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Contribution of Lev Vygotsky

A Report

Submitted to

Central Department of Psychology

Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.

In partial fulfillment of the requirement for M.A Psychology second semester practical
examination on Contemporary Theories and Trends in Psychology (PSY. 556)

Submitted by
Ashim Sharma

Roll no: 007

Date: 2022/09/01
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Letter of Recommendation

This Report submitted by Mr. Ashim Sharma of M.A Psychology 2nd Semester, as
a part of his practical report requirement for the session 2 022 , has been approved by
Central Department of Psychology, Tribhuvan University.

……………………….

Dr. Nandita Sharma

(Head of Department)
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Approval Letter

This paper submitted by Mr. Ashim Sharma of M.A 2nd semester, as a part of his
practical report requirement for the session 2022, has been approved by Central
Department of Psychology, Tribhuvan University.

……………………….. ………………………… ………………………

Dr. Nandita Sharma Mr. Ashish Kafle

Department Head Internal Examiner External Examiner

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Acknowledgment

I would like to express my gratitude to my respectable Dr. Nandita Sharma and lecturer
Mr. Ashish Kafle Sir along with the family of Department of Psychology, for providing me this
opportunity to work in Term Paper of “Contribution of Lev Vygotsky”. Also, I would like to
thank my all friends who support me to final this Term Paper. Thank you!

Ashim Sharma
M.A Psychology,
2nd semester, Morning Shift
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Table of Contents

Letter of Recommendation ............................................................................................................. ii

Approval Letter ............................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgment ............................................................................................................................ 3

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 4

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 5

Background ................................................................................................................................. 5

Aim .............................................................................................................................................. 6

Procedure ........................................................................................................................................ 6

Findings........................................................................................................................................... 7

Discussion and Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 10

References ..................................................................................................................................... 11
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Introduction
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934) was a talented scholar with broad
interests, an accomplished researcher, and a prolific writer. Vygotsky’s goal was “to create a new
and comprehensive approach to human psychological processes.” He was closely familiar with
works of his contemporaries such as Pavlov as well as Piaget, Binet, and Freud and often
commented on their ideas. His thinking was also influenced by philosophers such as Hegel,
Marx, and Engels. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 37, only ten years after his professional
career in psychology began. Shortly after Vygotsky’s death, his manuscripts were banned in the
USSR for political reasons. It was not until the late 1960s when his work was allowed to be
published again. Vygotsky first became known in the West when his Language and Thought was
translated in 1962. One of the greatest contributions of Vygotsky is “Sociocultural Theory.”
Socio-cultural theory in psychology is concerned with explaining how individual mental
functioning is related to cultural, institutional, and historical context; thus, sociocultural
perspective focus on roles of participation in social interactions and culturally organized
activities play in influencing psychological development. (Shaffer, Vygotsky's Sociocultural
Theory, 2009; Scott, n.d.; Allman, 2018).

Background
Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was born in November 17 1896 and was born to the
Vygodskii family in the town of Orsha, Belarus into a non-religious middle-class family of
Russian Jewish extraction. His father Simkha Vygodskii was a banker. He was homeschooled
until 1911 and then obtained formal degree (with distinction) in a private Jewish Gymnasium,
which allowed him entrance to a university. In 1913 Lev Vygotsky was admitted to the Moscow
University. He had interest in humanities and social sciences, but at the insistence of his parents
he applied to the medical school in Moscow University. During the first semester of study, he
transferred to the law school. Lev Vygotsky never completed his formal studies at the Imperial
Moscow University and, thus, he never obtained a university degree: his studies were interrupted
by the October Bolshevik uprising in 1917 in the country's capital Petrograd and the second
largest city Moscow. Following these events, he left Moscow and eventually returned to Gomel,
where he lived after the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 occurred. In January 1924,
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Vygotsky took part in the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd (soon
thereafter renamed Leningrad). After the Congress, Vygotsky received an invitation to become a
research fellow at the Psychological Institute in Moscow. He began his career at the
Psychological Institute as a "staff scientist, second class". He also became a secondary teacher,
covering a period marked by his interest in the processes of learning and the role of language in
learning.

