Extra information- VYGOTSKY'S THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

VYGOTSKY'S THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Russian psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, lived during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and the expression and application of his ideas were restricted. His work was suppressed and only became widely available in the last thirty years.

The first Western translations of his writings were published in the 1970's, and only since then have his theories become influential. His theories are now a powerful force in developmental psychology.

Vygotsky proposed that intellectual development can be understood only in terms of the historical and cultural contexts children experience, and development depends on the sign systems that individuals grow up with (e.g., the culture's language). Whereas Piaget stressed biology as the determiner in stages of development, Vygotsky proposed that cognitive development is an outgrowth of social development through interaction with others. Like Piaget, however, Vygotsky believed that the acquisition of these sign systems occurs in an invariant sequence of steps that is the same for all children.

The most important contribution of Vygotsky's theory is an emphasis on the sociocultural nature of learning. According to Piaget, development precedes learning. In other words, specific cognitive structures need to develop before learning can take place. According to Vygotsky, learning precedes development.

An essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the learner is interacting with people in his or her environment or in cooperation with peers. Once these processes are internalized, and the child can perform these processes without assistance, they become part of the child's developmental achievement.

Thus, learning is not development, but a necessary aspect of the process of development.
Vygotsky's theories have two major implications. One is the desirability of setting up cooperative learning arrangements among groups of students with differing levels of ability. Second, a Vygotskyan approach to instruction emphasized scaffolding, with students taking more and more responsibility for their own learning.