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For cognitive constructivists, like Bereiter and Scardamalia, “the mind” is most usefully described in terms of knowledge states. Whereas for socio-cultural constructivists, “the mind” is explicated in terms of mediated action, practices, artifacts, social and contextual relations between participants in an activity system.

The most significant historical originary figure in socio-cultural psychology is Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), whose contribution to developmental psychology rivals in importance that of Piaget. Vygotsky created a Marxist psychology that emphasizes the social and cultural genesis of all learning, as well as the explicitly meliorative ideological project that education represents. Three key ideas undergird Vygotsky’s developmental psychology: mediation, internalization, and the zone of proximal development.

For Vygotsky, learning is mediated by cultural tools, including concrete artifacts, as well as symbol systems, like language. Learning, in this view, is social, before it is individualized, and inter-mental, before it reappears as intra-mental activity. As Vygotsky put it,

We can formulate the genetic law of cultural development in the following way… Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an inter-psychological category and then within the individual child as an intra-psychological category… but it goes without saying that internalisation transforms the process itself and changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships. (Vygotsky, 1978)

The “zone of proximal development” is the single most widely-circulating construct from Vygotsky’s psychology in North American English-speaking educational settings. As Vygotsky put it, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is:

“The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers “(Vygotsky, 1978).

The main contribution that the ZPD construct makes to a psychology of learning is to highlight that our performance of any particular skill varies in its actual competence level as a function of the interactive setting, and is highly variable. On this view, then, capacity to benefit from interaction with others, and/or with rich artifacts, doesn’t just add to one’s competencies, but produces shifts in competence. And so what is critical, from an educational perspective, then, is not what the child can do alone, or without access to their computer, but what particular combination of social actors and artifacts produces, collectively, the most significant advance in culturally valued knowledge. One might conclude from this, with Courtney Cazden (1981), that performance precedes competence, and in fact, that one may never “see” competence directly, and that we only ever see performance in educational settings. Think about the significance of this theory for understanding the importance of interaction to learning, of educational technologies to learning, and of setting to assessment.