From 1926 to 1930, Vygotsky worked on a research program investigating the development
of higher cognitive functions of logical memory, selective attention, decision making, and
language comprehension, from early forms of primal psychological functions. Vygotsky guided
his students in researching this phenomenon from three different perspectives:

• The instrumental approach, which aimed to understand the ways humans use objects as
mediation aids in memory and reasoning.
• A developmental approach, focused on how children acquire higher cognitive functions
during development
• A culture-historical approach, studying how social and cultural patterns of interaction
shape forms of mediation and developmental trajectories (Wikipedia, n.d.).

Aim
The proponent of Socio-Cultural Psychology, Lev S. Vygotsky have made huge
contribution in learning and education.

The main aim of this term paper is:

• To explore the contribution of Lev S. Vygotsky.

Procedure
Information and data were collected through secondary sources like internet, journals,
websites, and books.
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Findings
Vygotsky claimed that infants are born with a few elementary mental functions—
attention, sensation, perception, and memory—that are eventually transformed by the culture into
new and more sophisticated mental processes that he called higher mental functions. Vygotsky’s
sociocultural theory offers a new lens through which to view human development by stressing
the importance of specific social processes other theorists have not emphasized. According to
Vygotsky, children’s minds, skills, and personalities develop as they (1) take part in cooperative
dialogues with skilled partners on tasks that are within their zone of proximal development and
(2) incorporate what skillful tutors say to them into what they say to themselves (Shaffer,
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory, 2009).

The sociocultural approach to cognitive development based on Vygotsky’s ideas

proposes that mental development is best understood as a product of social and cultural
experience. Social interaction, specifically, is seen as a critical force in intellectual development.
Through the assistance provided by the social environment, children gradually learn to function
intellectually as individuals in their culture. Thus, in contrast to the emphasis on individual
functioning that dominated other trends in psychology of his time, Vygotsky stressed the critical
relationship between individual psychological growth and the sociocultural environment in
which human psychology develops and is expressed. He defined the sociocultural environment
in very broad terms, including social interaction between individuals, the values and practices of
the culture that appear in the routines, rituals and customs in which people engage, and the tools
and signs, most importantly language, that people use to support and extend thinking. However,
Vygotsky did not view individual psychology as a direct consequence of social experience or
socially determined. He proposed that human development, including cognitive development, is
socially constructed (Gauvin, 2019).

Zone of Proxima Development:

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was a key construct in Lev Vygotsky’s theory
of learning and development. The Zone of Proximal Development is defined as the space
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between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance
or in collaboration with more capable peers (Walqui & BILLINGS, n.d.).

Vygotsky believed that when a student is in the zone of proximal development for a
particular task, providing the appropriate assistance will give the student enough of a "boost" to
achieve the task. To assist a person to move through the zone of proximal development,
educators are encouraged to focus on three important components which aid the learning
process:

• The presence of someone with knowledge and skills beyond that of the learner (a more
knowledgeable other).
• Social interactions with a skillful tutor that allow the learner to observe and practice their
skills.
• Scaffolding, or supportive activities provided by the educator, or more competent peer, to
support the student as he or she is led through the ZPD (McLeod D. S., 2019).

Elementary and Higher-Level Functions

For Vygotsky, elementary psychological functions, which include basic attention and
perception and involuntary memory, emerge spontaneously as children interact with the world.
Higher-level functions differ from basic functions because they entail the coordination of several
cognitive processes and are mediated by culture through its sign systems (e.g., language and
mathematics) and symbolic and material tools (e.g., literacy and technology). Consequently,
higher mental functions are not simply more complex versions of basic functions. Instead, they
incorporate cultural means and meaning and, as a result, allow new forms of mental processes to
occur. As such, they are qualitatively distinct from elementary mental functions.

