The Winding Path

This perspective will look at the many social influences on development, but unlike the social-emotional perspective it will also look at broader, cultural and global social influences.

Lev Vygotsky

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed that cognitive development depends largely on social factors, and it is partly this understanding which makes his work very important to the study of psychology, along with his ideas of how language and speech developed, and how they and social factors influence learning.

One core concept proposed in his theories is the zone of proximal development. This defines an conceptual space which other people provide within which children can develop. This space is larger than the space in which children are able to develop on their own. In other words a child can learn more if someone helps them. How much they might learn is defined by the zone of proximal development. It varies from child to child, and from helper to helper.

Wood, Bruner and Ross extended the concept of the zone of proximal development into the concept of scaffolding, which refers to the context, created by a tutor (who could be anyone assisting in the learning process), within which a child learns.

Scaffolding has five main components:

1. Recruitment: The tutor makes sure child is interested.
2. Simplification: The tutor makes task easier for the child by limiting options.
3. Direction: The tutor keeps the child on task and encouraged to persist.
4. Marking: The tutor points out critical features which the child should pay attention to.
5. Demonstration: The tutor shows the child how to complete the task so that the child can copy (or improve).

Vygotsky also argued that cognitive development depended a lot on the development and use of language. He said that children formed an understanding of concepts (such as how certain symbols related to certain properties of blocks of different shapes) in four stages which matched four stages of the development of language.

1. Vague syncretic stage
   Children show little understanding of concepts. Speech is pre-intellectual and thought is pre-verbal. Blocks are for chewing on or throwing, and the only utterances are cute burbling or the all too frequent crying demand for food/nappy change/attention.
2. Complex stage
   Strategies are used to try to understand concepts but they’re not successful. Language and thought start to develop but have little impact on one another. Blocks are placed together but the pattern makes no sense. And then they’re chewed on or thrown around the room, all while happily babbling away, making as much sense as the blocks.
3. Potential concept stage
   Systematic strategies are used to understand concepts but they focus on only one feature at a time. Children say the same things as others while talking to themselves (i.e., repeating instructions) in order to help them solve problems. Blocks of the same shape are grouped together, but colours are different. The child gives a running commentary of what they’re doing and why.
4. Mature concept stage
   Successful formation of concepts. Self-directed speech becomes internalised. All the blocks of the same size, shape and colour are grouped together. And none are thrown around the room. And Timmy looks very pleased with himself.

Stages three and four show the two very different functions Vygotsky said language performs. First in stage three as communication and regulation, then in stage three and four in aid of thought and self-regulation. This also points out an important aspect of cognitive development and language, which is the process by which different views of two people can be shared and altered so that they become more similar. This aspect is central to the previously mentioned concept of the zone of proximal development.

The influence of other people on a child’s development can highlight the importance of cultural influences. For example, in the book Children’s development within social context Shari Ellis and Mary Gauvian presented a study of Navaho and Euro-American children who were helped in a task by slightly older children. They showed that the Navaho children made less mistakes, possibly because the Euro-American helpers gave many more verbal instructions and were generally less patient than the Navaho helpers.

Another example of cultural influence can be seen in the study performed by Zhe Chen, Lei Mo and Ryan Honomichl in which Chinese and American students were presented with problems similar to tales which are common in their respective cultures, as well as problems neutral to both cultures. Both sets of students answered the neutral problems similarly, with some problems being solved by up to around 50% of students. However the Chinese students far outperformed the American students when it came to the problem based on the tale with Chinese cultural relevance, and the opposite occurred with the problem based on the tale with American cultural relevance.

For a comprehensive look at Vygotsky and his works, check out either of these sites:

• Lev Vygotsky Archive
• The Mozart of Psychology

Urie Bronfenbrenner took Vygotsky’s theories further in his Ecological Systems Theory, which identified the numerous social and cultural influences over development:

• Microsystem:
  Family, friends, school, local community.
• Mesosystem:
  Social institutions and connections between microsystems.
• Exosystem:
  External environments with only indirect influence such as a friend’s sports team.
• Macrosystem:
  Global cultural influences, political culture, subcultures.
• Chronosystem:
  Large-scale, long-term changes in external systems.

Bronfenbrenner’s theory highlighted the importance of context when trying to understand development. The other theories of development which I mentioned in previous posts mainly concerned the first two systems, though Vygotsky also implicated the next two, at least more so than the others, except for Erikson who also implicated the chronosystem in his life-encompassing theory.

Have a look at these two pdfs for an overview of Bronfenbrenner’s theory.

• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model of Child Development

Summary

So there we have five briefly described perspectives on human development, particularly the psychological aspects. You may have noticed that there is a lot of overlap between some of the perspectives, for example all theories presented have a biological components, naturally, and all have a social component, even if it’s only the relationship between you and your immediate family.

Nonetheless each perspective gives us some insight in different areas of our development. The psychosocial perspective shows us the importance of the unconscious parts of our mind, including our basic drives and instincts. The biological perspective shows that our genes have a strong influence, but out lives are not written in stone at our birth; the environment shapes us also. The social-emotional perspective highlights how our innate and learned emotional states combine with interaction with other people to guide our development. The cognitive perspective focuses on how our intellectual processes develop. And finally the social-cultural perspective grants us a bird’s eye view, showing how the whole world can influence us in a variety of ways.

That’s all for the series now. I hope you’ve learnt something along the way.

Related entries:

• Introduction to Human Development
• Introduction to Human Development: Psychoanalytic/Psychosocial Perspective
• Introduction to Human Development: Biological Perspective
• Introduction to Human Development: Social-Emotional Perspective - Part 1
• Introduction to Human Development: Social-Emotional Perspective - Part 2
• Introduction to Human Development: Cognitive Perspective

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.