Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development Alex Kozulin, Feuerstein Institute, Jerusalem, Israel Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development is recognized as one of the most innovative psychological theories of the twentieth century. The theory is based on the assumption that culture plays a major role in cognitive development. Each period in child development is associated with a leading activity dominant in a given period. A considerable emphasis is placed on emergent cognitive functions conceptualized through the notion of the zone of proximal development. Instruction and learning are perceived as leading child’s cognitive development rather than following it.

History

Sociocultural Orientation

With wisdom of hindsight, Vygotsky’s theory (VT) of cognitive development should be recognized as one of the most innovative psychological and learning theories of the twentieth century. Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) lived a short but intellectually very intensive life in a period of war, revolution, and social upheaval in Russia. His early interests were in the field of art and literature, and he earned a PhD for his theoretical work on the psychology of art. This interest in art and humanities rather than sciences may explain Vygotsky’s conceptualization of psychology as a cultural, rather than natural science. He was able to devote only 10 years (1924–34) to systematic research leading to his theory of cognitive development. Two years after his death of tuberculosis, VT together with other works in the field of applied child psychology (called ‘pedology’ at that time) became blacklisted by the Soviet government (Kozulin, 1990; Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991). Only in the late 1950s was the ban lifted and Vygotsky’s papers reprinted in Russia. Though some articles by Vygotsky and his colleagues, Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev, were published in English in the 1930s, it appears that VT made practically no impact on theories of cognitive development popular in the West at that time. The first book-length publication of Vygotsky’s work in English came out in 1962 as an abridged version of Thought and Language (later expanded, see Vygotsky, 1934/ 2012). It was followed by several other translations, culminating in the six-volume set of Vygotsky’s Collected Works (1987–98). Instead of fading VT became more and more popular with the passage of time. One possible reason is that this growing popularity is associated with the fact that VT provides some tentative answers to the questions that Western psychology and education started asking only recently. At the same time, the development and popularization of VT was seriously complicated by the early demise of its author. We will never know what Vygotsky would have said about translations, interpretations, and further developments of his theory; the author’s voice is very much missing in the dialogue on VT. In what follows, five major aspects of VT will be reviewed together with their educational applications: the sociocultural orientation of VT, the concept of mediation, periods of child development, the relationships between language and thought, and the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

The distinctive feature of VT is its emphasis on culture as the most important factor of cognitive development. Though Vygotsky readily admitted that some basic cognitive processes can be shared by humans and higher animals, he explicitly and deliberately focused his own theory on those cognitive processes that are uniquely human. He called them ‘higher mental processes’ and associated their development with the involvement of cultural tools in the shaping of human cognition. Culture in VT is not an external envelope or ethnographically specific appearance of human behavior and thinking; culture according to VT is the force that shapes all higher mental processes, such as perception, attention, memory, and problem solving. In the absence of more appropriate terms, we still use the same verbal labels for both basic cognitive processes and culturally shaped higher mental processes though these two groups of processes are very different in their origin, development, and capacity. Taken as a whole, the VT posed three major objectives for a study of human psychology: reconstruction of the transition from an animal to a human way of thinking and behaving; investigation of the historical change occurring in human mental functions as a result of the introduction of new cultural tools and sociocultural activities; and investigation of the developmental construction of children’s and adults’ psychological functions in a given society (Vygotsky and Luria, 1930/1993). Regarding the first objective, Vygotsky relied mainly on the comparison of human behavior and the behavior of apes as reported by other researchers, such as Wolfgang Kohler (see Vygotsky, 1934/2012: pp. 73–85). Vygotsky suggested that nonhuman primates have both some intellectual problemsolving skills and communicative abilities, but that in the apes these two domains remain dissociated. Communicative abilities do not impact on problem solving, while problem solving does not shape interpersonal interaction. In a human child, intensive interaction between these two domains takes place during the second year of life. As a result, speech becomes intellectual, while problem solving acquires the quality of verbal intelligence. Thus, the transition from animal to human cognition was envisaged by Vygotsky as a change in the interaction between different cognitive functions. Vygotsky and his colleagues, however, had no opportunity to investigate this hypothesis in

