Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky, accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being 'read' and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his theories. Miller peels away the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness.
A theory of cognitive modifiability deals with the phenomenon of low cognitive performance, explains its etiology, and forms the basis for a remedial intervention — Instrumental Enrichment (IE) — that induces changes of a structural nature. In contrast to learning by direct exposure to the environment, Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) occurs when a mediator interposes him/herself between the learner and the environment and interprets the world to the learner. The direct, or proximal, etiology of low performance is lack of MLE. IE is intended as a phase-specific substitute for MLE, and its major goal is to enhance cognitive modifiability by sensitizing the learner to formal and informal sources of learning and experience. The IE intervention program is briefly outlined, and empirical support for its efficacy is presented.
Two studies are reported concerning performance differences and similarities across cultures. Pascual-Leone's tests of mental attention/energy (M-power) were administered to Zulu-speaking township children aged from 7 to 12 years. In study 1, the Compound Stimulus Visual Information task (CSVI) was used to determine whether children (N=292) performed at theoretically predicted levels previously obtained with middle-class Canadian children. In study 2, the children (N=252) were required to complete the Figural Intersection Test (FIT) four times. Unlike the CSVI, in which learning is controlled by training prior to testing, the FIT assumes basic familiarity with the general test requirements. The purpose of repeated testing was to assess the extent of learning across trials. The results for study 1 indicate that subjects do perform at the predicted levels on the CSVI and have the same M-power as Canadian children. The results for study 2 indicate that the subjects underperform on trial 1 of the FIT but overperform on trial 2 relative to Canadian children.
This study presents an analysis of the performance of students from disadvantaged schools (DS) on first-year psychology examination questions. The analysis focuses on the process of enquiry that underpins different kinds of questions (factual, relational and conceptual) of increasing levels of difficulty. The findings indicate that success or failure is not simply a measure of the reproduction of content but is a function of the (in)appropriate form of responses that students generate in engaging with different kinds of questions. This has important implications for the conceptualisation of academic literacy and the development of responsive curricula in the South African higher education context. In order to further understand the reasons for the disproportionately high failure rate among students from disadvantaged schools, the responses of DS failing students are compared to those of their peers from advantaged schools (AS) who also failed the course. This comparative analysis reveals very different patterns of questioning engagement among the two failing groups of students, providing empirical support for the argument that underpreparedness is a distinct systemic phenomenon rather than simply failure by another name.
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