The Work of Vygotsky: Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory

Social, Knowledge(MKO), and Zone of Proximal Development (XPD

Children must be taught in two ways. They must be given a lot of information that they are forced to learn or they must be taught the skills needed for them to understand.

Some of these skills include summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting.

It is the main means by which mentors convey information to the children. It becomes an extremely powerful tool for intellectual adaptation because children learn by using internal language.

Attention- have to be able to attend information to learn it

The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) refers to anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. The MKO is normally though of as being a teacher, coach or older adult, but the MKO could also be peers, a younger person, or even computers.

Sensation - vision, hearing, touch, taste

Perception - the ability to understand information

Memory - must be able to remember the information

Social interaction plays a fundamental role in the process of cognitive development.

In contrast to Jean Piaget's understanding of child development (in which development necessarily precedes learning), Vygotsky felt social learning precedes development. He states: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice; first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people and then inside the child.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the distance between a student's ability to perform a task under adult guidance and/or with peer collaboration and the student's ability solving the problem independently. According to Vygotsky, learning occurred in this zone.

Vygotsky focused on the connections between people and the sociocultural context in which they act and interact in shared experiences. According to Vygotsky, humans use tools that develop from a culture, such as speech and writing, to mediate their social environments. Initially children develop these tools to serve solely as social functions, ways to communicate needs. Vygotsky believed that the internalization of these tools led to higher thinking skills.