VIGOTSKY

Vygotsky was born
in Orsha, in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus)
into a nonreligious Jewish family. He was influenced by his cousin, David
Vygotsky. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1917. In the mid-1920s, he worked
at the Institute of Psychology and other educational, research, and clinical
institutions in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov where he extensively investigated ideas about
cognitive development. He died in 1934, at the age of 37, in Moscow of tuberculosis.

Vygotsky was a theorist who
worked during the first decades of the former Soviet Union. He posited that
children learn through hands-on experience, as Piaget suggested. However,
unlike Piaget, he claimed that timely and sensitive intervention by adults when
a child is on the edge of learning a new task (called the zone of proximal
development) could help children learn new tasks. This technique is
called "scaffolding," because it builds upon knowledge children
already have with new knowledge that adults can help the child learn example of
this might be when a parent "helps" an infant clap or roll her hands
to the pat-a-cake
rhyme, until she can clap and roll her hands herself.

Vygotsky was strongly focused
on the role of culture in determining the child's pattern of development. He
argued that "Every function in the child's cultural development appears
twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first,
between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child
(intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical
memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as
actual relationships between individuals."