330 CHAPTER 8
on school education in Russia, and interest in his theories continues to grow through-
out the world (Bodrova & Leong, 1996; Duncan, 1995). Vygotsky wrote about children’s
cognitive development but differed from Piaget in his emphasis on the role of others in
cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1934/1962, 1978, 1987). Whereas Piaget stressed the
importance of the child’s interaction with objects as a primary factor in cognitive devel-
opment, Vygotsky stressed the importance of social and cultural interactions with other
people, typically more highly skilled children and adults. Vygotsky believed that chil-
dren develop cognitively when someone else helps them by asking leading questions
and providing examples of concepts in a process called scaffolding. In scaffolding, the
more highly skilled person gives the learner more help at the beginning of the learning
process and then begins to withdraw help as the learner’s skills improve (Rogoff, 1994).
Vy g o t s k y a l s o p ro p o s e d t h a t e a c h d e v e l o p i n g c h i l d h a s a zone of proximal development
(ZPD), which is the difference between what a child can do alone versus what a child can do
with the help of a teacher. For example, if Jenny can do fourth-grade math problems by her-
self but also can successfully work sixth-grade math problems with the help of a teacher, her
ZPD is about 2 years, the difference between what she can do alone and what she can do with
help. Suzi might be the same age as Jenny and just as skilled at working fourth-grade math
problems (and might even score the same on a traditional IQ test), but if Suzi can only work
up to fifth-grade math problems with the teacher’s help, Suzi’s ZPD is only about 1 year and
is not as great as Jenny’s. Both girls are smart, but Jenny could be seen as possessing a higher
potential intelligence than Suzi. This might be a better way of thinking about intelligence: It
isn’t what you know (as measured by traditional tests), it’s what you can do.
Other researchers have applied Vygotsky’s social focus on learning to the develop-
ment of a child’s memory for personal (autobiographical) events, finding evidence that
children learn the culturally determined structures and purposes of personal stories from
the early conversations they have with their parents. This process begins with the parent
telling the story to the very young child, followed by the child repeating elements of the
story as the child’s verbal abilities grow. The child reaches the final stage at around age 5
or 6 when the child creates the personal story entirely—an excellent example of scaffolding
(Fivush et al., 1996; Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Nelson, 1993). Unlike Piaget, who saw a child’s
talking to himself or herself as egocentric, Vygotsky thought that private speech was a way
for the child to “think out loud” and advance cognitively. As adults, we still do this when
we talk to ourselves to help solve a particular problem. Vygotsky’s ideas have been put
into practice in education through the use of cooperative learning, in which children work
together in groups to achieve a common goal, and in reciprocal teaching, in which teachers
lead students through the basic strategies of reading until the students themselves become
capable of teaching the strategies to others. Chapter Seven details the stages of language
development in infancy and childhood. to Learning Objective 7.12.
AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER Before leaving the topic of cognitive development in
infancy, let’s briefly discuss a topic that has been making the news lately: the causes
underlying autism spectrum disorder. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevel-
opmental disorder that actually encompasses a whole range of previous disorders (with
what may be an equally broad range of causes), which cause problems in thinking, feel-
ing, language, and social skills in relating to others (American Psychiatric Association,
2013; Atladóttir et al., 2009; Johnson & Myers, 2007; Lai et al., 2015; Schuwerk et al., 2015).
Theory of mind is a term that refers to the ability to understand not only your own
mental states, such as beliefs, intentions, and desires, but also to understand that other
people have beliefs, intentions, and desires that may be different from yours ( Baron- Cohen
et al., 1985). Autism research suggests that one of the main problems for people with
autism is that they do not possess a theory of mind, failing to understand that other peo-
ple have their own points of view (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Kimhi, 2014; Korkmaz, 2011).
The exact causes of autism are not yet known, but rumors and misinformation
about a possible cause of autism have been circulating on the Internet for many yearsscaffolding
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