Lev S. Vygotsky's Cultural/Cognitive Theory

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Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) attended Moscow University and graduated with a degree in Law. While in school he also studied various subjects such as philosophy, psychology, literature and art (Galant, n.d.). He began his psychology career as a teacher where he founded a psychology lab in 1917. Mr. Vygotsky wrote six books including The Psychology of Art, Pedagogical Psychology, and Thought and Language. Most of his writings were published after his death at the young age of 37 from tuberculosis. His main work, Thought and Language, was translated to English in 1962 and began to have a major impact on psychological research and other fields including education (Eddy, 2010). According to Vygotsky “the one’s development is a result of his own …show more content…
Every step in a child’s cultural development is shown both in the social level between the people and in the individual level inside the child (Recker, 1999). The sociocultural development is responsible for the development of knowledge to adapt to their environment no matter what their culture is. Cultures vary in the type of settings that are available for a child’s development. For instance, what we are taught at school in the U.S., may not be relevant to someone who lives in a country where it is not necessary for them to learn the structures of a sentence, but it is critical for them to learn how to farm to produce food (Cognitive development, n.d.). Social interaction with others plays a large part in development and social learning and what the child actually thinks and what they think about (McLeod, 2014). He believes that children are naturally curious about their environment and want to learn, and early learning begins with play (McLeod, 2014). Children retain and organize the information learned to be able to use the information to perform the task while learning. The more that the lesson is performed, the more …show more content…
The three parts of the zone of proximal development is: 1) the point in a person’s ability where they can do the task without assistance, 2) the person cannot accomplish a task without assistance or 3) if they can do it on their own (Cognitive Development, n.d.). The teacher will adjust the amount of support and the type of support that is needed for the child’s abilities, and withdraw support as needed when the student has become more skilled (Cognitive Development, n.d.). The zone is actually determined by the independent problem solving skills and the level of problem solving with the help of guidance and encouragement (Cherry, n.d.). He believed that the learning had to be appropriate for the child’s learning and skill level for them to be able to comprehend the lesson. If the lesson is too complicated, and not within their zone of proximal development, then it will not be learned until the child attains the skills in the lessons leading up to the task to be able to understand it. Vygotsky called this a shift in the zone for proximal development for the child (Eddy, 2010). Studies have shown that a student that has first been taught how to perform certain skills by a mother or someone with more knowledge has had a better success rate that someone who was left to figure out the problem alone (McLeod, 2014). Children watch and want to imitate the actions of their

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