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actual studies with nonhuman primates. The development of Vygotsky’s line of reasoning can, however, be identified in the work of Tomasello (1999) and his colleagues. First Tomasello (1999: p. 48) reasserts the main thesis of VT regarding the cultural origin of human higher metal processes: “Following Vygotsky and many other cultural psychologists, I contend that many of the most interesting and important human cognitive achievements, such as language and mathematics, require historical time and process for their realization – even if most cognitive scientists largely ignore these historical processes.” He then proceeds to show that in a number of cognitive tasks such as spatial memory, rotation of objects, and estimation of quantities, chimpanzees demonstrate performance comparable to and sometimes exceeding that of twoand-a-half year old children. At the same time children have an obvious advantage in the tasks related to gestural communication, observational learning, and understanding of intentions. Tomasello (1999: p. 213) concludes his analysis by stating that: “Language does not create new cognitive processes out of nothing, of course, but when children interact with other persons intersubjectively and adopt their communicative conventions, this social process creates a new form of cognitive representation – one that has no counterpart in other animal species.” Vygotsky should also be credited with posing an intriguing question regarding possible historical changes in human cognition. Are cognitive functions of people in antiquity, Middle Ages, and the eighteenth century the same as those of people in the twenty-first century? Do the historical changes in cultural tools impact on our cognition? In the absence of a ‘time machine,’ Vygotsky and Luria decided to rely on a ‘quasihistorical’ study of cognition in a traditional society that undergoes rapid sociocultural change. Vygotsky and Luria thought that they had found such a historical ‘experiment’ in the Soviet Central Asia of the early 1930s. The unique sociocultural situation of this region in the late 1920s and early 1930s was determined by a very rapid invasion of Soviet power into an otherwise traditional and mostly nonliterate agricultural society. As a result, people belonging to the same economic and sociocultural group, often even to the same extended family, found themselves under very different sociocultural circumstances. Some of them, especially those in the remote villages, retained all aspects of a traditional nonliterate culture and way of life. Others became involved in new agricultural or industrial enterprises, exposed to the new technology and means of communication, but still without access to systematic formal education. Some of the local people, however, already attended adult literacy courses and even teachers’ colleges. The main conclusions reached by Vygotsky and Luria on the basis of this study were that informants who retain a traditional nonliterate culture and way of life tend to solve problems by using functional reasoning reflecting their everyday life practical experience and reject the possibility of looking at classification, generalization, or drawing conclusions from another; for example, more abstractive point of view. Exposure to modern technology and involvement in jobs based on division of labor tend to increase the subjects’ readiness to solve problems both in functional and in verbal–logical ways. It was observed, however, that informants who did not experience

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formal education rather easily reverted to purely functional reasoning. At the same time, informants who received some form of formal education demonstrated a clear preference for the verbal-logical form of problem solving. Though the goal of Vygotsky and Luria was to investigate the ‘historical’ change in human cognition, their Central Asia research is usually interpreted as one of the first cross-cultural studies of cognitive processes. With the wisdom of hindsight, one can distinguish a number of questions that remained unanswered in this initial research. Vygotsky and Luria seem to have grouped together different sociocultural factors such as the acquisition of literacy, formal classroom learning, exposure to modern technology, and participation in labor activities based on the formal division of labor. Each of these factors seems, however, to have a different impact on the construction of cognitive functions and should be investigated separately. The Central Asia study later inspired the Scribner and Cole (1981) research in Western Africa that demonstrated that literacy and schooling may have a differential cognitive impact. By conducting their research in an African society where literacy in three different languages was associated with different acquisition and application contexts (school, home, and religious institution), Scribner and Cole showed that literacy does not have an overall impact on problem solving but affects specific cognitive functions corresponding to each one of the contexts. Formal education on the other hand has an impact on problem solving in the tasks that resemble those used in school. The emergence of cognitive functions was thus linked to more specific sociocultural contexts and activities. More recent studies conducted in Central American Mayan villages were able to identify the transition from subsistence and agriculture to wage economy and commerce as the main factor leading children from more concrete to more abstractive cognitive representations. At the same time, in more complex tasks that required selecting a strategy for continuation of the model pattern, schooling proved to have the strongest relationship with the choice of a more abstractive and less imitative strategy, with the involvement in the ‘new’ economy coming second.

