules behind the sort of behaviours that constitute being sisters. Another game involved a mother and son being mother and son – again, what was being performed may have not looked terribly different from everyday life, except it is completely different since ‘the rules’ are being made clear.
The games these children play are externalised – that is, they actually play them – but by adolescence children have stopped externalising their play and are able to run through the same process ‘in their heads’ – that is, as pure imagination. For Vygotsky, imagination is basically ‘silent play’. And since imagination is increasingly abstract it is learnt later and from play. So, rather than play being the external manifestation of imagination – actually imagination is internalised play.
The point that drives Vygotsky’s ideas here is that human thinking is social in character. Now, that is too easy to confuse with not saying very much at all. He means this quite literally and not at all superficially. As a Marxist, he believes that humanity makes its own world and that it does this by how it makes tools. The tools we make shape the way we interact with the world and this fundamentally changes our brains (not necessarily the literal structure of our brains, but the mental processes that allow us to interact with the world and think). These changes in the tools we use and the changes they make to how we think change what it means to be human across history. If society is in a constant process of development, and this development is impacted by the tools society uses (what Marx called the ‘means of production’) then human cognition needs to be understood within this changing process.
All of that might sound a bit off the point – but Vygotsky uses this in a number of ways that really change how we can understand children’s learning and how we can go about conceiving cognitive development.
Prior to Vygotsky most psychology considered childhood to be a process of natural development – but if humans are different according to the level of the development of the productive forces (different according to the tools we use) then talk of ‘natural development’ or ‘natural phases of development’ misses the main point of what it is to be human. This is Vygotsky’s criticism of Piaget – that Piaget saw childhood development as being around fixed stages that occurred though maturation – whereas Vygotsky saw the creation of the human child as something that happens in society and as a function of the requirements of society. This all probably sounds a bit over the top, but having these ideas in mind might help to explain his core ideas and how he came to them.
His main idea is his ZPD – Zone of Proximal Development. But to understand it you have to understand what everyone else was working on first. Basically, if you wanted to know what stage of development children were up to prior to Vygotsky you would give them something that looked a lot like an IQ test. This might say that two 10 year olds you are studying have the IQ of the average 8 year old. And this would have been as much as we would need to say – this would sum up their learning and cognitive level.
Vygotsky didn’t like this because it presents something that is both asocial and dead. The children can only show you what they already know – which doesn’t really tell you very much about what they are ready to learn. But how can you test what they are ready to learn? Well, the ZPD tests what the child can do with assistance from those around them – that is, rather than giving them an IQ test, the person giving the test might also provide the child with some hints.
This sounds like cheating, but the point is that I can give you all the hints in the world, but you are probably not likely to be able to solve a complex problem in quantum theory. You know, my saying, ‘you might want to try using Schrödinger’s equation there’ probably isn’t going to really help you all that much, even if Schrödinger ‘s equation is exactly what you should be using.
But if the 10 year old is quite confident with adding, but can’t multiply, then hinting to them that 4 times 4 is four lots of fours that can then be added together, that might be enough of a hint to allow them to solve ‘with assistance’ what they couldn’t solve without assistance.
And so what? Well, what they can do with assistance today is what they are on the cusp of learning to be able to do without assistance tomorrow. That is, it tells you what they are ready to learn. Whereas, unless you have studied quite a bit of physics, then solving a problem in quantum mechanics using Schrödinger’s equation is going to be beyond most of us and ‘hints’ aren’t really going to be of much help. In Vygotsky’s terms, Schrödinger is outside of our zone of proximal development.
The ZPD shows cognitive development as something alive – rather than the ‘fossilised’ version of what is ‘already known’ that comes with IQ tests. Our two 10 year olds with the IQs of 8 year olds might be able to solve problems with assistance of 10 year olds and 12 year olds respectively – so, rather than these two kids being at equal stages of development (which their IQs would suggest) they are really quite different in what they are ready to learn.
For Vygotsky language is a tool in much the same way that tools are – that is, we use language to help us solve problems. He tells us of a young girl given a complex problem to solve involving knocking sweets with a stick, and using some chairs. He listens in as she solves this problem. While she is solving it, she talks to herself – something, like playing before, we later learn to internalise and not say out loud. Language becomes a way for us to hear what we are thinking and also a way to structure our thoughts in more abstract ways and thus language helps us to solve problems we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
He shows this again with children who are not yet able to write. He gets them to draw a story and then asks them to ‘read’ him the story from what they have drawn. It is clear that many children’s drawings are a first step along the road to understanding the process of abstraction necessary for symbolic representation and this is the first step in learning to read and write. He also shows that very young children are tied to the concrete even in their drawings – so that if they are drawing a child running they might do so by making running movements with their hand with the pen in it, and therefore only produce short lines on the page.
This link to the concrete is shown nicely earlier in the book when he asks a child to say something like ‘John is standing’ – but if the child saying this can see John and John is sitting, the child finds it almost impossible to say ‘John is standing’. Instead, the child will end up saying ‘John is sitting’. The level of abstraction necessary to say the opposite of what is externally the case is beyond the child.
As is said at one point here, the idea of children having natural phases of learning development is a dangerous idea because if a child is ‘behind’ in this phase of learning we have too often separated them out from the other children and given them tasks that we think will ‘give them the basics’ so they can ‘catch up’. The problem is, according to Vygotsky, that learning only makes sense socially, and so this isolated learning makes the learning meaningless for the child and takes away the structures and supports that they might otherwise have been able to rely upon to learn. Our trying to help causes more harm than good.
April 29, 2009
I take in interest in Vygotsky's work primarily because he seeks to rescue experimental psychology from
a) Cartesianism/cognitivism/the "theater of the mind" on the one hand, and
b) A "naturalist" behaviorism which offers either poor explanatory power (Chomsky's classical critique of Skinner's language book), or threatens a radical irrealism if we are bold enough to extend it from a psychological methodology into a full-blown epistemology.
In other words, Cartesianism loses all grip on the social nature of learning, meaning, and language-acquisition, while the "naturalist" behaviorism is in denial about its own constructivist assumptions, which will eventually foreclose the idea of matter and material history itself.
Yet another gloss on Vygotsky is that he's on to the same idea as Bakhtin / Volosinov, something like a Marxist semiotics. If that sounds contradictory, it's because Marxisms always struggle to articulate a relationship between material 'base' and social 'superstructure' that is neither reductive in either direction nor dualist-- a material-social dialectic, in other words. This is the goal to strive for, IMHO. It's not as easy as it sounds. And if you're like me, it doesn't sound that easy to you in the first place. Which is why it's helpful that Vygotsky was a genius and he managed to write down at least some of his thoughts, and those writings have made it into English since the '70s. As the psychologist who wrote the preface to V's Thought and Language remarked, American psychologists and philosophers alike typically respond to Vygotsky like J. Fodor did, accusing him of naively mixing philosophy and psychology while insisting that he was a pure psychologist. Vygotsky clearly had a different concept of psychology than Fodor. Clearly, Vygotsky, like Merleau-Ponty, was convinced of the value of empirical data for understanding 'the mind' (if we can speak of such a thing). Neither of the two thinkers seemed to believe that there can be 'critical experiments' in psychology. That is, any experiment is as much a test of the viability of its theoretical framework as a test of the truth or falsity of a hypotheses generated by that framework. Obviously, philosophy of science is a complex matter and this admission amounts to a rather major concession to pluralism of some kind. Better to do justice to the concrete social origin of meaning than to defend an illusory foundationalism, though.
a) Cartesianism/cognitivism/the "theater of the mind" on the one hand, and
b) A "naturalist" behaviorism which offers either poor explanatory power (Chomsky's classical critique of Skinner's language book), or threatens a radical irrealism if we are bold enough to extend it from a psychological methodology into a full-blown epistemology.
In other words, Cartesianism loses all grip on the social nature of learning, meaning, and language-acquisition, while the "naturalist" behaviorism is in denial about its own constructivist assumptions, which will eventually foreclose the idea of matter and material history itself.
Yet another gloss on Vygotsky is that he's on to the same idea as Bakhtin / Volosinov, something like a Marxist semiotics. If that sounds contradictory, it's because Marxisms always struggle to articulate a relationship between material 'base' and social 'superstructure' that is neither reductive in either direction nor dualist-- a material-social dialectic, in other words. This is the goal to strive for, IMHO. It's not as easy as it sounds. And if you're like me, it doesn't sound that easy to you in the first place. Which is why it's helpful that Vygotsky was a genius and he managed to write down at least some of his thoughts, and those writings have made it into English since the '70s. As the psychologist who wrote the preface to V's Thought and Language remarked, American psychologists and philosophers alike typically respond to Vygotsky like J. Fodor did, accusing him of naively mixing philosophy and psychology while insisting that he was a pure psychologist. Vygotsky clearly had a different concept of psychology than Fodor. Clearly, Vygotsky, like Merleau-Ponty, was convinced of the value of empirical data for understanding 'the mind' (if we can speak of such a thing). Neither of the two thinkers seemed to believe that there can be 'critical experiments' in psychology. That is, any experiment is as much a test of the viability of its theoretical framework as a test of the truth or falsity of a hypotheses generated by that framework. Obviously, philosophy of science is a complex matter and this admission amounts to a rather major concession to pluralism of some kind. Better to do justice to the concrete social origin of meaning than to defend an illusory foundationalism, though.
