Social Development Theory, Lev Vygotsky 1896-1934

Social Development Theory or Social Constructivism was developed by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who lived during the Russian Revolution. Although he shared many of Piaget's ideas about how children learn, he believed that the social context of learning was paramount. Vygotsky died in 1934 at the age of 38, but English translations of his papers were not available until after 1960.

Vygotsky thought culture and social context were critical for cognitive development.
His zone of proximal development (ZPD) places thinking and problem solving in three different categories, some of which the child can perform independently, others need help, and some cannot be performed, even with help. The skills that the child can perform with help from others such as teachers, parents, peers, are in the ZPD, and working in the ZPD the child will develop skills of independent practice. Vygotsky asserts that

" What the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow." (Vygotsky, 1987)

Vygotsky proposed a complex relationship between thought and language. He differentiates between internal speech (thought, words are symbols for objects) and external speech (oral speech, dialogue, words are properties of objects). Before age 2, these are independent processes, but after age two, they are connected and interdependent.His comment:

'both [speech and thinking] at one and the same time; it is a unit of verbal thinking' (1987, p.47)

Mind is Distributed
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/virtual/colevyg.htm

It is interesting to note that Vygotsky's argument on these issues bears a striking similarity to the recent movement in cognitive science associated with the notion of distributed cognition and situated learning (Bechtel, 1993; Clark, in press; Cole & Engestrom, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; et passim). Central to this line of thought is the effort to create an external symbol system approach that 'moves formal symbols ... out of the head and locate them in the environment of the system'. Clark (in press) has argued for a position which recognizes the need to give 'more attention, and credit, to the many ways in which networks can learn to exploit external environmental structures so as to simplify and transform the nature of internal processing' (p.16). Related arguments have been put forth by Rumelhart, Smolensky, and Hinton (1986); Clark (1989); Dennett (1991) and Hutchins (1995). In short, Vygotsky's position on the centrality of artifacts, including external artifacts, in human mental processes is one that has great resonance in contemporary cognitive science as well as the human sciences more broadly.

Culture is seen by Vygotsky to be connected to the cognitive processes. The idea that our environments are flush with prior generation achievements and the artifacts of those achievements go back to Hegel and Marx (1845/1947) and is found in the writings of diverse nationalities of psychologists (Dewey, 1938; Durkheim, 1912; Leontiev, 1932; Luria, 1928; Stern, 1916/1990); Vygotsky, 1929). John Dewey wrote that:

... we live from birth to death in a world of persons and things which is in large measure what it is because of what has been done and transmitted from previous human activities. When this fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something which goes on exclusively inside an individual's body and mind. It ought not to be necessary to say that experience does not occur in a vacuum. There are sources outside an individual which give rise to experience (Dewey, 1938/1963, p. 39).

Artifacts shape and transform mental functioning in Vygotsky's view:

The inclusion of a tool in the process of behavior (a) introduces several new functions connected with the use of the given tool and with its control; (b) abolishes and makes unnecessary several natural processes, whose work is accomplished by the tool; and alters the course and individual features (the intensity, duration, sequence, etc.) of all the mental processes that enter into the composition of the instrumental act, replacing some functions with others (i.e., it re-creates and reorganizes the whole structure of behavior just as a technical tool re-creates the whole structure of labor operations) (1981, pp.139-140).

Bibliography
Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. New York: Macmillan.
Durkheim, E. (1912/1947) The elementary forms of religious experience. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Luria, A.R. (1928) The problem of the cultural development of the child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35, 493-506.
Leont'ev, A.N. (1932) Studies on the cultural development of the child. Journal of genetic psychology, 40, 52-83.
Minick, N. (1987) Introduction to L.S. Vygotsky, 1987.
Marx, K. (1845/1967) Theses on Feurbach. In L.D. Easton and K.H. Guddat (Eds.), Writings of the young Marx on philosophy and society. Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Anchor Books.
Stern, E. (1916/1990) Problems of cultural psychology. Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 12(1), 12-24.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1929) The problem of the cultural development of the child, II. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 36, 414-434. Vygotsky, L.S. (1981) The instrumental method in psychology. In J.V. Wertsch, (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 134-143.
Lev Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1934)
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Social Constructivist Theories, http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~ichen/ebook/et-it/social.htm
Vygotsky, L.S. (1987) The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky: Vol.1, Problems of general psychology. Including the volume Thinking and speech. New York: Plenum. (N. Minick, Trans.)