Mediation: Physical, Symbolic, and Human One of the main concepts of VT is that of mediation. Vygotsky and Luria (1930/1993) distinguished three main classes of mediators relevant for the development of cognitive functions: physical tools, symbolic tools, and human mediation. Physical tools (hammer, plow, bulldozer) aim at creating a change in the environment, and, in this sense, they ‘address’ external natural objects. Each physical tool, however, has a ‘handle’ corresponding to the physical and mental requirements of a person who operates this tool. Vygotsky hypothesized that the change in physical tools may have a reciprocal effect on the human mental functions required for ‘handling’ new tools. For a long time, this aspect of VT reasoning received relatively little attention; it is only recently that it has started being investigated in the context of ergonomics and the psychology of human–machine interactions.

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The main emphasis of VT is on symbolic tools and their internalization in the form of inner psychological tools. Through acquisition and internalization of symbolic tools, human beings start regulating and shaping their own cognitive and behavioral processes. Child development, according to VT, can be interpreted as the gradual acquisition by the child of increasingly more sophisticated symbolic tools, such as oral speech, reading and writing systems, mathematical symbols, graphic organizers, and pictorial representations. These tools then become internalized and shape the child’s cognitive processes. Each culture or subculture has its own system of symbolic artifacts. If a specific tool, for example technical drawing, is unavailable in a given cultural community its members will solve the same problem in an alternative way and their cognitive function of representation will be shaped by these alternative methods rather than psychological tools associated with internalized technical drawing. The availability of a certain symbolic artifact in a given culture, however, does not guarantee its appropriation as a cognitive tool. For example, many graphic-symbolic organizers such as tables, graphs, and charts are perceived by students as external artifacts and are never transformed into their inner psychological tools. The concept of psychological tools helps to elucidate the distinction made in VT between basic and higher mental processes. For example, the task of recalling the positions of objects on a given surface can be achieved via a basic process of direct memorization and retrieval. However, if objects are placed on a grid-like surface, one can use a culturally developed function of ‘mapping’ the position of an object with the help of the rows and columns of the grid. Moreover, even when the surface does not have the features of the grid, a person can imagine and project such an imaginary grid on the surface to facilitate the memorization and recall task. While direct memorization relies on a basic cognitive process, the use of an actual or imaginary grid turns the process of memorization into a higher mental activity mediated by a psychological tool. Educational programs based on VT consider acquisition and internalization of a broad range of symbolic tools as an important objective of school education. Moreover, many cognitive education and thinking skills programs developed without the direct influence of VT aim specifically at enriching the range of psychological tools available to children (Kozulin, 1998, Chapter 4). Regarding human mediation, Vygotsky mentioned two aspects. On the one hand he suggested that every higher mental function in the child’s development first appears in the interaction between people (interpsychologically), and then, when internalized, it appears as an inner mental function (intrapsychologically). As an illustration, Vygotsky cited the phenomenon originally described by J.M. Baldwin and then by J. Piaget, namely that a child’s cognitive ability to consider different points of view originated in actual arguments between children. The other aspect of human mediation mentioned by Vygotsky is the role of parents and other mentors as mediators of meaning to the children. He illustrated this by describing the evolution of the child’s indicatory gesture. Such a gesture, according to Vygotsky, first appears as an attempt of the child to actually grasp some remote object. Adults who witness the child’s attempt interpret it as a gesture and help the child to get the object. They thus provide a new meaning to the child’s

grasping movement. The child then ‘accepts’ this interpretation, and starts addressing his/her gesture to an adult rather than a desired object. Later on children transform this gesture into a verbal request and then internalize it in a form of command to themselves. The role of parents and other mentors as mediators was further elaborated by R. Feuerstein (see Kozulin, 1998, Chapter 3). Feuerstein identified specific parameters that turn the situation of interaction between an adult and a child into a situation of mediated learning. By using these parameters, Feuerstein was able to identify the lack of proper mediation during childhood as a source of learning and cognitive problems later in the child’s life. The consequences of the lack of human mediation, however, are not irreversible. In a number of case studies, Feuerstein and his colleagues demonstrated how intensive human mediation in late childhood and adolescence may compensate for its lack in earlier childhood.