January 5, 2019
I’m sure someday we’ll have artificial intelligence augmentation that will read along with us, whispering in our ears about the kind of stuff it knows we’re curious about. Until then, reading an old book will remain a hit-and/or-miss affair, especially science texts. What information herein has been proven, or disproven? What is fundamentally wrong-headed, and what is only misleading because so much has since been learned?
Vygotsky probably isn’t a name most people know, but then neither is David Riesman or Alexander Luria. But any modern educator knows the term “zone of proximal development”, which Wikipedia defines as “the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help”.
This is the reason I’ve decided to dive in. (By the way, although this book was published in 1978, it is an edited compilation of Vygotsky’s writings from the early 1930s, shortly before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.) Near the end of his life, Vygotsky’s research developed this ZPD concept, although it apparently didn’t make it into any of his own published works. In fact, it appears there some contentiousness regarding his research (including ZPD), which I’m not looking into. If you’re more curious than I, you could start with the “criticisms” and “revisionist” discussion on his Wikipedia page.
Looking back in time provided some fascinating insights. One of the more interesting ones involved Vygotsky’s methodology.
Today, the social sciences strive hard for statistical rigor, and statistics rely on quantitative data. But it is readily apparent that social studies will have to deal with far, far more variables than seen in physical or biological studies, and eliminating variables for control will inevitably eliminate important information. Many scientists (and even more non-scientists) deride non-quantitative data as “anec-data”, sneering that “the plural of anecdote is not data”. But careful observations in small-𝒏 studies can clarify what is happening in ways that complement large-𝒏 studies, and might reveal information that could never be discerned from a large quantity of sterilized data. For example, one well-documented approach is thick description.
Vygotsky’s approach, almost a century ago, was quite informal and ad hoc, and would probably be laughed at today. But starting his way is probably the only way his ideas could take place, since they focused on the social construction of knowledge. Some contemporaneous theories suggested that cognitive development was innate to the human brain; others provided mental models that treated development/learning as if it were little more than nudging reflex behaviors into a preferred form. What Vygotsky showed by his careful interactions with children was that their interactions with others was critical to how they perceived sensations, and even more how those changed their brains.
For example, his experiments with very young children demonstrated that “thinking” was effectively a function of “remembering”: only what had been witnessed was within the child’s ontological world. According to Vygotsky, if you point out the window to the sun in a blue sky and ask them to say “it’s very dark outside tonight”, they’ll struggle and often can’t even make such claims [is this true?!?] But within just a few more months, counterfactual possibilities can be introduced.
Another example is the role speech plays in imagination. His experiments recorded the introspective “egocentric” speech of young children, when they are playing by themselves and not speaking to others, and discerned that the speech is a narration of what would gradually develop into an internal imagination: by narrating events similar to those they’d seen, but with themselves in a new role as a mother or horse-rider, for instance, they were effectively training their own imagination.
For example, imagine that you put a button box in front of a child and ask them to push different buttons when they see different stimuli. For example, the leftmost button when they see a horse. If you put a symbol of a horse (a horseshoe, perhaps) on that button, the change in ability will differentiate children at differing levels of development. Some can only use very obvious symbols (maybe an outline of a horse); others can use representative symbols (a horseshoe), or even abstract symbols (the letter “H”). One thing that shows how social construction plays a role is that an experimenter can affect this: pointing out that the U-shape is a horseshoe and can represent a horse will change success. Such a lesson wouldn’t help very young children; older children could even be taught a convoluted story (maybe “the shape looks like a tornado, and if you saw a tornado, you’d get on a horse and ride away, right?”) to aid them. Adults tended not to find such instruction helpful, again: either they could already do it without assistance, or the assistance was ineffective.
Today one might think, well, duh!”, but many intuitively “obvious” claims turn out to be false. Some of the theorists at the time couldn’t explain how social interaction could change the stepwise brain development they’d posited.
Much of the first half of the book deals with childhood learning along these lines, including some very interesting discussions about the difference between symbols (including language) and tools. Both are mediators: in both cases, we use them to change things. In the example above, a child is using the symbol to create a new mental pathway between a stimuli and a result. Tools, similarly, are used to change things, but in this case the change is to the outside world. Apparently at the time, some theorists believed that language and symbol use was effectively the same as tool use. By highlighting the internal/external difference, Vygotsky pushed those threads into divergence.
The Zone of Proximal Development only played a smallish role in the book — about seven pages near the end. But even that helped me refine how I think about this important pedagogical concept.
Perhaps this image will help:
This is the target of the teacher. It doesn’t do much good to spend time instructing a student on something they can already do unaided, nor something they aren’t prepared to tackle even with help, does it?
So the goal is to try to discover what a student’s ZPD is, and then try to design lessons that help students learn material that will grow those concentric circles, so they’ll be able to master more without help, and be capable of mastering more with assistance.
One difficulty is that the ZPD is an abstraction. There won’t be a clean, bright line on the inside or the outside, and no teacher can ever know a single student with too much fidelity anyway. And, of course, the classroom will have many students, each with a different ZPD.
In fact, recent pedagogy (still controversial in some circles) involves detracking, which is “when students are deliberately positioned into classes of mixed ability”. That means that a classroom might include high-ability students alongside those who are struggling for various reasons. The latter might include students with Special Education needs, or students still learning the language (English Language Learners in the U.S.), or students with poor academic skills.
Remember Venn Diagrams? Those overlapping circles whose intersections and unions were one of the minor topics back in high school mathematics? Imagine the intersection of all the zones of proximal development of a highly diverse urban classroom, and how small it is likely to be. That makes designing lessons that all the students can learn from exceedingly difficult.
The response is to create lessons that are differentiated so that students of differing abilities can still learn effectively.
In mathematics, I know of two groups that have started tackling this. One is Cambridge’s NRICH group, which calls these Low Threshold, High Ceiling tasks. The other is Stanford’s “Youcubed” team (led by Jo Boaler), which calls their effort Low Floor, High Ceiling (possibly because ’Muricans don’t use the word “threshold” too often).
In Mind in Society, Vygotsky doesn’t go into nearly enough depth to help me build better lessons. But I’m pleased to report that he did force me to consider assessment more. My educational training taught me to distinguish between formative and summative assessment. We use the former to determine what students don’t yet know, and the latter to gauge their performance after teaching is concluded. For example, never grade homework, since students are still learning. (Well, we “grade” it with respect to whether a student did it or didn’t do it, not whether they got more or fewer answers correct.)
What the Vygotsky has to say throws this into disarray. Look at that diagram again, and note that traditional testing ignores the ZPD. To paraphrase his example: imagine that I use traditional testing to evaluate two new ninth graders on their Algebra and pre-Algebra knowledge. They both fair poorly, performing at the level expected of seventh graders. Then I assess them again, this time providing examples, hints, and suggestive questions — but no actual instructions or answers. One, with that help, is capable of answering questions at the level of an eighth grader; the other can answer questions at the tenth-grade level.
What this kind of assessment would tell me is that one of the two isn’t ready for my class, and needs quite a bit of remedial work. The other is ready, and will possibly excel or even be bored.
How should this impact my assessment strategy, much less my end-of-term grading policy? There are techniques for this that I’ll have to ponder. For example, I could increase the weighting of “group tests”, but I’d have to make sure students going into it have about the same ability to solve problems collaboratively — which makes this a recursive problem, doesn’t it?
Reading Mind in Society is a good way of delving more deeply into issues that a teacher should think about, although there are likely to be other books (journal articles, etc.) that do so more directly. Still, as a pioneering work in psychological development, it’s very illuminating — and most of it is quite easy to read, as well.
Vygotsky probably isn’t a name most people know, but then neither is David Riesman or Alexander Luria. But any modern educator knows the term “zone of proximal development”, which Wikipedia defines as “the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help”.
This is the reason I’ve decided to dive in. (By the way, although this book was published in 1978, it is an edited compilation of Vygotsky’s writings from the early 1930s, shortly before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.) Near the end of his life, Vygotsky’s research developed this ZPD concept, although it apparently didn’t make it into any of his own published works. In fact, it appears there some contentiousness regarding his research (including ZPD), which I’m not looking into. If you’re more curious than I, you could start with the “criticisms” and “revisionist” discussion on his Wikipedia page.
Looking back in time provided some fascinating insights. One of the more interesting ones involved Vygotsky’s methodology.
Today, the social sciences strive hard for statistical rigor, and statistics rely on quantitative data. But it is readily apparent that social studies will have to deal with far, far more variables than seen in physical or biological studies, and eliminating variables for control will inevitably eliminate important information. Many scientists (and even more non-scientists) deride non-quantitative data as “anec-data”, sneering that “the plural of anecdote is not data”. But careful observations in small-𝒏 studies can clarify what is happening in ways that complement large-𝒏 studies, and might reveal information that could never be discerned from a large quantity of sterilized data. For example, one well-documented approach is thick description.
Vygotsky’s approach, almost a century ago, was quite informal and ad hoc, and would probably be laughed at today. But starting his way is probably the only way his ideas could take place, since they focused on the social construction of knowledge. Some contemporaneous theories suggested that cognitive development was innate to the human brain; others provided mental models that treated development/learning as if it were little more than nudging reflex behaviors into a preferred form. What Vygotsky showed by his careful interactions with children was that their interactions with others was critical to how they perceived sensations, and even more how those changed their brains.
For example, his experiments with very young children demonstrated that “thinking” was effectively a function of “remembering”: only what had been witnessed was within the child’s ontological world. According to Vygotsky, if you point out the window to the sun in a blue sky and ask them to say “it’s very dark outside tonight”, they’ll struggle and often can’t even make such claims [is this true?!?] But within just a few more months, counterfactual possibilities can be introduced.
