Piaget, Vygotsky & Beyond

Future issues for developmental psychology and education

Leslie Smith, Julie Dockrell, Peter Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134755059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are arguably the two most influential figures in psychological research. Although born in the same year of 1896, it is only over the last decade or so that the work of Vygotsky has rivalled that of Piaget in importance in the Western world. This collection of original contributions by leading researchers celebrates the 1996 centenary of the births of the two most seminal figures in education and developmental psychology - Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Research in their footsteps continues worldwide and is growing.
What are the implications for the future for this extensive programme? Which of the large body of findings has proved most important to current research? Based around five themes, these original contributions cover educational intervention and teaching, social collaboration and learning, cognitive skills and domains, the measurement of development and the development of modal understanding.

Piaget, Vygotsky and Beyond is a uniquely comprehensive collection, drawing together a wide range of themes in psychology and educational research that would otherwise be dispersed throughout a variety of different publications. It will be useful to advanced scholars and practitioner-researchers in both education and psychology.

Part 1

Educational intervention and teaching

1
Educational implementation and teaching
‘School knowledge’ and psychological theory

Michael Beveridge

THE OPTIMISTIC AGENDA

The development of psychology in the twentieth century can reasonably be seen as a success story. It has broadened and deepened its academic base as well as taking important steps as a profession. However, in the UK, psychology, which was once thought to make a significant contribution to the professional knowledge of teachers, is facing difficulties in influencing educational practices. In this paper I will examine some of the problems which we need to understand and overcome if future generations of learners are to benefit from the implementation of psychological research in educational contexts.

Many teachers, especially the newly qualified (Blandford, 1995), remain ignorant and deeply sceptical about the use of psychology in education. This is unfortunate because in the move away from grand theory, psychology has been making progress in the study of specific problems with practical applications in education. Psychology has put much effort into modelling processes. Of obvious relevance to education is the substantial body of work on cognitive processes in reading, writing and numeracy (e.g. Healy and Bourne, 1995). Other potentially useful areas of research include the roles of analogy, external representations, reasoning, implicit knowledge acquisition, social factors and the role of language in collaborative learning, the value of mixed modes of teaching, and cognitive apprenticeship (Pressley and McCormick, 1995).

Psychologists are also developing models of how learning develops over time, which take account of the structure of the tasks and the way they are taught. Work on small group teaching and peer tutoring shows that there may be many pathways to learning. Research is also continuing into how information technology can be used creatively to expand rather than narrow down children’s learning environments. There is an urgent need for this research because designers of educational software are currently no better informed by research than textbook authors were fifty years ago.

This psychological research agenda looks promising for educational intervention with so many important new developments now being pursued. New areas and methods of work will, of course, be required. For example, because teachers are concerned with student learning over an extended period of time and in different contexts psychologists should connect research on ‘situated cognition’ to studies of classrooms. In this connection there is a substantial body of research which has attempted to describe the ‘meaning making’ activities in classrooms which lead children to learn (Pollard and Filer, 1996). However this work is often highly interpretative, relies heavily on the subjectivity of the observer and fails to systematically test these interpretations. Nevertheless this research is attractive to practitioners because it presents data in narrative form from which they can recognise events similar to their own experiences. This work could usefully take account of psychological research into the long-term retention and use of both knowledge and skills. This would require studies of the individual learning histories of children, which investigate the scenes and situations they encounter in home and school.

Another fertile area of study which will benefit from this type of longitudinal research is that of teacher expertise. Developments in the study of expertise indicate that the intuitive knowledge of gifted teachers gained through experience can be formulated in ways which can be communicated to new recruits to the teaching profession (Borko and Livingston, 1989). Hopefully the pervasive idea that only teachers understand teaching will be less easy to sustain in future. Especially if, out of the usual complexities revealed by research, some useful simplifications emerge.

IMPLEMENTATION: PROCESS AND PROBLEMS

From the above, it might be concluded that the educational impact of psychological research is likely to increase with a consequent improvement in educational standards. Certainly the potential is there, but, as I will now suggest, the impact might well be minimal without careful consideration and resolution of the problems of research implementation in education. Simply doing the ‘right’ research will not be enough.

The relationship between research and practice in education has been a cause for concern for a considerable time. It has been the subject of several reviews and numerous formal and informal meetings. It is now clear that research-based educational intervention is not a straightforward process. Problems are well documented. These include (Havelock and Huberman, 1977) (see Table 1):

1. problems in managing the implementation process,
2. problems arising from the personalities and behaviour of those involved,
3. inadequate resources and organisational capacities, and
4. opposition from key groups in society to the proposed reforms.

Table 1 Problems in research utilisation

These are factors which work against the application of new psychological ideas in education. However, even if psychological ideas are used there is, in addition to these other problems, the possibility that psychology can be distorted in the application process.’ For example, two decades ago Piaget was used as a theoretical justification for discovery learning. Piaget’s ideas on the important role of certain child activities in the development of logical thought were seen as supporting a classroom environment in which children engaged with physical objects so as to inevitably discover relationships of e.g. quantity, size, volume and mass. Learning by discovery was seen as, in some sense, ‘real’ and meaningful for the child. This, in theory, was contrasted with didactic methods in which the meaning was seen to emanate from a teacher, but often failed to be clearly understood by children. Piaget’s emphasis on the role of action in the genesis of thought was used to support the view that children could learn on their own. As we know, and as is demonstrated in this volume, Piaget paid great attention to the role of other persons in learning and development. But these aspects of his work were largely ignored by liberal educators with a particular agenda. The distortion of psychological theories by educators is difficult to avoid given their tendency to want simple, easily applied, solutions; especially if psychologists adopt weak techniques of dissemination to minimally satisfy funding conditions.

One particular problem to be addressed is the way that psychology has avoided the process of providing user communities with syntheses of current competing theories. Consider the following passage from Van der Veer and Valsinner’s (1991, p. 392) Understanding Vygotsky:

A present-day psychologist is most likely to adopt a non-dialectical, ‘either-or’ perspective when determining the ‘class membership’ of one or another approach in psychology. Hence the frequent non-dialectical contrasts between ‘Piagetian’ and ‘Vygotskian’ approaches, or the widespread separation of psychologists into ‘social’ versus ‘cognitive’ categories, which seem to occupy our minds in their meta-psychological activities. Even the existence of an overlap of the two (‘social cognition’) does not alter the non-dialectical classification of the psychological ‘mindscape’, since the focus of that taxonomy is mostly ‘book-keeping’, rather than synthesising ideas from opposing camps.

This quotation captures an important problem to be resolved if psychology is to be made useful to teachers. Many trainee teachers, when forced in their written assignments to decide which of two poorly understood theories was correct, promptly dismissed both as irrelevant. Without serious attempts at synthesis by the research community the case for relevance for the teaching context is not easily established.

The research implementation process in education is poorly understood. Attempts to characterise solutions to implementation problems have a tendency to end up with crude and relatively useless taxonomies and favour

SEVEN MODELS OF RESEARCH UTILISATION

The classical linear model: research development diffusion and dissemination application.

The problem-solving model in which the researcher supplies evidence or conclusions needed to solve a policy problem or implement the policy: knowledge needed relevant to policy search for relevant knowledge or commissionin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Editorial note
• Introduction
• Part 1 Educational intervention and teaching
• Part 2 Social collaboration and learning
• Part 3 Cognitive skills and domain specificity
• Part 4 Measurement of development
• Part 5 Development of modal understanding
• Postface
• References
• Name index
• Subject index