Periods of Child Development Vygotsky and his followers in Russia, particularly Daniel Elkonin, created an original model of the periods of child development built around the concept of so-called leading activity (Karpov, 2005). This model assumes that though children are involved in different types of activities, in each period there is one activity that plays the leading role and is crucial for propelling the child’s cognitive and emotional development. The above model is explicitly culture-specific and describes periods of child development in a modern industrial society that has a formal educational system. Leading activities and developmental periods in nonliterate and nonindustrial societies and communities could be different. The periods of child development alternate between those where leading activity has an emotional-interpersonal focus and the periods with cognitive focus. It is important to remember that these are developmental, rather than age periods: some children may stay longer in some of the periods or make a quicker transition to the next period depending on their social situation of development. Thus the ages provided in Figure 1 are approximate and should not be considered as reflecting normative data.

Age (years)

Emotional-interpersonal focus Emotional interaction with caregivers

0–1

Object-centered joint activity

2–3 Sociodramatic play

3–6

Formal learning

6–12 12–18

Interaction with peers Vocational activity

18+

Figure 1

Cognitive focus

Periods of child development.

Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Within each one of the periods, the development of the child’s cognitive and interpersonal skills leads to the formation of a new motive that corresponds to the new leading activity in the next developmental period. Thus, for example, the emotional component is central during the earliest period in child development, while the manipulation with objects (toys) plays a subdominant role. Gradually, however, the objectcentered joint activity with adults becomes a new motive of the child and at a certain moment assumes the role of the leading activity with emotional contact becoming subdominant. In a similar way, the leading activity of object-centered play gradually prepares the child for the transition to sociodramatic play: If in the first of these two periods manipulation with a toy car is focal, in the second period the imaginary role of a driver becomes the main interest of the child. Relative to other developmental periods, the period of sociodramatic play and the period of formal learning activity received the major attention in the VT (Karpov, 2005). There are some practical reasons for this emphasis because the period of sociodramatic play is associated with children’s school readiness, while the period of formal learning is associated with education in primary schools. In the VT, school readiness is associated with the following abilities developed via sociodramatic play: the ability to flexibly switch roles, enhanced self-regulation, and the development of symbolic thought. To be ready for formal learning in school the child should be able to assume a new role of a student which is different from those of son, daughter, sibling, or playmate. Play according to specific rules enhances selfregulation, while imaginative play strengthens hypothetical reasoning. In what concerns the period of formal learning, the main contribution of VT is in distinguishing between generic learning activity that may appear as an element of play, practical activity, interpersonal interaction, and so on, and a specially designed activity of formal learning that aims at turning a child into a self-regulated learner. The true target of this leading activity is the child himself/herself, who through acquisition of reflective and metacognitive skills becomes an agent of his/her own learning. To be an agent of one’s own learning does not mean, however, to learn independently; one of the main goals of primary education according to VT is to teach children how to distinguish between those elements that they can learn themselves and those aspects that require the assistance of teachers and other mentors. In other words, primary school students should be able to distinguish between what they ‘know and can do themselves’ and what they ‘can do only with the help of others.’ An elaborate request for assistance is one of the main subjects of this educational approach that will be discussed in greater detail in the last section.