Another example is the role speech plays in imagination. His experiments recorded the introspective “egocentric” speech of young children, when they are playing by themselves and not speaking to others, and discerned that the speech is a narration of what would gradually develop into an internal imagination: by narrating events similar to those they’d seen, but with themselves in a new role as a mother or horse-rider, for instance, they were effectively training their own imagination.
For example, imagine that you put a button box in front of a child and ask them to push different buttons when they see different stimuli. For example, the leftmost button when they see a horse. If you put a symbol of a horse (a horseshoe, perhaps) on that button, the change in ability will differentiate children at differing levels of development. Some can only use very obvious symbols (maybe an outline of a horse); others can use representative symbols (a horseshoe), or even abstract symbols (the letter “H”). One thing that shows how social construction plays a role is that an experimenter can affect this: pointing out that the U-shape is a horseshoe and can represent a horse will change success. Such a lesson wouldn’t help very young children; older children could even be taught a convoluted story (maybe “the shape looks like a tornado, and if you saw a tornado, you’d get on a horse and ride away, right?”) to aid them. Adults tended not to find such instruction helpful, again: either they could already do it without assistance, or the assistance was ineffective.
Today one might think, well, duh!”, but many intuitively “obvious” claims turn out to be false. Some of the theorists at the time couldn’t explain how social interaction could change the stepwise brain development they’d posited.
Much of the first half of the book deals with childhood learning along these lines, including some very interesting discussions about the difference between symbols (including language) and tools. Both are mediators: in both cases, we use them to change things. In the example above, a child is using the symbol to create a new mental pathway between a stimuli and a result. Tools, similarly, are used to change things, but in this case the change is to the outside world. Apparently at the time, some theorists believed that language and symbol use was effectively the same as tool use. By highlighting the internal/external difference, Vygotsky pushed those threads into divergence.
The Zone of Proximal Development only played a smallish role in the book — about seven pages near the end. But even that helped me refine how I think about this important pedagogical concept.
Perhaps this image will help:
This is the target of the teacher. It doesn’t do much good to spend time instructing a student on something they can already do unaided, nor something they aren’t prepared to tackle even with help, does it?
So the goal is to try to discover what a student’s ZPD is, and then try to design lessons that help students learn material that will grow those concentric circles, so they’ll be able to master more without help, and be capable of mastering more with assistance.
One difficulty is that the ZPD is an abstraction. There won’t be a clean, bright line on the inside or the outside, and no teacher can ever know a single student with too much fidelity anyway. And, of course, the classroom will have many students, each with a different ZPD.
In fact, recent pedagogy (still controversial in some circles) involves detracking, which is “when students are deliberately positioned into classes of mixed ability”. That means that a classroom might include high-ability students alongside those who are struggling for various reasons. The latter might include students with Special Education needs, or students still learning the language (English Language Learners in the U.S.), or students with poor academic skills.
Remember Venn Diagrams? Those overlapping circles whose intersections and unions were one of the minor topics back in high school mathematics? Imagine the intersection of all the zones of proximal development of a highly diverse urban classroom, and how small it is likely to be. That makes designing lessons that all the students can learn from exceedingly difficult.
The response is to create lessons that are differentiated so that students of differing abilities can still learn effectively.
In mathematics, I know of two groups that have started tackling this. One is Cambridge’s NRICH group, which calls these Low Threshold, High Ceiling tasks. The other is Stanford’s “Youcubed” team (led by Jo Boaler), which calls their effort Low Floor, High Ceiling (possibly because ’Muricans don’t use the word “threshold” too often).
In Mind in Society, Vygotsky doesn’t go into nearly enough depth to help me build better lessons. But I’m pleased to report that he did force me to consider assessment more. My educational training taught me to distinguish between formative and summative assessment. We use the former to determine what students don’t yet know, and the latter to gauge their performance after teaching is concluded. For example, never grade homework, since students are still learning. (Well, we “grade” it with respect to whether a student did it or didn’t do it, not whether they got more or fewer answers correct.)
What the Vygotsky has to say throws this into disarray. Look at that diagram again, and note that traditional testing ignores the ZPD. To paraphrase his example: imagine that I use traditional testing to evaluate two new ninth graders on their Algebra and pre-Algebra knowledge. They both fair poorly, performing at the level expected of seventh graders. Then I assess them again, this time providing examples, hints, and suggestive questions — but no actual instructions or answers. One, with that help, is capable of answering questions at the level of an eighth grader; the other can answer questions at the tenth-grade level.
What this kind of assessment would tell me is that one of the two isn’t ready for my class, and needs quite a bit of remedial work. The other is ready, and will possibly excel or even be bored.
How should this impact my assessment strategy, much less my end-of-term grading policy? There are techniques for this that I’ll have to ponder. For example, I could increase the weighting of “group tests”, but I’d have to make sure students going into it have about the same ability to solve problems collaboratively — which makes this a recursive problem, doesn’t it?
Reading Mind in Society is a good way of delving more deeply into issues that a teacher should think about, although there are likely to be other books (journal articles, etc.) that do so more directly. Still, as a pioneering work in psychological development, it’s very illuminating — and most of it is quite easy to read, as well.
December 28, 2019
A beautiful woman came up to me when I was reading this because she "loves Vygotsky." I can't say if this book will have the same benefits for you, but I wanted to let you know it's a possibility.
November 18, 2014
We are often wrong on our way to figuring things out.
We don't learn in a steady march of additional facts. Unlike what our current education methods and evaluations would have us believe, learning does not follow a straight ever-rising line of success on a chart.
We learn by making associations: circling around the problem or situation, with sudden leaps of connection and insight.
We don't solve problems by memorizing. We make analogies; we relate this to that. This involves some trial and error--let us emphasize this word: "ERROR". We learn by making errors. We are wrong before we are right. THAT is how we learn.
It's not the facts themselves that are important, but the way they are used and organized and where they lead us. Not only brain function, but context.
Unfortunately, education is presently obsessed with facts and the "right" answer, a stream of ever rising numbers from test scores. Problems that we need to solve in our lives don't come with an answer key. And they often don't have any relation to the "facts" that the media or business and politics feeds us.
Vygotsky's book, while dense reading, has many alternative ideas to consider about teaching and learning.
We don't learn in a steady march of additional facts. Unlike what our current education methods and evaluations would have us believe, learning does not follow a straight ever-rising line of success on a chart.
We learn by making associations: circling around the problem or situation, with sudden leaps of connection and insight.
We don't solve problems by memorizing. We make analogies; we relate this to that. This involves some trial and error--let us emphasize this word: "ERROR". We learn by making errors. We are wrong before we are right. THAT is how we learn.
It's not the facts themselves that are important, but the way they are used and organized and where they lead us. Not only brain function, but context.
Unfortunately, education is presently obsessed with facts and the "right" answer, a stream of ever rising numbers from test scores. Problems that we need to solve in our lives don't come with an answer key. And they often don't have any relation to the "facts" that the media or business and politics feeds us.
Vygotsky's book, while dense reading, has many alternative ideas to consider about teaching and learning.
January 21, 2008
"We call the internal reconstruction of an external operation internalization. A good example of this process may be found in the development of pointing. Initially, this gesture is nothing more than an unsuccessful attempt to grasp something, a movement aimed at a certain object which designates forthcoming activity. The child attempts to grasp an object placed beyond his reach; his hands, stretched toward that object, remain poised in the air. His fingers make grasping movements. [...] When the mother comes to the child's aid and realizes his movement indicates something, the situation changes fundamentally. Pointing becomes a gesture for others. The child's unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he seeks but from another person. Consequently, the primary meaning of that unsuccessful grasping movement is established by others. Only later, when the child can link his unsuccessful grasping movement to the objective situation as a whole, does he begin to understand this movement as pointing."
I learned thru this book that using words is no different from using fingers ; as with the grasping that becomes pointing, the word usage is aimed at another person. Speach is therefore the internal reconstruction of an external operation; when i use words like these, i no longer grasp what i feel but i point at what i feel, in the unsuccessful attempt of which a reaction from you the reader is engendered.
I learned thru this book that using words is no different from using fingers ; as with the grasping that becomes pointing, the word usage is aimed at another person. Speach is therefore the internal reconstruction of an external operation; when i use words like these, i no longer grasp what i feel but i point at what i feel, in the unsuccessful attempt of which a reaction from you the reader is engendered.
November 5, 2023
I most like (i) the defense of an interfunctionality according to which capacities develop together, and (ii) the insistence that this requires a historical-cultural theory.
November 5, 2007
Vygotsky rocks. Every early childhood teacher should read at least a little of his actual work (not just what the textbooks say). I love Vygotsky!!
September 12, 2013
“Standing a head taller” is an empowering theme that Soviet cognitive psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky mentions from time to time, and he notices this quality most with the children he observed throughout his career. In these cases, imaginative play allows a child to internalize the activities of older individuals, learning and developing in the “zone” which continues to motivate the mind throughout one’s life. Most people seem to believe this development stops at a certain age, adulthood (anywhere between 13 and 24, according to different cultural beliefs), but I would argue that we continue to see ourselves a head taller, especially those who embrace the idea of life-long learning. For the majority who became adults and stopped the imaginative play, a good reminder will come when a person visits a place from their recent past: an old school, first job site or even the home to which, we are told, we can never go back. Recalling the feelings of that time when we hoped and dreamed to be grown up might make one feel a head taller than they were, but children get to live this experience everyday, a head taller than they are. Perhaps this is why someone like Vygotsky wanted to surround himself with these young active learners, as he could share in their enthusiasm to try new things for the rest of his tragically shortened life he knew, at the age of 26, he was going to live.
