What kind of developmental potential is present in elementary schoolchildren but hindered by the traditional type of education? Half a century ago Daniel El'konin and Vasili Davydov, the leaders ofRussian Vygotskian educational psychology started answering this question. They suggested that reflection is a basic human ability and it can be developed in younger students. Reflection includes thinking about one's own actions and thoughts, taking other people's point of view, and understanding oneself. In this paper I present results of the design experiments conducted in Russian schools that deliberately promote students' reflection. In these schools the majority of children achieve high levels of reflection previously attributed only to the gifted students. One aspect of reflection will be given special attention, the ability of the student to take the perspective of another person. The comparative microanalysis of learning discourse in the first and the fourth grades demonstrated a significant growth of this ability through the first three years of schooling and made evident limitations imposed by the existing structure of the classroom cooperation. The long-term effects of education based on the principles of learning activity are demonstrated on the basis of the recent PISA study data.Learning activity (LA) is a specifically organized form of education, which is designed to promote development of reflection in elementary schoolchildren. Late in the 1950s, Daniel B. El'konin ) and Vasilii V. Davydov (1988) advanced a hypothesis that the LA would help the majority of elementary schoolchildren to achieve high levels of reflection, which were previously attributed only to the gifted students. It took three decades to verify this daring hypothesis in design experiments, which among other things have led to a new type of primary school curricula. Nowadays these curricula are used in 10% of Russian schools, and the Russian psychological community accepts the LA theory as the most consistent and validated practical embodiment of the Vygotskian idea of the relations between education and psychological development. In this paper I will discuss the theoretical basis of the LA approach to education and report some new evidence of its effectiveness.One of the cornerstones of the LA theory is a new understanding of normal development. The norm is usually presented as a statistically average performance observed in a particular age group in a particular sphere of competence. Such a statistical notion of the norm implicitly
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) of a child is not a naturally existing phenomenon that arises by itself every time an adult helps a child achieve greater independence. It is a special form of interaction in which the action of the adult is aimed at generating and supporting the child's initiative. The relationship between a capable and an incapable individual or between a knowledgeable and an ignorant individual is a reduced form of the joint action that has the potential to create a ZPD. The developed form of such interaction is the collaboration of those who are equal but different that is represented in the "adult-group of children" relationship. A ZPD is described not in the language of the content of tasks but in the language of the kinds of help that to a greater or lesser degree aid the child in solving a task. The description of different teaching systems in the language of kinds of help shows that teaching unavoidably introduces an asymmetry into a child's development, supporting some kinds of initiative and constraining others. The choice of a teaching system is the choice of a direction for the development of a child (generation of children).
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