D-+Vygotsky's+Constructivism

Janet Green - Vygotsky's Constructivism.


 * 1. Define and describe the theory and its key features (5 pts)**

Constructivism is a theory of learning that focuses on knowledge construction - where a learner uses prior understandings in tandem with current experiences to construct, elaborate or restructure their knowledge.

Lev Vygotsky, along with Jean Piaget is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Constructivism, but while Piaget concentrated on analyzing the individual child learner, Vygotsky developed his ideas on learning, from a strong social and cultural perspective. He stated that "//Children appropriate the conceptual resources of the preexisting cultural world, which are transmitted to them by their parents, other adults and peers//". He argued that the mind can't be understood in isolation from it's surrounding society.

Vygotsky was born in Russia in 1896 and worked in the field of psychology, before passing away at the young age of 37 in 1934. His work was influenced by the political times that he lived in and aspects of Karl Marx's theory can be seen in the formulating of his approach to the psychology of learning. In particular, he attempted to build on Marx's claims about the social origins of human consciousness and Friedrich Engel's claims about mediation by tools and signs. But just after his death, Vygotsky's work was banned by Stalin, and until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and good dialogue was again established between the West and Russia, his work was relatively known. With the translation of his concepts into english, a much bigger audience was introduced to his research work.

His main ideas propose that: • Children construct knowledge. • Social interaction and culture have a dramatic impact on an individual's cognitive development and cannot be separated from it. • Cognitive processes (language, thought, reasoning) develop through social interaction and have a central role in mental development. • Learning is largely mediated by social interaction between students and 'more knowledgeable others' (i.e teachers, parents, coaches, peers, experts)

A key feature of his research was the idea he labelled as 'the Zone of Proximal Development' or ZPD. He stated that //"The Zone of Proximal Development defines those functions that have not yet matured, but in the process (of doing so)..."//. "...//what is the Zone of Proximal Development today, will be the actual development level tomorrow - that is, what a child can do with assistance today they will be able to do by themselves tomorrow//". Vygotsky believed that it was in this area, that teachers needed to focus their attention for direction in how to teach and respond to their student's learning needs.


 * 2. Discuss and explain how the theory operates (10 pts)**

Social interaction and Culture We learn through interactions with others who are more advanced. As learners, our direct interactions with others (parents, teachers, friends) and overall society (through media and social events), provides the context, stimuli and interpretation as we 'appropriate' their ideas and actively construct our own knowledge.

Through culture, children acquire much of the content of their thinking, that is, their knowledge. Surrounding culture provides a child with the processes or means of their thinking - the tools of intellectual adaption. Culture also has a profound influence on how we think and what we think.  Cognitive Processes - Language and Thought The development of language for communication in social relationships, is central to Vygotsky's ideas about intellectual development. He saw it as a primary form of interaction though which adults transmit to children the rich body of knowledge that exists in the culture. As the learner progresses, the child's own language comes to serve as their primary tool of intellectual adaptation. Eventually they internalize their language and use it as thought to direct their own behaviour - illustrates their mastery with learning.

The activities that promotes active cognitive development are achieved through problem solving situations where the child shares their experiences with someone else, usually a parent or teacher or peer. Initially the person interacting with the child assumes most of the responsibility for guiding the problem solving, but gradually this responsibility transfers to the child.

Zone of Proximal Development  (ZPD) The 'Zone' refers to differences between levels of a student's independent performance and ability to solve problems alone, and their assisted performance and ability to solve problems with someone else's help, such as a teacher, guide, peer or parent. 'Proximal' means what comes next. The ZPD defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation. An important idea is that a child is only able to take the next step in their cognitive development if another person - typically an adult - supports and prompts them to do so - this assistance is usually called 'scaffolding'. In an instructional context, the implementation of the ZPD would involve determining the number of steps necessary to be followed in order to successfully acquire competence with a new set of skills.

Scaffolding Vygotsky viewed scaffolding as a social process and a set of methods for moving your child from the assisted to independent levels of learning. Through scaffolding, the learner is supported in their learning process and is able to externalize higher cognitive functions with help from someone else. Scaffolding not only produces immediate results, but also instills the skills necessary for independent problem solving in the future. As over time, these functions can become successfully internalized. It is pre-supposed that the teacher has a plan for accomplishing this, along with a plan for gradually removing the scaffolding, as the child's knowledge, ability and confidence increases, until the student is learning on their own as a 'self-regulated' learner and has mastery over their cognitive processes.


 * 3. Demonstrate, show an example, or provide a way for your reader to //see// the theory in action (5 pts)**

The development of a child’s arithmetric abilities. By looking at two groups of apples, very young children can probably visually decide which group of apples - 2 or 6 - is larger. When there’s a more complex differentiation - one group has 26 and the other 29 apples - they will have more trouble deciding on their answer by using just their sight. In this scenario, children would be first introduced to the cultural processes or tools used for counting objects. The first step would be learning how to speak the numbers of counting, ‘one, two, three ...’ and so on - the use of spoken language as a beginning step in being able to internalize knowledge. As most children begin to learn to count before having a clear concept of what a 'sum' is, the child would need further learning assistance or scaffolding to develop their conceptual understanding of addition before they were able to give the correct answer. For example, we could ask a child ‘how many fingers are on your hand?’ depending on where they are in their ZPD, they could repeat a previously learned associated answer and say ‘five’ or they may know the counting sequence and be able to point to each of their fingers and arrive at their answer. But if I said to them ‘how many do I have?’ count again’ the child may now reply ‘no, I can’t’. This would indicate that at this stage of their cognitive development, the child only knows how to apply their counting skills to their own fingers and not to the fingers of others or other objects. The feedback from these assessment explorations of the child's comprehension of arithmetric functions would enable me to know what level the child is at and what sequence and types of instructional aids I would need to develop to support their learning process.

As the children move through their ZPD, they will move towards the mastery of genuine counting and arithmetric skills. They would begin to understand what it means to count on their fingers, and they may still use their fingers to count the number of other objects. For example when given the problem ‘here are 6 apples, if we take 2 away, how many are left?’ children need to switch from apples to fingers. In this case, fingers play the role of signs, children put 7 fingers up and then take 2 away, leaving 5 remaining fingers.They solve the problem with the help of external signs.

Children then move quickly from counting on their fingers to counting mentally. If older children need to subtract 2 from 7, they no longer count on their fingers, but now do mental arithmetric.


 * 4. Analyze and discuss the theory’s application to instruction (i.e., its importance to learning theory, its strengths for instruction, its weaknesses for instruction, what it does well and not well) (20 pts)**

Learning Environments If you're implementing Vygotsky's constructivist learning theories in an instructional context, learning environments need to first be organized so that they bring learners together in purposeful interactions with adults and knowledgeable peers. There shouldn't be any random communication, but rather the adults or knowledgeable peers should have clear ideas about what the learner should achieve.

Teachers and Curriculum Development For teachers, they have a very challenging role, as they must try to understand each student's Zone of Proximal Development, develop scaffolding and then keep them challenged and co-construct knowledge by asking questions, making comments and encouraging peer interactions. As learning is facilitated through interaction, the curriculum needs to be designed so that it's content emphasizes much interaction between learners and their learning tasks. If classes have a lot of students participating, this would be a very time challenged situation for customizing learning approaches for each individual student.

Instructional Methods The instructor provides support during the initial learning stages, choosing easier content and doing some of the harder steps while students complete the easier parts. They can also provide cognitive crutches by first writing out the steps to give learners a structure to refer to, along with repeat spoken instructions to the class, so that over time the knowledge becomes internalized. Once learners have developed the necessary skills, the teacher can gradually remove the scaffolding and add more complicated task variables.

Allow learners to accomplish tasks that they normally wouldn't be able to accomplish on their own and provide structural support with scaffolding. This enables learners to gain access to areas that they couldn't obtain on their own.

The use of collaboration between peers, where children may work together in groups to solve a problem with little or no adult guidance, or take on a role as a class tutor, helping less competent peers to learn some relatively straightforward skill.

If the place of learning is online, scaffolding can be implemented in the form of examples, links to more information, animations, reflections, quizzes - anything that helps to better facilitate the learning process.

<span style="color: rgb(103, 16, 249)">Assessment Methods must take into account the ZPD and target both levels. What children can do on their own - their actual level of development and what they can do with assistance - their potential level of development. By assessing learners and their current level of assistance, the instructor gains more specific feedback on what level and form of scaffolding is necessary to give to the current learner, and how to gradually remove this assistance as they move towards becoming an independent learner.

<span style="color: rgb(104, 41, 250)">Weaknesses for instruction Vygotsky's method endorses that children come to learn adult meanings, behaviours and technologies in the process of collaboration, and that learning unfolds in the direction of culturally appropriate practices - the process of positive socialization. But if there are circumstances in which collaboration with others leads learners to regress, doubt must be cast on the interpretation of the ZPD, in which development is always seen to lead to more advanced practices. The context in which students can be led to either develop or regress in their thinking, is very dependent on the nature of their social interaction.

The importance of culture as a component that informs what students think about and how they process information, is another area that isn't necessarily clear today when communities are composed of many different cultures with many differences in how they communicate and interpret objects. This is especially true as we see the dramatic influence of global changes and attitudes on not just cultural groups but also generational groups.

Having a more indepth understanding of Vygotsky's learning theory of social constructivism from this research process, I can now more clearly see instructional parallels with how the practice of design is taught to undergraduate students. First observation is the development of curriculum, though I've experienced it in three different cultural settings, each program has conformed to a similar methodology where students commence their studies by exploring spatial formats and manipulating simple variables of shape and color within these predefined areas. Before students begin work on their projects, previous student work examples are shown to help students visualize what they're about to embark upon and simple theories of visual organization are introduced to students to use as scaffolding in helping them be successful with their tasks. As the students progress through their studies, subject content and design requirements gradually move from a simplistic collection of inputs to ones that increasingly replicate real world design tasks and demand higher level design skills for originality, research findings and the management of many complex elements. At each level of their learning, there are also subject pre-requisites stated to ensure that students are successfully guided through the scaffolding structure that's been developed for this discipline, leading to the end capstone class requirement where student designers just prior to graduating, must define their own design project and demonstrate their mastery of skills at this final level.
 * 5. Give your personal understanding of the theory, why you chose it to analyze, what it means for you or your practice, etc. (10 pts)**

In my examination of the practice of design, I also see very strong associations with active and collaborative learning styles exercised by this profession, which begins with a communication problem looking for a solution being assigned to a creative team to collectively brainstorm and develop original concepts from. An important part of this design process for creative development, is researching the context of a specific situation and / or the activity taking place and how these are influenced by their surrounding environment - analysis from a social and contextual perspective - and very compatible with Vygotsky's cognitive approach.

So in order to create a design that is effective at conveying information, the designer must first interact with various tools (such as graphic software, a computer, a ruler, pen and paper, etc) or artifacts that are specific to design conceptualizing and creation. In order to be proficient with these tools and design methods, the designer has to have gone through a prior learning process of gaining mastery over design tools and methods and then over time, their implementation of design becomes more 'automatic' as they collect and test out different visual design scenarios, design approaches and gather more experience. As the creative team works in collaboration with each other, their own social and environmental contributions influence their final outcome. Cultural standards, such as the use of color, language, etc also have an impact on the final result. Once the creative work is presented to it's target audience, assessment methods come into play through focus groups and community surveys, to determine whether the work has effectively communicated what the project aimed for as it's communication goal and if modifications need to be acted upon. In the bigger picture, today's global activities are constantly redefining and changing cultural practices and communication, so designers must constantly be aware of this and adapting their creation process to reflect these new influences.