In the pages of Mind in Society, Vygotsky vents some of his frustration at adults who accept that things are the way they are, contemporary psychologists like Ted Thorndike and Jean Piaget, and their view of adulthood as the end of the developmental line. Equally frustrating is their search for the lower limits of ability, the beginning of a developmental stage where children or certain animals could do some things or not do some things. Given the proper amount of observation, children will never cease to impress open-minded adults that there are not many things they can’t do: anything that can be imagined could be played out. Vygotsky and his team had the right amount of patience for such viewings of children, infants and people with cognitive exceptionalities as able learners who go through a process of interpersonal (the mind in a society) and intrapersonal (internalizing society) adaptation. Attempts to get candy from a shelf or using coloured cards to recall instructions for a game of questions, both experiments described in this book, meet the participants at their level of cognitive ability. While he share opinions and gives respect to other constructivists and behaviorists in their respective fields, it seems a challenge for Vygotsky to accept their limiting theories; both “Problems of Method” and “Interaction between Learning and Development” are places where Vygotsky hashes out how quickly these theories fall apart. Setting limits is akin to censorship, something Vygotsky struggled with professionally in Soviet Russia.
Borrowing a quote from another Soviet author who faced censorship and limitations, Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s “manuscripts don’t burn” is very applicable. It is impressive how so much of Vygotsky’s thoughts survive on paper, and how many decades later his ideas are finally catching hold of minds in a far wider society than most people would have imagined. Somehow I know Vygotsky would have imagined it like this.
In the pages of Mind in Society, Vygotsky vents some of his frustration at adults who accept that things are the way they are, contemporary psychologists like Ted Thorndike and Jean Piaget, and their view of adulthood as the end of the developmental line. Equally frustrating is their search for the lower limits of ability, the beginning of a developmental stage where children or certain animals could do some things or not do some things. Given the proper amount of observation, children will never cease to impress open-minded adults that there are not many things they can’t do: anything that can be imagined could be played out. Vygotsky and his team had the right amount of patience for such viewings of children, infants and people with cognitive exceptionalities as able learners who go through a process of interpersonal (the mind in a society) and intrapersonal (internalizing society) adaptation. Attempts to get candy from a shelf or using coloured cards to recall instructions for a game of questions, both experiments described in this book, meet the participants at their level of cognitive ability. While he share opinions and gives respect to other constructivists and behaviorists in their respective fields, it seems a challenge for Vygotsky to accept their limiting theories; both “Problems of Method” and “Interaction between Learning and Development” are places where Vygotsky hashes out how quickly these theories fall apart. Setting limits is akin to censorship, something Vygotsky struggled with professionally in Soviet Russia.
Borrowing a quote from another Soviet author who faced censorship and limitations, Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s “manuscripts don’t burn” is very applicable. It is impressive how so much of Vygotsky’s thoughts survive on paper, and how many decades later his ideas are finally catching hold of minds in a far wider society than most people would have imagined. Somehow I know Vygotsky would have imagined it like this.
January 19, 2024
I have finally read something by Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, the highly influential (childhood) developmental psychologist. This 1978 selection of previously untranslated (into English) and unpublished essays has been exactly what I had in mind, and more. My previous knowledge of Vygotsky’s major contribution to education was his theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Some of his other essays were selected among his publications from the 1930s covered a wide range of interconnected topics which all seem to be very logically scaffolded atop each other: tools and symbols, perception and attention, mastery of memory with auxiliary signs, internalization of higher psychological processes, methods, interactions of learning and development, play, and writing.
Basic Theory and Data
1 “Tool and Symbol in Childhood Development” is a fascinating background of some early psychological studies of childhood compared with studies of botany (in terms of physical maturation) and later zoology (for psychological development). The foundations of elementary psychological processes, including the use of tools allowed psychologists to observe the convergences of child and animal psychology. However, when higher psychological processes came into question, the use of tools and speech began to provide a point of departure in terms of practical intelligence, identifying how unique and important human infancy is. The marked difference emerges in the child’s responses to social interaction and use of speech to accomplish tasks, even if that speech is egocentric and inwardly communicated.
2 “The Development of Perception and Attention” begins:
The advent of speech induces the transformation of childhood perceptions which impact many other functions, such as how a two-year-old transitions from visual perception through verbalized perception and becomes capable of a far more advanced cognitive perception than the child’s animal counterparts. As visual perception is undertaken simultaneously, speech is sequential and thus becomes an analytical tool to reexamine one's reality. The development of motor-sensory skills combines physical movement and external focus. As these are instinctively simultaneous reflexes, the introduction of auxiliary signs permits children to form an internal connection between an external stimulus with the help of the sign to make the right choice. This ability initiated by speech allows the child to shift away from the immediate visual-spatial field, and to create a time field as separate from now, the past and the future.
3 "Mastery of Memory and Thinking" includes some of the most clear examples of participant responses in this whole collection, which is refreshing. The essential focus of this essay examines the use of memory in problem-solving (answering questions with two rule restrictions), and how the use of signs (color cards) can be an external cue which over time and with practice can become an internalized process. Before any internalization takes place, the transformation of signs may occur over time and without awareness. Thus, a new associative series (A -> X -> Y) can develop into mediated symbolism (A -> X -> A), sign reorientation (E -> 3), or even direct representation (A -> A). These kinds of transformations form an intermediate period before the fully mediated function of "actively remembering with the use of signs." These studies of the complex process of memory help to distinguish the biological origin of elementary processes from the sociocultural origin of higher psychological functions.
4 "Internalization of Higher Psychological Processes" begins with some of the ways that tools and signs are part of a concept of mediated activity to the extent that the tool is externally oriented and lent to the mastering of nature while signs are internally oriented seeking the mastering of behavior. The process of internalization is explicated as an external activity that is slowly reconstructed internally, through a series of social or interpersonal processes, and later becomes an adopted intrapsychological function. The inner function as the internalization of cultural forms of behavior can lead to several transformations in systems of behavior, forms of psychological entities, use of external signs, and the development of communicative speech as well as inner speech.
5 “Problems of Method” outlines three principles that guide Vygotsky’s methodology.
1. analyzing processes, and not objects
2. explanations versus descriptions
3. the problem of “fossilized behavior”
Educational Implications
6 “The Interaction between Learning and Development” begins with three models portraying learning with development. The first, in which, Vygotsky references Piaget, stimulates that learning and development are independent. Others such as Binet suggested that development was a prerequisite for learning, and never the result of it. The second model is one where the development is simultaneous and the same as learning to the degree that it is habit formation and mastery of conditioned reflexes. James (to which I think he means William James) states that education is but the organization of acquired habits, such that development is the elaboration of innate responses. A third model Vygotsky summarizes development as two processes: maturation of the nervous system and learning as a developmental process, to which he attributes several studies by Koffka.
7 “The Role of Play in Development” includes the ratio of action to meaning. The metaphor of this calculation is powerful and rather useful as an internal function. Can we act with incomplete understanding, or ought we to understand completely before acting?
8 “The Pre-history of Written Language” has a fascinating account of the child’s development of gesture and visual signs, which include play, drawing, and finally writing. This essay seems aimed at a new approach to teaching reading and writing based upon developmentally appropriate timing and cites the young ages of early education around the world, such as studies by Montessori in Italy.
To the purpose of revisiting this text in the future, the researchers mentioned by chapter are:
1. Karl Stumpf, Hegel, A. Gesell, Wolfgang Köhler, K. Buhler, Charlotte Buhler, Shapiro and Gerke, R. E. Levina
2. Köhler, Binet, Stern, A. Potebnya, K. Koffka, K. Lewin
3. E. R. Jaensch, A. N. Leontiev, N. G. Morozova, L. V. Zankov, U. C. Yussevich
4. Pavlov, Dewey, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx
5. Watson, Bekhterev, Wundt (Würzberg school), Engels, Koffka, K. Lewin, Marx, Titchener, P. P. Blonsky, Cattell
6. Piaget, Binet, James, Koffka (Gestalt school), Woodworth, Thorndike, Dorothea McCarthy
7. Marx, Sully, Lewin, Goldstein and Gelb, Geothe, Spinoza
8. Baldwin, H. Hetzer, K. Buhler, Luria, Montessori
I also really loved the helpfulness of the Introduction by Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner and the Afterward by Vera John-Steiner and Ellen Souberman. As I will be passing this book along to my sister, a new elementary school teacher, I doubt I will have the chance to revisit it for a while. But honestly, I think this is a fantastic work with serious educational implications for the teaching of children.
Basic Theory and Data
1 “Tool and Symbol in Childhood Development” is a fascinating background of some early psychological studies of childhood compared with studies of botany (in terms of physical maturation) and later zoology (for psychological development). The foundations of elementary psychological processes, including the use of tools allowed psychologists to observe the convergences of child and animal psychology. However, when higher psychological processes came into question, the use of tools and speech began to provide a point of departure in terms of practical intelligence, identifying how unique and important human infancy is. The marked difference emerges in the child’s responses to social interaction and use of speech to accomplish tasks, even if that speech is egocentric and inwardly communicated.
2 “The Development of Perception and Attention” begins:
The linkage between tool use and speech affects several psychological functions, in particular perception, sensory-motor operations, and attention, each of which is part of a dynamic system of behavior.
The advent of speech induces the transformation of childhood perceptions which impact many other functions, such as how a two-year-old transitions from visual perception through verbalized perception and becomes capable of a far more advanced cognitive perception than the child’s animal counterparts. As visual perception is undertaken simultaneously, speech is sequential and thus becomes an analytical tool to reexamine one's reality. The development of motor-sensory skills combines physical movement and external focus. As these are instinctively simultaneous reflexes, the introduction of auxiliary signs permits children to form an internal connection between an external stimulus with the help of the sign to make the right choice. This ability initiated by speech allows the child to shift away from the immediate visual-spatial field, and to create a time field as separate from now, the past and the future.
Created with the help of speech, the time field for action extends both forward and backward. Future activity that can be included in an ongoing activity is represented by signs. As in the case of memory and attention, the inclusion of signs in temporal perception does not lead to a simple lengthening of the operation in time; rather, it creates the condition for the development of a single system that includes effective elements of the past, present, and future. This emerging psychological system in the child now encompasses two new functions: intentions and symbolic representation of purposeful action....New motives, socially rooted and intense, provide the child with direction.
3 "Mastery of Memory and Thinking" includes some of the most clear examples of participant responses in this whole collection, which is refreshing. The essential focus of this essay examines the use of memory in problem-solving (answering questions with two rule restrictions), and how the use of signs (color cards) can be an external cue which over time and with practice can become an internalized process. Before any internalization takes place, the transformation of signs may occur over time and without awareness. Thus, a new associative series (A -> X -> Y) can develop into mediated symbolism (A -> X -> A), sign reorientation (E -> 3), or even direct representation (A -> A). These kinds of transformations form an intermediate period before the fully mediated function of "actively remembering with the use of signs." These studies of the complex process of memory help to distinguish the biological origin of elementary processes from the sociocultural origin of higher psychological functions.
The invention and use of signs as auxiliary means of solving a given psychological problem (to remember, compare something, report, choose, and so on) is analogous to the invention of tools in one psychological respect. The sign acts as an instrument of psychological activity in a manner analogous to the role of tools in labor.
4 "Internalization of Higher Psychological Processes" begins with some of the ways that tools and signs are part of a concept of mediated activity to the extent that the tool is externally oriented and lent to the mastering of nature while signs are internally oriented seeking the mastering of behavior. The process of internalization is explicated as an external activity that is slowly reconstructed internally, through a series of social or interpersonal processes, and later becomes an adopted intrapsychological function. The inner function as the internalization of cultural forms of behavior can lead to several transformations in systems of behavior, forms of psychological entities, use of external signs, and the development of communicative speech as well as inner speech.
5 “Problems of Method” outlines three principles that guide Vygotsky’s methodology.
1. analyzing processes, and not objects
2. explanations versus descriptions
3. the problem of “fossilized behavior”
Educational Implications
6 “The Interaction between Learning and Development” begins with three models portraying learning with development. The first, in which, Vygotsky references Piaget, stimulates that learning and development are independent. Others such as Binet suggested that development was a prerequisite for learning, and never the result of it. The second model is one where the development is simultaneous and the same as learning to the degree that it is habit formation and mastery of conditioned reflexes. James (to which I think he means William James) states that education is but the organization of acquired habits, such that development is the elaboration of innate responses. A third model Vygotsky summarizes development as two processes: maturation of the nervous system and learning as a developmental process, to which he attributes several studies by Koffka.
7 “The Role of Play in Development” includes the ratio of action to meaning. The metaphor of this calculation is powerful and rather useful as an internal function. Can we act with incomplete understanding, or ought we to understand completely before acting?
8 “The Pre-history of Written Language” has a fascinating account of the child’s development of gesture and visual signs, which include play, drawing, and finally writing. This essay seems aimed at a new approach to teaching reading and writing based upon developmentally appropriate timing and cites the young ages of early education around the world, such as studies by Montessori in Italy.
To the purpose of revisiting this text in the future, the researchers mentioned by chapter are:
1. Karl Stumpf, Hegel, A. Gesell, Wolfgang Köhler, K. Buhler, Charlotte Buhler, Shapiro and Gerke, R. E. Levina
2. Köhler, Binet, Stern, A. Potebnya, K. Koffka, K. Lewin
3. E. R. Jaensch, A. N. Leontiev, N. G. Morozova, L. V. Zankov, U. C. Yussevich
4. Pavlov, Dewey, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx
5. Watson, Bekhterev, Wundt (Würzberg school), Engels, Koffka, K. Lewin, Marx, Titchener, P. P. Blonsky, Cattell
6. Piaget, Binet, James, Koffka (Gestalt school), Woodworth, Thorndike, Dorothea McCarthy
7. Marx, Sully, Lewin, Goldstein and Gelb, Geothe, Spinoza
8. Baldwin, H. Hetzer, K. Buhler, Luria, Montessori
I also really loved the helpfulness of the Introduction by Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner and the Afterward by Vera John-Steiner and Ellen Souberman. As I will be passing this book along to my sister, a new elementary school teacher, I doubt I will have the chance to revisit it for a while. But honestly, I think this is a fantastic work with serious educational implications for the teaching of children.
February 6, 2017
Bu kitabı değerli kılan en önemli şey bence psikolojinin sosyalist bakış açısına uygun hale nasıl getirilmeye çalışıldığını görmek. Ne zaman çevremdeki insanlarla metodolojik bir tartışmaya girsem bilginin ideolojik olduğunu inkar ettikleri için çözümsüz kalıyorum. Bu kitap farkı hissetmek için birebir. Bu sosyalist çerçevede Vygotsky günümüzde hakim olan bakış açısının çok dışında bir yöntem belirlemiş, kimi tanımlamalarda Hegel ve Spinoza'ya referans veriyor. Psikolojinin günümüzdeki halini düşününce oldukça tuhaf, ancak yine de çok kontrollü olduğuna inanılan deneysel yöntemin içinde bulunduğu büyük sorunları düşünecek olursak alternatif bir yöntemi görmek açısından zihin açıcı.
Psikolojinin idealleştirdildiği dünyada kendini çıkmazda hisseden insanların alternatifi görüp değerlendirmeleri için iyi bir kaynak olabilir. Ancak ikinci bölümünde eğitim odaklı ilerlediğinde oldukça sıkıcılaşıyor.
Psikolojinin idealleştirdildiği dünyada kendini çıkmazda hisseden insanların alternatifi görüp değerlendirmeleri için iyi bir kaynak olabilir. Ancak ikinci bölümünde eğitim odaklı ilerlediğinde oldukça sıkıcılaşıyor.
November 26, 2020
I've always found Vygotsky's ideas, particularly the "zone of proximal development" in the form of scaffolding, to be useful instructional techniques and good ways to help students apply knowledge to different concepts.
However, as an explanation for cognitive development, they makes less sense to me. I am not convinced that sociocultural tools and influences alone are enough to override or precede biological foundations necessary for learning to occur (whether in stages or not), even if they are important to the development of knowledge. In this way I find myself somewhere between Piaget and Vygotsky. Vygotsky's ideas seem more relevant to conscious learning and development than simply learning and development per se.
However, as an explanation for cognitive development, they makes less sense to me. I am not convinced that sociocultural tools and influences alone are enough to override or precede biological foundations necessary for learning to occur (whether in stages or not), even if they are important to the development of knowledge. In this way I find myself somewhere between Piaget and Vygotsky. Vygotsky's ideas seem more relevant to conscious learning and development than simply learning and development per se.
June 24, 2023
Notes
Shairo/Gerke mechanical conception of repetition: child imitates adult actions, tool-use to master not tool-use but the principle involved: like repeated-exposure photograph where similarities become clear and differences blur.
Buhler/Meyerson/Guillaume - pre-speech child (or aphasic adult) behavior similar to ape. Speech makes all the difference. Others treated practical intelligence and speech dev as 2 unconnected processes.
Even Piaget - concept of egocenctric speech - doesn't attribute speech to organization of mind/activities.
Greatest discovery in child's life between year 1-2: recognition of fact that signs have meaning.
Vygotsky: Dialectical unity of practical intelligence/sign-use as basis of complex behavior.
Pursuing a goal, children not only act but speak, increasing in complexity/persistence as task becomes more complicated. If goal is more complex, less direct, then importance of the speech in the operation increases. If not permitted to use it, they cannot accomplish the task. Ape has series of uncontrolled attempts. Speech makes kid's practical operations less impulsive/spontaneous - divides into planning stage and execution.
Unlike apes, with speech, kid becomes both subject and object of own behavior (control).
Greatest change in capacity to use language for problem-solving when they turn speech inward, no longer need to appeal to an adult. Agency. Process of internalization of social speech is history of socialization of practical intellect. Signs and words serve first as social contact, then become basis for superior form of activity, elevating above apes.
Kohler: importance of visual field in organizing practical behavior of apes. But humans can enhance sensory field through voluntary effort.
2-year old identifies only objects in picture. Older identifies actions, relations between objects: limited by verbalized perception. labeling as primary function of speech.
Visual perception is integral (simultaneously perceived). Language is analytical - labelled elements connected linearly in sentence.
Language creates a time-field that is just as perceptible as visual field, allows direction of attention dynamically - learning from past, aiming towards past. For ape, goal and object both need to be in view. Ape must see in order to pay attention, child must pay attention in order to see.
