Paper On Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky was born to two middle-class Jews in the town of Orsha, Russia in 1896. He grew up to love poetry, and began writing literary reviews for various journals during the time that he was a student in university. According to René van der Veer (2007) in this book, Lev Vygotsky, Vygotsky’s religious upbringing had an effect on his quality of life and papers that he wrote in his lifetime. His Jewish background, though secular in nature, tended to lean toward negative in his university years. Anti-Semitism was high, and very few Jews were able to make it through university. Vygotsky was one of those three percent though. After he graduated from university, he worked for several years not in psychology, but in art. It was not until 1923 that he was able to set up a small laboratory in the school that he was teaching at, and began small experiments. He then went to work for the Institute of Experimental Psychology where he studied and tested his theories for most of the rest of his life. Many of his findings and papers were based on children, thus Vygotsky is regarded by many as a childhood psychologist (Veer, 2005, p. 13-25). Vygotsky’s developmental theory that will be discussed in this paper focuses on the cognition of children. …show more content…
Santrock’s, A Topical Approach to Life-Span Development textbook (2014), the main idea of Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development is that children actively construct their knowledge and