Language and Thought Among the contributions made by VT to the study of language and thought probably the most important is the broadening of the scope of what is called ‘child language.’ When Vygotsky and Piaget started their theoretical dialogue child language was considered almost exclusively in its communicative aspect while a child’s verbal reasoning was perceived as an ‘incomplete’ adult thought (see Vygotsky, 1934/2012). VT radically

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broadened this field by focusing on such phenomena as private speech, silent inner speech, and a child’s written language (Wertsch, 1985). An important role here is played by a study of child speech that apparently is not directed at any listener, and which Piaget called ‘egocentric.’ Piaget considered such a speech to be a by-product of a child’s immature egocentric thought. The destiny of the ‘egocentric’ speech in his opinion was to be replaced by ‘socialized’ speech attuned to the expectations of the listener. Vygotsky, however, interpreted such private speech as an important developmental tool leading a child toward self-regulation and voiceless verbal thinking. More recent studies have proved that private speech has many varieties and functions (Winsler et al., 2009). For example, many children at the age of one to three systematically engage in the so-called crib speech. Crib speech takes place at bedtime when toddlers are left in their own room and parents are either not present or at least are not visible to a child. Crib speech includes retelling significant episodes of the child’s experience, questions and answers, word play, and ‘experimentation’ with different language forms. So instead of being a by-product of the child’s immaturity, crib speech proved to be an important mechanism for the consolidation of the child’s experience, language practice, and acquisition of such social communication forms as dialogue. Crib speech is often much richer than the daytime communicative speech of the same child, and as such provides a glimpse into the child’s future development. Probably the most prominent and well-researched function of private speech is its support of the child’s self-regulation and problem solving (Winsler et al., 2009). It has been established that the amount of private speech in 5–7-year-old children is dependent on the subjective difficulty of the task. When the task is too easy or too difficult for a child, the amount of private speech is low. However, when the task is within the child’s ZPD the amount of private speech is high. Moreover, the presence of task-relevant private speech is indicative of the child’s performance not only with the present but also with future tasks. First graders who made self-guiding task-relevant comments did better at math in the second grade. While private speech is important for problem solving, one expects it to be eventually internalized; i.e., become completely silent inner speech. Children who progressed more rapidly from private to inner speech also showed better sustained attention and were less distractible. Contrarily, children who have learning problems often display private speech that is not task-related (chanting, repetitions, nonguiding comments) for a longer developmental period than children without learning problems. What started as Vygotsky’s response to Piaget’s notion of ‘egocentric’ speech has now developed into a broad area of studies on the relationship between different forms of verbalization and the cognitive processes involved in executive functions, selfregulation, and problem solving. Another important area of research triggered by Vygotsky’s critical analysis of Piaget was the distinction between everyday and academic concepts. Vygotsky (1934/2012) suggested that there is a significant difference, even conflict between spontaneous concepts that children acquire through their everyday life experience (e.g., ‘ The sun rises in the morning’) and the corresponding academic concepts essential for

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scientific and technological reasoning (‘ What appears as a sunrise is the result of the rotation of the Earth around its axis’). What is acceptable for everyday functioning cannot serve as a basis for rigorous academic reasoning. Vygotsky and his followers alerted educators to the fact that children do not come to the classroom as a tabula rasa but bring with them their preexistent everyday concepts. These concepts in themselves, however, do not lead to proper scientific reasoning. Moreover, they are the basis of many of the students’ ‘misconceptions’ that greatly complicate math and science instruction. The acquisition of academic concepts would not happen without deliberate instructional activity. Such activity should be carried out in a ‘dialogue’ between the teacher’s systemically organized academic concepts and the students’ experientially rich but often scientifically invalid spontaneous concepts.

ZPD and Dynamic Assessment There is little doubt that ZPD became the most popular of Vygotsky’s concepts, often to such an extent that in the public mind the entire VT just becomes the theory of ZPD. Quite often, however, the popularity of ZPD fails to be accompanied by a sufficiently deep understanding of this notion. One of the difficulties in ‘decoding’ the notion of ZPD and its relationship to such practical application as dynamic assessment stems from the fact that Vygotsky and his followers in Russia refer to ZPD in three different contexts – developmental, educational, and directly related to assessment. In the developmental context, ZPD appears as a principle that helps to explain the dynamics of child development. Vygotsky (1935/2011) argued that typical psychological study focuses only on those psychological functions that have already fully matured and as such are displayed by children in their independent activity. What is needed is the method of evaluation of those emergent psychological functions that are still ‘invisible’ because children cannot yet demonstrate them without assistance. VT stipulates that in joint activity with adults these functions, however, become ‘visible’ and can thus be studied. The notion of ZPD allows one to see not only the developmental ‘present’ but also the future of the child. In the educational context, ZPD helps to explain the relationships between education and child development. Educational process according to VT should include the development of children’s cognitive functions as one of its main objectives. Contrary to a popular view that instruction should be based on already fully formed cognitive functions, VT claimed that it should target those emergent functions that can be shaped by education. In this way, students will not only acquire information and specific skills but also form higher mental functions (Kozulin et al., 2003). In relation to assessment, ZPD was operationalized as a difference between the independent performance of students and their performance under conditions of joint activity with their mentors. In this context ZPD emerges as a precursor of what today is called dynamic assessment (Haywood and Lidz, 2007). Vygotsky (1935/2011) suggested a range of means for turning the assessment process from strictly independent into assisted: presenting a complete problem-solving model,

