Hiding in Plain Sight: The Stages of Mastery/Self-Regulation in Vygotsky's Cultural-Historical Theory

Abstract

Abstract During the late 1970s and 1980s, as interest in Lev Vygotsky's work was growing rapidly, most of his writings were unavailable in English. Translations of Vygotsky's work that reflect the breadth and depth of his thinking became available in the mid-to late 1990s. However, this work has yet to become an integral part of educational psychology. This article first presents Vygotsky's unique view of cognitive development, followed by the central framework of his theory—the stages of sign use/concept development. These stages are also the stages of self-regulation/mastery of one's thinking and they culminate in the development of higher mental functions. Also discussed are current conceptions of self-regulation, a comparison with Vygotsky's view, and the implications of Vygotsky's thinking for curriculum and instruction. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I thank the reviewers for their comments. Notes 1The editors of Mind in Society also stated in the preface that they had taken "significant liberties" with Vygotsky's work (CitationCole, John-Steiner, Scribner, & Souberman, 1978, p. x) 2The set of six lectures briefly analyzed then-current theory on the development in childhood of perception, memory, thinking, emotions, imagination, and the problem of will, including brief statements of his views 3Vygotsky's published lectures and writings have not appeared in the order in which they were developed. For example, two of the six lectures just mentioned (delivered in 1932) contain only a few sentences on psychological systems and connections among mental functions. The full discussion of psychological systems is in a report of a 1930 talk entitled "On Psychological Systems." This talk currently appears in Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology, Volume 3 in the English edition of Vygotsky's collected works, published in 1997 4The cross-cultural study planned by Vygotsky and Luria and conducted by Luria during two summers in remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kighizia reflect this focus. The study compared two isolated and illiterate groups and three groups with varying literacy levels and some exposure to technology. The groups were compared on perception, generalization and abstraction, and other cognitive tasks (see CitationLuria, 1976) 5Alexander Luria and Alexsei Leont'ev, two close associates of Vygotsky, stated that he originally referred to his conception of human consciousness as the "cultural-historical theory of the psyche" (CitationLeont'ev & Luria, 1968, p. 342), a designation that reflects the sources of the artificial stimuli that develop thinking 6In discussing the crisis in psychology in 1926, Vygotsky (1982–1984/1997h) noted that science needs books not that reveal the truth but that instruct us on the search for truth. He placed Hegel in that group, noting "it would not be difficult to show that Hegel is an idealist, it is proclaimed from the housetops" (p. 266). Despite this fact, Hegel had identified "methodological truth (dialectics);" he was "limping towards the truth" (p. 266) 7This essay was written in 1930–1931. The writings with original publication dates of 1929 and 1934 reflect the year a selection was written, and the 1935 publications were written in 1934. The exceptions are (a) the set of six lectures in psychology delivered in 1932 that were published first in 1960, and (b) the initial research on concept development ("An Experimental Study of Concept Development" [1935]), which was completed in 1930. The essay by Vygotsky and Luria entitled "Tool and Symbol in Child Development" was written in 1930 and submitted to Murchinson's Handbook of Child Psychology but never published (Citationvan der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, p. 188). Also, unless explicitly stated in the text, other works were written in the period from 1929 to 1931 8Vygotsky (1982–1984/1998d) reported this example from the thinking of Kurt Lewin on the characteristics of 2-year-olds 9Vygotsky (1982–1984/1997h) stated, in his discussion of the crisis in psychology, that "everything that was and is genuinely scientific belongs to Marxist psychology" (p. 341). He was referring to dialectics and "a cornerstone of materialism is the proposition that consciousness and the brain are a product, a part of nature" (p. 328). A theory that is found to be inaccurate may be scientific, but false 10In the 1920s, various factions vied with one another to be noticed as the Marxist psychology—a strategy decried by Vygotsky. Psychology, he noted, needed a theory of the mind, not "fortuitous utterances" (Vygotsky, 1982–1984/1997h, p. 313). In contrast, "Vygotsky had studied the 'classics of Marxism' for deeper reasons than political convenience or ideological fashion … he was seeking unified understanding of human beings as natural objects with conscious minds" (CitationJoravsky, 1989, p. 261) 11An American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, pursued this direction in child development, maintaining that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," a view that was soon discredited 12 CitationMinick (1987) described Vygotsky's use of "word meaning" as introducing a new period in his thinking. Minick noted, however, that Vygotsky did not abandon concepts that were central to his work but expanded and reworked them (p. 18) 13Issues related to egocentric or private speech researched in contemporary studies include parental interactive style, age, task difficulty, and syntactic structures (see, e.g., CitationDiaz & Berk, 1992) 14The authors cited the chapter by Vygotsky entitled "The Genesis of Higher Mental Functions," translated by James V. Wertsch and published in 1981. However, they did not incorporate into their writing the description of the qualitative "revolutionary" shifts that occur in children's thinking mentioned by CitationWertsch (1981) in the introduction to the chapter (pp. 133–145), and in the chapter itself (CitationVygotsky, 1981, p. 150) 15 CitationMartin and McLellan (2008) presented a penetrating analysis of the ramifications of the many definitions of self-regulation, including misunderstandings of conceptual and empirical issues, and related issues. Vygotsky (1982–1984/1997h) addressed the issue of different terms attached to the same or overlapping constructs as a "troubled condition of the language [that] reflects a troubled condition of the science" (p. 282) because "scientific language is a tool of thought" (p. 281), and "what is true of the word is true of the theory" (p. 291). (Current examples include self-concept, self-worth, self-image, self-esteem, self-efficacy.) 16Everyday concepts, such as table or dog, that child learns through daily experience are saturated with personal experience and do not form a system (Vygotsky, 1934/1987a, pp. 234–238). In contrast, a "system emerges only with the development of the scientific [academic] concept" (p. 223) 17Vygotsky (1934/1987a) referred to the representation of a concept in terms of other concepts as "the law of concept equivalence" (p. 226) 18Vygotsky wrote a book on pedagogy in psychology that was published in 1926. This was 3 years before the first outlines of his cultural-historical theory were developed (CitationVygotsky, 1929). Translated as Educational Psychology in English, it does not reflect his insights about cognitive development 19The other aspect of the relationship between the ideal and present forms is the young child's interactions with a primary caregiver in learning adult speech; see Vygotsky (1935/1994c)