Vygotsky, Lev (1896–1934)

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896–1934) was born of middle-class parents in the Jewish enclave of Orsha, a town in western Russia near Minsk. From childhood, he excelled in multiple educational pursuits, earning a gold medal for the highest grades in all of his subjects, organizing his adolescent friends to debate such ideas as Hegel's philosophy of history, and completing studies at two Moscow universities in 1917. In 1924, a presentation on psychology at a national conference by Vygotsky, then a teacher in Gomel province, led to his appointment at the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology.

Vygotsky's goal was to formulate psychology as part of a unified social science. For him, this task required explaining the qualitative cognitive changes involved in the development of higher forms of thinking. His major writings include identification of the higher mental processes, the role of cultural symbols and subject-matter concepts in cognitive development, the relationship of thinking to speech, and the sequence of critical and stable periods in development. He also defined the role of culture in cognitive development as providing (a) the symbols (e.g., mathematical and verbal) that are used for thinking and (b) the culture's methods of reasoning.

Dissatisfaction with some perceived concepts of Piagetian theory led to a search for alternatives in the 1980s. Vygotsky, as portrayed in a small 1978 book, seemed to be the answer. This sketchy discussion absent Vygotsky's thinking popularized his name in the 1980s. English translations of most of Vygotsky's writings were not available until the late 1990s, however, and they present a different view of his work.

Vygotsky defined the higher mental processes, which are not fully developed until the end of adolescence, as self-organized attention, categorical perception, conceptual thinking (verbal and mathematical), and logical memory. For example, categorical perception is a synthesis of concrete images and word (concept) meanings, and logical memory is the recall of subject-matter concepts that directly reflect one's analysis and systematic organization of ideas.

These processes undergo four developmental stages, two of which are premastery stages. Stage [Page 928]three involves mastery of one's thinking through external symbols, such as identifying concrete examples of concepts. Stage four is completed when external symbols that facilitate thinking are transformed into new internal connections and ways of thinking. For example, in true conceptual thinking, the concept becomes an element in a network of concepts that are linked through a system of acts of thinking.

Each aspect of cognitive development appears first as a relation between two people (interpsycho-logical) and then within the child (intrapsychological). This general law of genetic development refers to interactions between the ideal form of behavior (the adult) and the present form (the child), beginning with the child learning speech. Then the child must imitate, invent, and practice the same forms of behavior that adults practiced with him or her. Also, the key collaborations in the classroom are the interactions between teacher and child because only these interactions advance cognitive development.

Vygotsky maintained that teachers should determine the child's higher mental processes as they are beginning to mature. The assessment consists of identifying the problems the child can solve in cooperation with either the teacher or a more advanced peer. This area of maturing intellectual processes is the zone of proximal development (zpd). In other words, the zpd refers to a diagnostic assessment of cognitive development by the teacher that allows instruction to address the emerging capabilities.

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