Vygotsky
Social Constructivst
Believes cognitive development progresses through interaction with others.
Socioculture context
Communicating with others and learning new things or teachers others.
Asynchronous learning
SocioCulture context
Not live, not interaction but a recording or reading. Still a social experience that is to be read or heard by other people.
Vygotsky’s Theories fit well with our current emphases on cultrure
Socio contextual theory
Scaffolding
support for others to learn
Zone of Proximal Development
Lower limit
Upper limit
Upper limit
ZPD
level of additional responsibility child or adolescent can accept with assistance of an able instructor.
Just enough support to progress but not do it for the student.
Lower Limit
ZPD
Task too difficult for a chid or adolescent to master alone; level of problem solving reached on these tasks by child or adolescent working alone.
Vygotsky Strengths
- explained role of culture and social component of learning/development
- direct applications to educational practice
Vygotsky Weaknesses
- Some of the propositions difficult to test.
- very philosophical at times.
- Not a lot of empirical research during his lifetime.
- He died at the peak of his career.
Vygotsky vs. Piaget
difference
- Socialist constructivist vs cognitive constructivist
- vygotsky has no stages
- vygotsky saw language as an important school emerging from culture.
- vygotsky:thinking and language become intertwined
- piaget: thinking is a separate process.
- Vygotsky: for all development in order to be successful you have to have education.
- Piaget: didn’t think education was necessary for basic cognitive development
Information Processing Theories
Founding father is George Miller
George Miller (1920-2012)
Information Processing Theory
One of the fathers of cognitive psychology.
- Chunking
- goal directed problem solving.
Information Processing Theory
We engage in information processing daily
- quantitiative: in nature with cognitive development
- qualitative: learning new strategies for problem solving
Stroop Test
2 process
-certain tasks become so automatic it becomes hard to resist them.
-difficulty in task switching
having to follow a new set of instructions after becoming familiar with original task.
Mechanisms of Change
Encoding
automaticity
strategy construction
generalization
Encoding
Mechanisms of change
making sense of the stimuli in order to properly store or process it (visual, auditory, semantic, etc)
Automaticity
Mechanisms of change
Decrease in effort and load with experience in tasks
EX: when you first drive you have hands at 10 and 2. Later on you can move hands, listen to radio.
Strategy Construction
Mechanism of change
problem solving given info at hand and end goal.
EX: baby walking to a toy, am i get closer or moving away?
Mathematical strategies to learn new information
Generalization
Mechanisms of Change
Applying strategies to other problems.
When you learn a strategy you apply to a problem, often times strategy can be thrown off. Understanding you can still use strategy in different situation.
Info-Processing Key Terms/Processes
Multi-Store Model of Memory
Multi-Store Model of Memory
Executive Control Process
- Sensory Register
- Working Memory
- Long Term Memory
Sensory Register
auditory, sight
1-3 seconds
decide what I am being made aware of. constantly washed over and only catch about 2-4 words at a time.
EX: sound(hearing professor talk) echo, you will remember voice later.
Working Memory
maintain 5-9 items with repetition.
Attention brings over memory from sensory register.
EX: telephone number or e-mail address