Guided Participation

Guided participation is a process of learning that occurs as children participate in the

activities of their community and are guided in their participation by the actions of more
experienced partners in the setting. Guided participation highlights the fact that adults regularly
support learning in the context of everyday activities by directing children’s attention to and
involvement in these activities. Sometimes these activities are child focused, such as in play or
an organized game, but oftentimes they are adult activities in which the primary purpose is not to
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instruct children but to carry out the activity itself as children participate. For example, while
learning to cook rice, a child might look at the mother cooking the rice. Then mother guide the
children, As in Vygotsky’s approach, the child is not a passive learner who follows the
instructions of the more experienced partner. Instead, children are active participants who co-
construct with their partners new ways of understanding and engaging in an activity (Gauvin,
2019).

One way of describing children’s informal learning experiences outside of school

situations is called ‘guided participation,’ and it is derived from Vygotsky’s ideas (Rogoff,
1990). Guided participation is a process of learning that occurs as children participate in the
activities of their community and are guided in their participation by the actions of more
experienced partners in the setting. Guided participation highlights the fact that adults regularly
support learning in the context of everyday activities by directing children’s attention to and
involvement in these activities. Sometimes these activities are child focused, such as in play or
an organized game, but oftentimes they are adult activities in which the primary purpose is not to
instruct children but to carry out the activity itself as children participate (Gauvin, 2019).

Extending Thinking by Cultural Means

In various ways, cultural signs and tools extend thinking. They allow individuals to carry
out activities, social and mental, that would not be possible without these mediational means.
Although the earlier example concerns literacy, cultural mediation applies to a vast range of
mental functions, including instances where literacy is not present.

Cognitive Mediation Through Signs and Tools

The use of signs and tools to mediate human mental functioning was, for Vygotsky, the
single distinguishing feature of human intelligence. Whereas other primates, and human beings
when they use basic mental functions, react to and use external features of the world to guide
action, human beings are also capable of creating signs, such as language and number systems,
and tools, such as navigational systems and computer technology, that affect how people think
and interact with the world. In other words, human beings create and live in an organized social
unit, called culture, that devises signs and tools for supporting and extending human thinking and
action. For Vygotsky, this capability transforms the nature of human intelligence; it frees it from
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its biological base and creates what is referred to as a cultural mind. Moreover, cultural signs and
tools are passed across generations from more to less experienced members of the group
(Gauvin, 2019).

Discussion and Conclusion

Lev S. Vygotsky’s major contribution is in the field of education. His idea of zone of
proximal development and guided participation is frequently used by the teacher knowingly and
unknowingly. The idea of ZPD can be seen being applied to daily life. Children learn from the
MKO (most knowledgeable other) i.e., from their parents and elders.

Besides that, idea of Vygotsky also proposes that learning of children occurs through the
social interaction, where they interact with elders and most knowledgeful others.
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References
Allman, B. (2018). Socioculturalism. Retrieved from EdTech Books:
https://edtechbooks.org/studentguide/socioculturalism

Gauvin, M. (2019). Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory. Elsevier Inc.

McLeod, D. S. (2019). The Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding. Retrieved from
Simply Psychology: https://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-
Development.html

Scott, S. (n.d.). Sociocultural Theory. Retrieved from education.com:

http://www.education.com/reference/article/sociocultural-theory/

Shaffer, D. R. (2009). Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory. In D. R. Shaffer, Social and Personality

Development (pp. 90-93). Belmont, CA: WADSWORTH.

Walqui, A., & BILLINGS. (n.d.). Zone of Proximal Development: An Affirmative Perspective in
Teaching ELLs. Retrieved from West Ed: https://www.wested.org/resources/zone-of-
proximal-
development/#:~:text=The%20Zone%20of%20Proximal%20Development,collaboration
%20with%20more%20capable%20peers.

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Lev S. Vygotsky. Retrieved from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky