Definition
The cultural-historical theory of development is a general metatheory (theoretical framework) of human development introduced by Russian/Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky that strongly affected the further progress of developmental and educational psychology.
Theoretical Background
The cultural-historical theory of development sees child development mostly as a social process. Conscience is not given to human beings at birth; it has its genesis and history of development. Vygotsky introduced and argued for a principle of social-historical determination of human mental life and the specificity of its development in the process of ontogenesis. He considered the regularities of human child mental development to be radically different from the regularities of mental development in all other species. This general viewpoint was...
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References
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1998). The collected works (Vol. 5, R. W. Rieber Ed.). New York: Plenum.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Podolskiy, A. (2012). Cultural-Historical Theory of Development. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_311
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