2 kinds of memory: natural memory (influence of external stimuli: perceptions). mediated memory by signs, first external stimuli (notches on a stick) then internalized.
for the young child, to think is to recall. content of thinking is not logical structure of a concept "what is a grandmother" but recollection of impressions "she has warm lap". for the adolescent, it is reversed - to recall is to think. remembering is reduced to establishing/finding logical relations.
In elementary form, something is remembered, in higher form, humans remember something. Tying a knot in handkerchief as reminder is fundamental characteristic of higher form of behavior - civilizations build monuments to remember.
Pavlov telephone: unconditioned reflex connect two points directly through a fixed line. Conditioned reflex as relay through central station (cortex) that can form temporary and limitless connections.
Difference phenotypic (appearance) and causal-dynamic/genotypic. Marx: if essence of every object coincided with external manifestation, every science would be superfluous (everyday experience would suffice).
Essential factors of psychological analysis
Process analysis not object analysis
Reveals dynamic relations, not enumeration of outer features - explanatory not descriptive
Developmental analysis that goes to source and then reconstructs all points of development to reveal structures
Complex reaction takes longer than simple reflex. But Wundt showed that with practice, complex reaction reduces towards simple reflex time. Given how meticulously psychology research is practiced/prepared, reactions have been studied only after they have already been fossilized. So need a causal-dynamic study of choice reactions.
Give adults a task with many different stimuli and required responses, and they will refuse to play until they are given more information and figure out the necessary relations. Give a kid, and it immediately starts to play, responding to the current stimuli, and treating them in isolation. Unmediated memory, unhesitatingly accept the challenge.
Limits of child’s mediated memory. Picture of horse = key with picture of sleigh. Picture of bread = press key with picture of knife. Horse-Sleigh, and Bread-Knife mediation becomes strong (introduce sleigh/knife and make responses faster than just ‘press left key’). But switch sleigh and knife, and child can no longer use mediated memory, it was limited. When you begin to try and remember which stimuli linked with which response, you start to learn what remembering is, and can begin to use auxiliary stimuli more effectively. Eventually: I don’t need pictures, I’ll do it myself.
Cognitive development not as gradual accumulation of separate changes: but instead dialectical, periodic, metamorphic, transformative, intertwined and adaptive that overcome impediments.
How to study a subject’s means/methods rather than responses/behaviors? Functional method of double stimulation - give novel situation that is beyond current ability, and also neutral object, see how it is incorporated into problem-solving
3 concepts of education:
1. Learning as purely external, separate from development. Mental functions develop, and learning uses these, cannot outrun them. Piaget.
2. Learning is development. Learning/Development is the mastery of conditioned reflexes. James - habit formation: Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.
3. Combine these 2. Koffka’s Development based on both maturation (physical) and learning.
If we want relation between development and learning, need 2 development levels: 1. Actual level - completed development cycles of mental function. 2. Zone of proximal development ie determined by problem-solving or guided problem-solving. Therefore the only ‘good learning’ is in advance of development.
Play seems to develop at a time when the child begins to experience needs that cannot be immediately realized. To resolve tension of unfulfilled need, child enters imaginary world. Arising from action, imagination is thus a new psychological process.
Lewin’s ‘motivating nature of things’ - a door asks to be opened. A staircase to be climbed. But in play, the child acts independently of what he sees. Freedom of action is not acquired in a flash, a long process of development. Involves Object / Meaning ratio - able to use symbols like words to see only the meaning, not the object itself, so a stick is called a horse, and you see neither object nor word, but the horse - meaning.
Real world: action dominates meaning (don’t even know meaning of most action), but in imaginary play, action is subordinated to meaning.
Koffka’s incorrect view - child occupies imaginary play reality, and the adult serious reality. But even for the child, these are 2 separate realities. To behave in the Real as if Play is delirium.
In play, imagine higher competence than current - contains all developmental tendencies in condensed form.
History of written language in child is unknown. Begins with appearance of gesture: writing in air.
Children do not draw, they indicate, and the pencil fixes the indicatory gesture.
Buhler’s x-ray drawings: children will draw fully clothed figures but with legs, stomach, wallet inside pocket etc. Second leg of horseman in profile. Draw from knowledge/memory, omit the unimportant: head with legs, no neck/torso.
80% of 3-yr-olds can master arbitrary combinations of sign/meaning (written language), but 100% of 6yr-olds can. So 3-6 is not so much mastery of writing but improvement in attention and memory. So teach reading earlier.
Problem with Montessori (teach early), writing as a motor skill, content totally meaningless “Best wishes to the director and teacher”. Writing as ‘relevant to life’ just like teaching ‘relevant arithmetic’.
Writing with meaning. Kindergarten not to teach reading and writing but where these skills can be found in play situations.
Engels: in dialectical philosophy, nothing is permanent, absolute, sacred, all is process - of decline and formation and destruction and ascent.
Shairo/Gerke mechanical conception of repetition: child imitates adult actions, tool-use to master not tool-use but the principle involved: like repeated-exposure photograph where similarities become clear and differences blur.
Buhler/Meyerson/Guillaume - pre-speech child (or aphasic adult) behavior similar to ape. Speech makes all the difference. Others treated practical intelligence and speech dev as 2 unconnected processes.
Even Piaget - concept of egocenctric speech - doesn't attribute speech to organization of mind/activities.
Greatest discovery in child's life between year 1-2: recognition of fact that signs have meaning.
Vygotsky: Dialectical unity of practical intelligence/sign-use as basis of complex behavior.
Pursuing a goal, children not only act but speak, increasing in complexity/persistence as task becomes more complicated. If goal is more complex, less direct, then importance of the speech in the operation increases. If not permitted to use it, they cannot accomplish the task. Ape has series of uncontrolled attempts. Speech makes kid's practical operations less impulsive/spontaneous - divides into planning stage and execution.
Unlike apes, with speech, kid becomes both subject and object of own behavior (control).
Greatest change in capacity to use language for problem-solving when they turn speech inward, no longer need to appeal to an adult. Agency. Process of internalization of social speech is history of socialization of practical intellect. Signs and words serve first as social contact, then become basis for superior form of activity, elevating above apes.
Kohler: importance of visual field in organizing practical behavior of apes. But humans can enhance sensory field through voluntary effort.
2-year old identifies only objects in picture. Older identifies actions, relations between objects: limited by verbalized perception. labeling as primary function of speech.
Visual perception is integral (simultaneously perceived). Language is analytical - labelled elements connected linearly in sentence.
Language creates a time-field that is just as perceptible as visual field, allows direction of attention dynamically - learning from past, aiming towards past. For ape, goal and object both need to be in view. Ape must see in order to pay attention, child must pay attention in order to see.
2 kinds of memory: natural memory (influence of external stimuli: perceptions). mediated memory by signs, first external stimuli (notches on a stick) then internalized.
for the young child, to think is to recall. content of thinking is not logical structure of a concept "what is a grandmother" but recollection of impressions "she has warm lap". for the adolescent, it is reversed - to recall is to think. remembering is reduced to establishing/finding logical relations.
In elementary form, something is remembered, in higher form, humans remember something. Tying a knot in handkerchief as reminder is fundamental characteristic of higher form of behavior - civilizations build monuments to remember.
Pavlov telephone: unconditioned reflex connect two points directly through a fixed line. Conditioned reflex as relay through central station (cortex) that can form temporary and limitless connections.
Difference phenotypic (appearance) and causal-dynamic/genotypic. Marx: if essence of every object coincided with external manifestation, every science would be superfluous (everyday experience would suffice).
Essential factors of psychological analysis
Process analysis not object analysis
Reveals dynamic relations, not enumeration of outer features - explanatory not descriptive
Developmental analysis that goes to source and then reconstructs all points of development to reveal structures
Complex reaction takes longer than simple reflex. But Wundt showed that with practice, complex reaction reduces towards simple reflex time. Given how meticulously psychology research is practiced/prepared, reactions have been studied only after they have already been fossilized. So need a causal-dynamic study of choice reactions.
Give adults a task with many different stimuli and required responses, and they will refuse to play until they are given more information and figure out the necessary relations. Give a kid, and it immediately starts to play, responding to the current stimuli, and treating them in isolation. Unmediated memory, unhesitatingly accept the challenge.
Limits of child’s mediated memory. Picture of horse = key with picture of sleigh. Picture of bread = press key with picture of knife. Horse-Sleigh, and Bread-Knife mediation becomes strong (introduce sleigh/knife and make responses faster than just ‘press left key’). But switch sleigh and knife, and child can no longer use mediated memory, it was limited. When you begin to try and remember which stimuli linked with which response, you start to learn what remembering is, and can begin to use auxiliary stimuli more effectively. Eventually: I don’t need pictures, I’ll do it myself.
Cognitive development not as gradual accumulation of separate changes: but instead dialectical, periodic, metamorphic, transformative, intertwined and adaptive that overcome impediments.
How to study a subject’s means/methods rather than responses/behaviors? Functional method of double stimulation - give novel situation that is beyond current ability, and also neutral object, see how it is incorporated into problem-solving
3 concepts of education:
1. Learning as purely external, separate from development. Mental functions develop, and learning uses these, cannot outrun them. Piaget.
2. Learning is development. Learning/Development is the mastery of conditioned reflexes. James - habit formation: Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.
