Vygotsky's Developmental Theory: An Introduction

Question 1

According to the theories of Vygotsky, what is necessary to evaluate classified behaviour?

Answer 1

The level of their independent performance and from seeing how they use help

Question 2

What are the four major ideas of Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development?

Answer 2

1) Children construct knowledge
2) Learning can lead to development
3) Development cannot be separated from its social context
4) Language plays a central role in mental development

Question 3

What are the key ideas for “children construct knowledge?”

Answer 3

• They do not passively reproduce what is presented to them
• Learning is much more than mirroring
• It always involves the learners creating their own representations of new information
• Knowledge is not so much constructed as co-constructed
• Learning always involves more than one human

Question 4

What did the block test that Vygotsky develop test for?

Answer 4

How children develop the ability to discover categories

Question 5

What is the opposing position to constructivism?

Answer 5

Behaviourism

Question 6

What do behaviourists believe?

Answer 6

That there is no structural distinction between learning and development

Question 7

What is not accounted for by the accumulation of facts or skills?

Answer 7

Qualitative changes in thought

Question 8

How did Vygotsky differ from Piaget in believing that learning can lead to development?

Answer 8

Vygotsky envisioned a more complex relationship between development and learning than either the young Piaget or the elderly Pavlov had conceived

Question 9

What belief were Vygotsky and Piaget in agreement with?

Answer 9

That there were maturational prerequisites for certain learning

Question 10

What did Vygotsky argue in opposition to Piaget’s early writing?

Answer 10

Learning impacts development

Question 11

What did Vygotsky give great value to?

Answer 11

Assisting children to use strategies to further their intellecular capacities

Question 12

What is assisted performance?

Answer 12

The higher level, which the child is currently capable of attaining only with help

Question 13

What is the zone of proximal development?

Answer 13

The area between the level of independent performance and the level of assisted performance
- Not all the assistance used by the child needs to be intentionally provided by an adult

Question 14

What social interactions did Vygotsky believe contributed to performing at a higher level?

Answer 14

Interaction with peers as equals, with imaginary partners, or with children at other developmental levels

Question 15

Why is the zone of development not static?

Answer 15

It shifts as a child progressively attains the higher level
- With each shift, the child is capable of learning more complex concepts and skills (obviously there are concepts and skills beyond a child’s current zone of proximal development)

Question 16

What are the important implications for early childhood education with regard to the zone of proximal development?

Answer 16

Directions - What you want to do
1) Causes educators to rethink how we intervene
2) How we assess children
3) Causes us to rethink what is developmentally appropriate

Question 17

What is a developmentally appropriate practice defined by?

Answer 17

The child’s repertoire of fully developed skills and concepts

Question 18

What is the most effective teaching aimed at? How should it be provided by teachers?

Answer 18

The higher level of the child’s zone of proximal development, not at the lower
- Provide activities that are just beyond what a child can do on their own, but within what she can do with assistance

Question 19

Intervening more actively with the learning of children does what?

Answer 19

Gives children better tools with which to express themselves - doesn’t seem to block creativity

Question 20

What is the most pervasive Vygotsky tenet?

Answer 20

That development cannot be separated from its social context

Question 21

What does the social context influence?

Answer 21

• More than just attitudes and beliefs
• Has profound influence on how we think as well as what we think

Question 22

Why is Western logic not universal?

Answer 22

Other cultures have ways of classifying and describing experiences that differ from ours, but that are appropriate to their environments

Question 23

What two levels of mental functioning did Vygotsky believe there to be?

Answer 23

Lower and higher mental functions which consist of abilities like reactive attention, reacting to a loud noise or bright coloured objects

Question 24

What kinds of functions are associative memory and sensory-motor thought?

Answer 24

Innate

Question 25

Describe higher mental processes.

Answer 25

• Unique to humans
• Passed down through generations by teaching and learning
• Form varies from culture to culture
• Through the passing of cultural tools, such functions as focused attention, the ability to concentrate in spite of distractions, deliberate memory, the ability to remember on purpose

Question 26

According to Vygotsky, what is the whole history of human culture based on?

Answer 26

The development of mental tools, primitive external ones to complex ones

Question 27

Why does language play a central role in mental development?

Answer 27

• Language is both the transmitter of these cultural tools and the most important to them
• Language is a mechanism for thinking, the most important mental tool

Question 28

What is information?

Answer 28

The means by which information is passed from one generation to another

Question 29

What does learning always involve?

Answer 29

External experience being transformed into internal processes through the mediation of language

Question 30

What was the aim of Vygotsky’s educational practices?

Answer 30

• To develop an independent, self-regulating individual who could work with others to use the lessons of the past to push the envelope to the present
• Expand the ways teachers can guide and influence a child’s active learning

Question 31

What can Vygotsky’s analysis of learning enable?

Answer 31

Children to master their own behaviour, and to foster what Vygotsky called “rousing minds to life”