11.20.06
Posted in Socio-historic perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 1:11 am by youngsah
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. Intro, Ch 1-3
Introduction. – Historical background on Vygotsky including state of psychology at the time, influence of Russian revolution, and incorporating Marxism into psychology.
Ch. 1 Tool and Symbol in Child Development – Some talk on what others think and then an argument that humans are different from animals not in tool use but in language and the subsequent organization that it brings.
Ch. 2 The Development of Perception and Attention – One difference between children/humans and animals is that humans can think about things that aren’t there. There is also a discussion of the system of signs.
Ch. 3 Mastery of Memory and Thinking. This chapter talks about how sign manipulation becomes more and more sophisticated. Also, talk of interfunctional relations and how memory of different aged children is not only different in itself, it’s used differently.
In these chapters Vygotsky asserted that the use of language, specifically signs, is the basis and organization for thinking, planning, and especially higher level thinking. There also seems to be a push here both to distance man/child from animals as well as distancing Vygotsky’s ideas from what has gone before.
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Posted in Situative perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings, Miscellaneous at 1:06 am by youngsah
Resnick, L. B. (1987). Learning in and out of school. 1987 AERA Presidential Address. Educational Research, 13-20.
This paper asserted that school was a different, special, and separate place from daily life. The paper goes on to compare school learning and outside learning on many different fronts including individual cognition v. shared cognition and pure mental exercises v. tool use. The article also goes on to look at the purpose of education.
I preferred the organization of this paper to the Brown piece. As someone who was dissatisfied with some of their schooling (and who isn’t) the Situative perspective is nice in that it wants knowledge to have a point when so many school activities are too far removed from actual meaningfulness. However, should school be different than outside learning, is there a need for teaching things that aren’t directly applicable or used out in the world? I’m sure some philosophers and theorist might think so. Me, I’m not sure.
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Posted in Situative perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 12:52 am by youngsah
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 32-40.
These authors believe knowledge is situated and it should be taught in an authentic way like a “cognitive apprenticeship”. In this paper, they talk a lot about authentic activities and how school often presents learners with inauthentic activities. They also compare how just plain folks, students, and practitioners approach things to strengthen their argument.
I generally agree with the idea that there should be more authentic activities in schools but I don’t want to go as far as these authors did. Also, in some disciplines there would be disagreement about what kinds of activities would be most useful or most practitioner-like.
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Posted in Annotated References - Class readings at 12:17 am by youngsah
Adamson, L. B., Moster, M. A., Roark, M. L., & Reed, D. B. (1998). Doing a science project: Gender differences during childhood. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(8), 845-857.
In the article, the authors looked at two years of a elementary school science fair focusing on gender differences in areas of science, participation, awards given, as well as whether the parents and science fair judges had any obvious gender biases. They did this through observing science fair results and participants, a parent survey, and asking the judges to give their best guess as to the gender of the science projects they had judged. The authors found little difference in participation, but found females doing more projects in the biological/social sciences than males. No obvious gender biases were seen in either the parents or judges.
I could say loads about this article since we did a critique on it but I’ll be brief. As a social science major with many natural science/engineering friends in college I feel they needed to explain their categorization of the sciences a bit more. I would have been more comfortable if they had split natural and social sciences and then talked about biology as on odd case than the way the authors classified it in the paper. For more on this paper, see my critique.
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Posted in Socio-historic perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 12:16 am by youngsah
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. Ch 4-6
Ch. 4 Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions – Vygotsky clarifies somewhat the relation between tool and sign as well as talks about how simple reactions become more complex processes and are then internalized.
Ch. 5 Problems of Method - Vygotsky makes the claim that though their perspectives may differ psychologist study things in strikingly similar ways. He then goes in to contrast his approach, which focuses on analyzing processes and explanation. Later there is a discussion of choice research.
Ch. 6 Educational Implications – Talks about three different perspectives in thinking about learning and development, then contrasts these with ZPD. I probably didn’t get as much out of chapter 4 as I should have, some more focused reading might be warranted. I also added on Chapter 6 because I’m a fan of ZPD. I liked Vygotsky’s approach to criticizing the scientific approach of other psychologists in chapter 5. I’m sure they all weren’t studying things in the same way, but to be able to say that most were does make one think.
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