3. Combine these 2. Koffka’s Development based on both maturation (physical) and learning.
If we want relation between development and learning, need 2 development levels: 1. Actual level - completed development cycles of mental function. 2. Zone of proximal development ie determined by problem-solving or guided problem-solving. Therefore the only ‘good learning’ is in advance of development.
Play seems to develop at a time when the child begins to experience needs that cannot be immediately realized. To resolve tension of unfulfilled need, child enters imaginary world. Arising from action, imagination is thus a new psychological process.
Lewin’s ‘motivating nature of things’ - a door asks to be opened. A staircase to be climbed. But in play, the child acts independently of what he sees. Freedom of action is not acquired in a flash, a long process of development. Involves Object / Meaning ratio - able to use symbols like words to see only the meaning, not the object itself, so a stick is called a horse, and you see neither object nor word, but the horse - meaning.
Real world: action dominates meaning (don’t even know meaning of most action), but in imaginary play, action is subordinated to meaning.
Koffka’s incorrect view - child occupies imaginary play reality, and the adult serious reality. But even for the child, these are 2 separate realities. To behave in the Real as if Play is delirium.
In play, imagine higher competence than current - contains all developmental tendencies in condensed form.
History of written language in child is unknown. Begins with appearance of gesture: writing in air.
Children do not draw, they indicate, and the pencil fixes the indicatory gesture.
Buhler’s x-ray drawings: children will draw fully clothed figures but with legs, stomach, wallet inside pocket etc. Second leg of horseman in profile. Draw from knowledge/memory, omit the unimportant: head with legs, no neck/torso.
80% of 3-yr-olds can master arbitrary combinations of sign/meaning (written language), but 100% of 6yr-olds can. So 3-6 is not so much mastery of writing but improvement in attention and memory. So teach reading earlier.
Problem with Montessori (teach early), writing as a motor skill, content totally meaningless “Best wishes to the director and teacher”. Writing as ‘relevant to life’ just like teaching ‘relevant arithmetic’.
Writing with meaning. Kindergarten not to teach reading and writing but where these skills can be found in play situations.
Engels: in dialectical philosophy, nothing is permanent, absolute, sacred, all is process - of decline and formation and destruction and ascent.
August 8, 2017
I am a pre-service high school teacher, and I have heard a lot about Vygotsky, especially in my classes on Second Language Acquisition (SLA). I wanted to go straight to the source in order to understand the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and other educational implications of Vygtosky's theory.
Reading the chapter on development and learning really helped me understand what the ZPD is. Now I know that we need to assess students in a way that shows us not just what they know, but what they are beginning to learn. In other chapters found some useful points about the importance of mediation (tools and signs) and how that ability is unique to human development.
That being said, this book was difficult to get through. Some of his ideas were difficult to understand or not relevant to a high school teacher. I have never taken a psychology class, and I know that made his technical discussions more difficult. And for a lay person like me, the introduction and afterword (not written by Vygotsky) were completely incomprehensible! I'm glad I read this book so that I can cite the source of what the ZPD is and means. However, I think I need to find a book that makes Vygotsky accessible to teachers if I'm going to continue studying his work.
Reading the chapter on development and learning really helped me understand what the ZPD is. Now I know that we need to assess students in a way that shows us not just what they know, but what they are beginning to learn. In other chapters found some useful points about the importance of mediation (tools and signs) and how that ability is unique to human development.
That being said, this book was difficult to get through. Some of his ideas were difficult to understand or not relevant to a high school teacher. I have never taken a psychology class, and I know that made his technical discussions more difficult. And for a lay person like me, the introduction and afterword (not written by Vygotsky) were completely incomprehensible! I'm glad I read this book so that I can cite the source of what the ZPD is and means. However, I think I need to find a book that makes Vygotsky accessible to teachers if I'm going to continue studying his work.
April 25, 2016
This book edits together writings by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The first part of the book went over my head a bit, but the section on education (pp. 79-119) was very interesting. I particularly liked his ideas on the role of play in education. Play basically plays an important role in improving children' abilities.
June 17, 2023
It is a truth empirically acknowledged that learning should be aligned with the level of a child’s development. This is the premise for the zone of proximal development for which Vygotsky is famous. The zone is like a zygote, “the zone of proximal development today will be the actual developmental level tomorrow.”
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a bridge in the psychological topography from the present mastery to future potentiality. Imagination provides the boardwalk for this bridgework. Play is a child’s first act of emancipation from the constraints of reality. “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.”
Collaboration with adults and more capable peers serve as the guardrails of support in the ZPD bridge. Children “do not yet know their own capacities and limitations. They operate with complex tasks in the same way they operate with simple ones.” Their abilities with the assistance of others may provide a more valid assessment of children’s mental development than their independent competence.” Thus, the entire secret of teaching is to prepare and organize this natural transition appropriately, through the “alloy of speech and action…refracted through the prism of the child’s environment.”
“Environmental procedures become surrogates for psychological processes.” “The relationship between the individual and the society is a dialectical process, which, like a river and its tributaries, combines and separates the different elements of human life. They are never frozen polarities.” Vygotsky emphasized theory and methodology that telescope change. The brain acts as “an organ of civilization in which are hidden boundless possibilities.”
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a bridge in the psychological topography from the present mastery to future potentiality. Imagination provides the boardwalk for this bridgework. Play is a child’s first act of emancipation from the constraints of reality. “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.”
Collaboration with adults and more capable peers serve as the guardrails of support in the ZPD bridge. Children “do not yet know their own capacities and limitations. They operate with complex tasks in the same way they operate with simple ones.” Their abilities with the assistance of others may provide a more valid assessment of children’s mental development than their independent competence.” Thus, the entire secret of teaching is to prepare and organize this natural transition appropriately, through the “alloy of speech and action…refracted through the prism of the child’s environment.”
“Environmental procedures become surrogates for psychological processes.” “The relationship between the individual and the society is a dialectical process, which, like a river and its tributaries, combines and separates the different elements of human life. They are never frozen polarities.” Vygotsky emphasized theory and methodology that telescope change. The brain acts as “an organ of civilization in which are hidden boundless possibilities.”
April 8, 2021
Dentro de la psicología educativa, Piaget se convirtió en referente por su teoría genética que partía de la premisa de que los estados mentales del niño tenían un cierto carácter universal, estableciendo unos estadios psicoevolutivos generales. Para él, el conocimiento se construye a través de la acción, y se centró en el desarrollo individual de las funciones cognitivas.
Frente a esta perspectiva psicogenética, Vygotski, discípulo del neuropsicologo Luria, profundizó en la importancia que la interacción social tiene en el desarrollo de esas funciones. Así, la inteligencia y el desarrollo de los procesos psicológicos superiores no pueden entenderse al margen de lo social. Por ello, el lenguaje juega un papel primordial en tanto que es facilitador (o no) de esa interacción social. De hecho, Vygotski teorizó la llamada Zona de Desarrollo Próximo, entendida como la distancia entre el nivel de desarrollo del niño, determinado por su capacidad para resolver un problema, y su nivel de desarrollo potencial, que es la capacidad para resolver un problema cognitivo con ayuda.
En este libro, Vygotski analiza de forma magistral procesos como la percepción, la memoria, la atención o el lenguaje.
Un libro muy útil para entender cómo se adquieren estas capacidades, y cómo un entorno facilitador es determinante para el desarrollo de las funciones cognitivas.
Si os movéis en el campo de la educación, os lo recomiendo especialmente. Es de muchísima utilidad pedagógica.
Frente a esta perspectiva psicogenética, Vygotski, discípulo del neuropsicologo Luria, profundizó en la importancia que la interacción social tiene en el desarrollo de esas funciones. Así, la inteligencia y el desarrollo de los procesos psicológicos superiores no pueden entenderse al margen de lo social. Por ello, el lenguaje juega un papel primordial en tanto que es facilitador (o no) de esa interacción social. De hecho, Vygotski teorizó la llamada Zona de Desarrollo Próximo, entendida como la distancia entre el nivel de desarrollo del niño, determinado por su capacidad para resolver un problema, y su nivel de desarrollo potencial, que es la capacidad para resolver un problema cognitivo con ayuda.
En este libro, Vygotski analiza de forma magistral procesos como la percepción, la memoria, la atención o el lenguaje.
Un libro muy útil para entender cómo se adquieren estas capacidades, y cómo un entorno facilitador es determinante para el desarrollo de las funciones cognitivas.
Si os movéis en el campo de la educación, os lo recomiendo especialmente. Es de muchísima utilidad pedagógica.
August 28, 2020
A great series of essays from the preeminent Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Suffers invisibly from being taken quite haphazardly from his manuscripts provided to American scholars many years after his death, and the editors are quite open about the liberties they took with the translation and selection of the essays contained within. although it's one of the shortest and broadest collections of Vygotsky's works translated to English, I think it gives a misleading impression if taken as an introduction to his thought; as Yasnitsky's studies show, his theories changed very greatly over his career, and without a prior and critical introduction to Vygotsky elsewhere I think one is liable to miss some of his meanings. The influence of the gestalt school, for example, is very clear when one is looking for it, but without this understanding I think it's possible to come away from Mind in Society thinking of Vygotsky as offering an endorsement of current developmental and cognitive psychology 50 years before it arrived, rather than a stinging critique of his contemporaries that is still relevant today.