asking leading questions, starting solutions, and then asking the child to continue. What Vygotsky did not provide was a specific step-by-step manual for conducting ZPD assessment. So his contribution in this field remained paradigmatic rather than methodological. There is still no consensus regarding practical applications of the notion of ZPD. Some authors emphasize the developmental aspect and insist on applying the concept of ZPD only to the qualitative cognitive changes that occur in the transition from one developmental period to the next one. Other authors focus on the assessment context and argue that ZPD is useful for explaining quantitative difference between children’s cognitive performance and their learning potential or the degree of their cognitive modifiability (Kozulin et al., 2003). Taking into account the current popularization of the notion of ZPD it seems important to delineate the theoretical boundaries of this concept. Not every situation that involves a mentor, a child, and a task is related to ZPD, but only those situations that reveal or promote the development of children’s psychological functions. A mere transmission of content knowledge or specific skills has nothing to do with ZPD. It would be counterproductive to apply the notion of ZPD to a situation of a teacher simply helping students with specific math or reading problem without setting any cognitivedevelopmental goals for this activity. The relationship between the notion of ZPD and the current practice of dynamic assessment is far from unequivocal. Not all dynamic assessment approaches are based on ZPD, and on the other hand, ZPD is not just a theory of assessment. Today various dynamic assessment tests offer a range of possible evaluation formats from intensive one-on-one learning sessions in which the mentor flexibly reacts to the student’s performance to learning sequences that are tightly scripted – standardized cues or prompts appear in response to specific answers of the student (Haywood and Lidz, 2007). There is also a variety of tasks used in dynamic assessment; some of them resemble the tasks of standard intelligence tests such as matrices, number series, and analogies, while others use curricular language and math problems. What unites all these approaches and what brings them close to VT’s original vision is the need to reach beyond current problem-solving performance into the processes that lead to students’ development and change.

Educational Applications Though some of Vygotsky’s ideas have been applied in clinical areas (see Kozulin, 1990, Chapter 6), the main area of VT applications is educational. These applications range from those using a general VT philosophy to specially designed educational programs with their own VT-based curriculum and didactics. Some of the former are only loosely connected to VT theory and just assert the need of taking students’ culture into account or focusing not only on current achievement but also on potential. The more structured of VT-based programs and curricula usually implement some of the theoretical concepts that were discussed earlier in this article: the concept of leading activity; internalization of symbolic tools as inner psychological tools; the difference between everyday and

