Mercedes Chaves Jaime (7 November 1956 La Uvita, Colombia - 22 August 2005 Tunja, Colombia) was a Colombian psycopedagogue, professor and educational researcher. Chaves established herself as a notable Vygotskian pedagogue in Latin America.
Mercedes Chaves Jaime (7 November 1956 La Uvita, Colombia - 22 August 2005 Tunja, Colombia) was a Colombian psycopedagogue, professor and educational researcher. Chaves established herself as a notable Vygotskian pedagogue in Latin America.
Her work extended to early childhood education and cognitive stages for child development in read/write processes. She was inspired by the work of the Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, the founder of cultural-historical psychology.
Chaves was a proponent of the empty acts theory in children's learning processes. The theory argues that the relationship between teachers and students must be focused on the Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, in order to avoid negative interactions with other students, potencializing the ability to interpret, as a complex interaction between the text and the reader, the information symbols represent, and to be able to re-create those same symbols so that others students can derive the same meaning.
Mercedes Chaves attended the National Pedagogic and Technological University of Colombia in Tunja, studying early childhood education and getting a degree in Bachelor of Education. In 1993 Chaves founded the Lev Vygotsky Research Center and Private School, located in Tunja. In 1993 she went on Bogotá to finish her studies in Education at the Pontifical Xavierian University, receiving a Master of Arts in Education with honors. From 1994 to 2004, Chaves was an academic in the field of child psychopedagogy, teaching at National Pedagogic and Technological University of Colombia.
Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning. The field of educational psychology relies heavily on quantitative methods, including testing and measurement, to enhance educational activities related to instructional design, classroom management, and assessment, which serve to facilitate learning processes in various educational settings across the lifespan.
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psychological development in children. He published on a diverse range of subjects, and from multiple views as his perspective changed over the years. Among his students was Alexander Luria and Kharkiv school of psychology.
Instructional scaffolding is the support given to a student by an instructor throughout the learning process. This support is specifically tailored to each student; this instructional approach allows students to experience student-centered learning, which tends to facilitate more efficient learning than teacher-centered learning. This learning process promotes a deeper level of learning than many other common teaching strategies.
Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students by imparting to them skills, and the basis on how to learn a specific subject and schemata required to measure up to the specific performance requirement. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving. Student-centered learning theory and practice are based on the constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the learner's critical role in constructing meaning from new information and prior experience.
Early childhood education (ECE), also known as nursery education, is a branch of education theory that relates to the teaching of children from birth up to the age of eight. Traditionally, this is up to the equivalent of third grade. ECE is described as an important period in child development.
The psychology of learning is a theoretical science that covers the various psychological theories that relate with learning. Throughout history, there has been many various psychological learning theories. Some take on a more behaviorist approach which focuses on inputs and reinforcements. Other approaches, such as theories related to neuroscience and social cognition, focus more on the brain's organization and structure to define learning. Some psychological approaches, such as social constructivism, focus more on one's interaction with the environment and with others. Other theories, such as those related to motivation, like the growth mindset, focus more on the individual.
Constructivism is a theory in education that recognizes learners construct new understandings and knowledge, integrating with what they already know. This includes knowledge gained prior to entering school. It is associated with various philosophical positions, particularly in epistemology as well as ontology, politics, and ethics. The origin of the theory is also linked to Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch tv, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Cognitive apprenticeship is a theory that emphasizes the importance of the process in which a master of a skill teaches that skill to an apprentice.
Sheltered instruction is an approach to teaching English language learners which integrates language and content instruction. The phrase "sheltered instruction," original concept, and underlying theory of comprehensible input are all credited to Stephen Krashen.
Dynamic assessment is a kind of interactive assessment used in education and the helping professions. Dynamic assessment is a product of the research conducted by developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It identifies
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the distance between what a learner can do without help, and what they can do with support from someone with more knowledge or expertise. The concept was introduced, but not fully developed, by psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) during the last three years of his life. Vygotsky argued that a child gets involved in a dialogue with the "more knowledgeable other" such as a peer or an adult and gradually, through social interaction and sense-making, develops the ability to solve problems independently and do certain tasks without help. Following Vygotsky, some educators believe that the role of education is to give children experiences that are within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning such as skills and strategies.
Anna Stetsenko, born in the former Soviet Union, is a developmental psychologist at the City University of New York. She has developed theories about infants' concepts of thinking and speaking based on the research of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky and Jean Piaget. Stetsenko has expanded Vygotskyan and Piagetian ideas of how children learn through memory and experience.
Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.
The bioecological model of development is a theoretical model of gene–environment interactions in human development. This model, first proposed by Urie Bronfenbrenner and Stephen J. Ceci, in 1994, is an extension of Bronfenbrenner's original theoretical model of human development, called ecological systems theory. Bronfenbrenner developed the bioecological model after recognizing that the individual was overlooked in other theories of human development, which were largely focused on the context of development.
Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge.
In the framework of the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) the leading activity is the activity, or cooperative human action, which plays the most essential role in child development during a given developmental period. Although many activities may play a role in a child's development at any given time, the leading activity is theorized to be the type of social interaction that is most beneficial in terms of producing major developmental accomplishments, and preparing the child for the next period of development. Through engaging in leading activities, a child develops a wide range of capabilities, including emotional connection with others, motivation to engage in more complex social activities, the creation of new cognitive abilities, and the restructuring of old ones.
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind and activity. It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience. Especially since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process". Core ideas are: 1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; 2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning – and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.
Leonid Vladimirovich Zankov — was a Soviet psychologist and defectologist, a member of Vygotsky Circle and a major administrator of scientific research in the Soviet Union. Zankov specialized in the psychology of memory, psychology of abnormal development (defectology), and educational research and practice. He authored one of the two most prominent educational conceptions of the so-called "developmental learning" that is known under the name of its creator as the "Zankov system of developmental learning".
In learning, co-construction is a distinctive approach where the emphasis is on collaborative or partnership working. The approach includes some more interactional processes such as cooperation and coordination.