October 23, 2023
[...]Ακόμη και σχετικά απλές διεργασίες, όπως το δέσιμο ενός κόμπου ή το σημάδεμα ενός μπαστουνιού για να μας θυμίσει κάτι, αλλάζουν την ψυχολογική δομή της μνημονικής λειτουργίας, επεκτείνουν τις διεργασίες της μνήμης πέρα από τις βιολογικές διαστάσεις
του ανθρώπινου νευρικού συστήματος, και της επιτρέπουν να ενσωματώσει τεχνητά ή αυτοδημιούργητα ερεθίσματα που τα ονομάζουμε σημεία. Η συγχώνευση αυτή, που είναι μοναδική στα ανθρώπινα όντα, συμασιοδοτεί μια εξολοκλήρου νέα μορφή συμπεριφοράς. Η
βασική της διαφορά με τις απλές, στοιχειώδεις λειτουργίες έγκειται στη δομή των σχέσεων ερεθίσματος-αντίδρασης σε κάθε λειτουργία. Το κεντρικό χαρακτηριστικό των βασικών λειτουργιών είναι ότι προσδιορίζονται άμεσα και συνολικά από τα ερεθίσματα του περιβάλλοντος. Για τις ανώτερες λειτουργίες, το κεντρικό χαρακτηριστικό είναι ο αυτοπροκαλούμενος ερεθισμός (self-generated stimulation), δηλαδή η δημιουργία και η χρήση τεχνητών ερεθισμάτων, που γίνονται στη συνέχεια η άμεση αιτία για την εμφάνιση μιας συνμπεριφοράς.[... ]
του ανθρώπινου νευρικού συστήματος, και της επιτρέπουν να ενσωματώσει τεχνητά ή αυτοδημιούργητα ερεθίσματα που τα ονομάζουμε σημεία. Η συγχώνευση αυτή, που είναι μοναδική στα ανθρώπινα όντα, συμασιοδοτεί μια εξολοκλήρου νέα μορφή συμπεριφοράς. Η
βασική της διαφορά με τις απλές, στοιχειώδεις λειτουργίες έγκειται στη δομή των σχέσεων ερεθίσματος-αντίδρασης σε κάθε λειτουργία. Το κεντρικό χαρακτηριστικό των βασικών λειτουργιών είναι ότι προσδιορίζονται άμεσα και συνολικά από τα ερεθίσματα του περιβάλλοντος. Για τις ανώτερες λειτουργίες, το κεντρικό χαρακτηριστικό είναι ο αυτοπροκαλούμενος ερεθισμός (self-generated stimulation), δηλαδή η δημιουργία και η χρήση τεχνητών ερεθισμάτων, που γίνονται στη συνέχεια η άμεση αιτία για την εμφάνιση μιας συνμπεριφοράς.[... ]
August 12, 2022
A book read in pursuit of understanding education and how best to teach people, Vygotsky's points here are valid, inciteful and required if one wishes to truly know how best to teach someone from a theoretical perspective. Notably his idea of scaffolding, characterised through his zone of proximal development (ZPD) is always going to remain valuable knowledge.
However, it is docked a mark in this regard as what he says how now been outlined clearer and presented more smoothly, but that's the mere passage of time working its magic as teachers and psychologists of today can redraft his work.
For its time, this book was vital and remains important today. Definitely give it a read if you're pursuing education as a career or simply wish to expand your psychological knowledge.
However, it is docked a mark in this regard as what he says how now been outlined clearer and presented more smoothly, but that's the mere passage of time working its magic as teachers and psychologists of today can redraft his work.
For its time, this book was vital and remains important today. Definitely give it a read if you're pursuing education as a career or simply wish to expand your psychological knowledge.
February 22, 2018
After a few years studying social constructivism, it's very interesting to read about the social and historical aspects of human mind development. The editors did a great job turning Vygotsky's isolated texts into one single book and in clarifying his most difficult concepts by researching its origins. However, the author mentions tons of studies without explaining how they were conducted -- or any other detail really -- so I missed being able to check the sources of his conclusions (a problem which the editors seemed to be aware and tried to bring as much information as they could).
Still, it's a must read to everyone interested in education.
Still, it's a must read to everyone interested in education.
November 24, 2022
O Livro é interessante para as pessoas que estão em busca de aprofundar seu Conhecimento sobre o tema abordado no Titulo e sobre alguns Conhecimentos mais relacionados ao Ensino e a formação escolar porem deve se ter em Mente que o livro é um livro que tende a ter uma linguagem mais culta e menos acessivel o que o torna uma leitura chata e massante ao longo das paginas sendo que Junto a isso o livro tambem é confuso em diversos trechos e ate mesmo chato sendo assim Devido a esses fatores o livro é interessante porem nem tanto sendo assim o livro é uma leitura interessante porem complexa e enjoativa
Nota:6/10
Nota:6/10
June 15, 2022
Livro muito bom como introdução ao pensamento de Vigotski, onde aparecem alguns dos principais conceitos trabalhados em suas obras, e é possível perceber seu método de investigação. Na primeira vez que tomei contato com textos desse livro, lembro de ter achado incrível como ele substancia o que difere os humanos de outros animais. Mesmo sendo um livro introdutório, recomendo uma leitura prévia do livro "Dialética da Natureza" de Friederich Engels, ou ao menos o último capítulo deste livro, "A transformação do macaco em homem".
Read
August 22, 2023This book is very different from what I'm used to reading — nonetheless, a valuable addition to my library. Understanding better how our mind behaves while we're children and how knowledge changes is fascinating, as well as the whole "zone of proximal development" subject. I'd love to read more Vygotsky, but honestly, as I'm not an academic, I'd rather read derived works that explain in easier terms — and more straightforward ways — his views on education and human development.
July 26, 2022
found this collection of essays compiled from Vygotsky's papers and manuscripts to be an interesting read; with chapter 6 in particular useful in understanding his Zone of Proximal Development approach. the editors clearly spent a significant effort to ensure Vygotsky's work was accurately and authentically represented in this publication. recommended text for early childhood theorists' studies.
March 7, 2017
This was the first book I have ever read on psychology.
As Vygotsky's name kept appearing in texts on psycholinguistics and motivation and children's development in my TESOL course, I decided to check him out.
I didn't understand everything I read but could feel my brain trying to expand to keep up with Lev's intellect. It was fascinating stuff.
I learned the differences between 'learning' and 'development' and how they are not necessarily the same thing as well as many of the mistakes we have made in the teaching profession. The most I got out of this book was Vygotsky's thoughts on how writing should be taught - in a nutshell, he says it should be taught in an inductive way so that children will write out of necessity and desire to do so, not just a boring lecture on the mechanics and how to write.
Thanks to this chapter, I now have new ideas on how I will teach my daughter to write English and Japanese in future.
Look forward to reading Thought and Language by Vygotsky at some future date - probably his most famous work which was originally put out by MIT Press - but this shorter work was more than enough for me to process for now.
If you are at all interested in how humans differ from other primates in terms of for example higher psychological processes (such as speech) or are interested in child psychology, just to name a few topics he tackles here, then this book is for you. His style of writing is quite academic and slightly highbrow and definitely singular (!) but not too hard to follow if you go through it slowly.
I feel I will get more and more out of this book with repeating readings. This year I plan to improve my previous study on motivation that I have been conducting on my university students and Vygotsky has given me some ideas on new approaches I might try. It is amazing to think that these ideas were around in the 20s and 30s but largely ignored in his own life time, especially outside of Russia.
Anyone interested in pedagogy should read some Vygotsky.
As Vygotsky's name kept appearing in texts on psycholinguistics and motivation and children's development in my TESOL course, I decided to check him out.
I didn't understand everything I read but could feel my brain trying to expand to keep up with Lev's intellect. It was fascinating stuff.
I learned the differences between 'learning' and 'development' and how they are not necessarily the same thing as well as many of the mistakes we have made in the teaching profession. The most I got out of this book was Vygotsky's thoughts on how writing should be taught - in a nutshell, he says it should be taught in an inductive way so that children will write out of necessity and desire to do so, not just a boring lecture on the mechanics and how to write.
Thanks to this chapter, I now have new ideas on how I will teach my daughter to write English and Japanese in future.
Look forward to reading Thought and Language by Vygotsky at some future date - probably his most famous work which was originally put out by MIT Press - but this shorter work was more than enough for me to process for now.
If you are at all interested in how humans differ from other primates in terms of for example higher psychological processes (such as speech) or are interested in child psychology, just to name a few topics he tackles here, then this book is for you. His style of writing is quite academic and slightly highbrow and definitely singular (!) but not too hard to follow if you go through it slowly.
I feel I will get more and more out of this book with repeating readings. This year I plan to improve my previous study on motivation that I have been conducting on my university students and Vygotsky has given me some ideas on new approaches I might try. It is amazing to think that these ideas were around in the 20s and 30s but largely ignored in his own life time, especially outside of Russia.
Anyone interested in pedagogy should read some Vygotsky.
January 26, 2021
Un libro muy interesante si te apetece saber sobre modelos de aprendizaje .Es complicado de entender si no tienes nociones de neuropsicología o no has leído nada sobre esto. Aun así es un trabajo de investigación útil y nada pretencioso.
February 4, 2021
This book is a little hard to follow. In short, Vygotsky wrote a series of summaries based on his own research along with a limited level of engagement with other contemporary psychologists.
Short, dense, worth the read.
Short, dense, worth the read.
October 15, 2021
Important read -- he is writing in the early 1900s and so the language and organization of text is specific (and a translation from Russian) to that era -- he has some...ethnocentric tics - but overall it is a really helpful foundational text about sociocultural studies.
October 24, 2018
Lovely stuff
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