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academic concepts; and ZPD as a basis for both assessment and educational action. For children at kindergarten age, the leading activity is that of sociodramatic play. The VT research identified the following outcomes of this leading activity that contribute significantly to school readiness: development of the function of symbolization both in the verbal and nonverbal sphere that serves as a prerequisite for the acquisition of literacy and other symbolic systems used in school; flexible change of social play roles that helps children to accept their new role as students and reduces their cognitive ‘egocentrism’; play by rules develops selfregulation and self-control essential for classroom activities (Karpov, 2005). School readiness is thus interpreted as a development of a broad range of cognitive functions and motives, rather than specific school-related skills. The preschool programs based on the VT model have been developed both in Russia and other countries (Bodrova and Leong, 2007) and have proved to be successful in enhancing children’s school readiness and improving their executive cognitive functions. Probably the best known educational application of VT is the primary school curriculum developed by Vygotskian scholars and practitioners in Russia (Davydov, 2011). The curriculum and its didactics is based on the assumption that children of a primary school age are particularly sensitive to formal learning as a leading activity. The main emphasis is put on the development of students’ self-reflection and metacognition using a wide range of symbolic tools. For example, the VT-based math curriculum in the early grades focuses more on general cognitive strategies and skills rather than numerical operations. Numbers are introduced as one of the possible ways to represent the relationships between a selected ‘measure’ and an object of measurement rather than the operation of counting objects. Various symbolic representations and elements of algebra are introduced much earlier than in other curricular systems. Research has confirmed that students who studied math in primary school according to Davydov’s curriculum performed much better with more complex PISA tasks than their peers from elite schools that used a more traditional curriculum (Zuckerman, 2004). The English version of Davydov’s math curriculum was also used in a number of schools in the United States (see Kozulin et al., 2003, Chapter 12). Even greater emphasis on symbolic tools can be seen in the program developed by Kinard and Kozulin (2008) for teaching mathematics in socioculturally heterogeneous classrooms. The authors argued that much of the students’ failure in mathematics stems not from a lack of mathematical knowledge, but from underdevelopment of general cognitive skills on the one hand, and insufficient emphasis on mathematical conceptual reasoning, on the other. Their program aims at developing students’ cognitive functions and problem-solving skills through appropriation and internalization first of general and then of mathematically specific symbolic tools. Codes, tables, and diagrams are examples of general symbolic tools, while number line, formulae, and coordinate system are mathematically specific tools. This is achieved by the inclusion of special cognitive tasks into the mathematics curriculum and by emphasizing the instrumental role of such mathematical tools as graphs and formulae.

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VT curricula also emphasize the difference between everyday and academic concepts. Instead of trying to enrich students’ preexistent spontaneous concepts, these curricula aim at developing theoretical concepts that in many respects are opposite to the notions spontaneously formed by students (Davydov, 2011). What unites all curricula based on VT is their emphasis on education as an ‘engine’ of students’ cognitive development. Instead of perceiving the curriculum as an informational content that should be given to students who already have all the prerequisite cognitive functions, the VT-based curriculum aims at actually forming these functions. The educational application of the concept of ZPD includes a closer integration of assessment and learning processes. Typical educational intervention based on the VT model starts with the evaluation of students’ performance in a target learning area (e.g., proportional relationships): some students in a given classroom demonstrate that they have already mastered these relationships, some that they are within their ZPD, and others that they are still beyond their ZPD. This initial evaluation helps to formulate the instructional strategy for students belonging to the three subgroups. After a certain period of intervention, the evaluation is repeated and the cycle of assessment and instructions continues (Zuckerman, 2004). In some respects, this approach has a certain affinity with ‘formative assessment,’ though the latter usually focuses on curricular content and skills rather than on students’ cognitive development.

Theoretical Impact of VT The continuing and ever growing interest in VT might be related to the fact that one can find in it some tentative answers to the questions that emerged in psychological and educational theory only recently. Through its notion of psychological tools, VT helps to operationalize cognitive differences observed in multicultural classrooms. The distinction between everyday and academic concepts allows us to better understand students’ ‘misconceptions’ and explains the lack of success of educational approaches built around children’s everyday experiences. The notion of ZPD has not only paved the way for dynamic assessment but has also helped to turn cognitive development into one of the objectives embedded into almost every one of the national curricula. At the same time, the potential of VT is far from exhausted; many of the VT-based educational applications still remain at the pilot stage awaiting more comprehensive research, development, and implementation.

See also: Bruner’s Theory of Cognitive Development; Cognitive Development, Educational Theories of; Cognitive Development: Child Education; Cognitive Development: Mathematics Learning and Instruction; Culture, Cognition and Embodiment; Human Cognition, Evolution of; Implicit Social Cognition; NeoPiagetian Theories of Cognitive Development; Neo-Vygotskian Developmental Theory; Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development; Piaget, Jean (1896–1980); Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory; Vygotsky’s Theory of Human Development and New Approaches to Education; Vygotsky, Lev Semenovic (1896–1934).

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