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The main point in this article is to conceptualise how demands connected to children's life conditions influence both children and caregivers. To pursue this aim I advocate an extension of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of children's learning and development. Vygotsky pursued a wholeness approach to children's development with his concept of “the child's social situation of development” as the child's dialectic experiential and motivational relation with his or her surrounding. This conception I extend with the concepts of institutional practice and activity setting. The conditions for children's activities are the institutional practice and its activity settings. But a child's activities in these settings also has to be seen from the child's perspective, that is, his or her motive orientation. To focus on the child's motive within an activity setting—requires the researcher to focus on the child's social situation of development to discern how the dialectic between the child's orientation within a...

A central dilemma in developmental psychology has been to combine general concepts with research of the individual child in all her complexity in everyday life activities. Psychologists such as Riegel, Bronfenbrenner, Burman, Morss, Hedegaard, and Walkerdine have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view. Sociologists and anthropologists, such as Corsaro, James, Jenks, Prout, and Qvotrup have instead argued for childhood studies as the alternative to developmental psychology. None of these approaches is alone sufficient; instead, it is important to formulate a theoretical approach of child and youth development that combines general psychological concepts with research of children and youth in concrete settings, such as home or school. The aim of this article is to argue that this will be possible by building on Vygotsky's cultural–historical theories of the zone of proximal development and developmental crises. A theory of children's development should include mor...

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's thinking and concept formation generated in classroom teaching can relate to daily life situations. Situated thinking and learning and theoretical thinking and learning are discussed as learning forms that can accomplish this integration. According to Vygotsky, subject-matter concepts are transformed into personal concepts through children's ability to use them in daily life. The relation between skill and content has to be presupposed in this transformation of subject-matter concepts into everyday concepts, because everyday or daily-life concepts are learned through and interwoven with practical activities in cooperation with other people. The analyses are based on distinctions between (a) societal and personal knowledge, (b) subject-matter and everyday concepts, (c) subject-matter methods and content, and (d) thinking as related to subject-matter methods and concepts as related to subject-matter content. For the personal aspect of knowledge, eve...

This article focuses on variations in children' s understanding of the evolution of species and the origin of humans, and on how these variations are related to classroom instruction. In order to evaluate the children' s concept development as influenced by teaching method, children from two classes who participated in a teaching experiment throughout the third grade were interviewed. The teaching experiment aimed at teaching the children the theoretical concepts of evolution by teaching them to integrate their knowledge into coherent models. Two experimental groups from two different schools were interviewed during the middle of the fourth grade. A control group of children from a class that had not been taught the concepts of evolution were also interviewed. Analyses of the interviews showed that the manner of instruction influenced the children's conceptions, both in the area they were taught, the evolution of species, and a related area, the origin of humans.

When schools in the United States use computers as part of their instructional practices with minority children, they tend to use the same practices that take place without the technology, namely, remediation (Boruta et al., 1983; Center for the Social Organization of Schools, 1983). Computers are used primarily as instructional delivery systems to provide drill and practice programs instead of as tools (e.g., word processors, databases, spreadsheets) to investigate problems in subject matter areas. In working with minority children, we believe enrichment is a better strategy for addressing academic achievement problems (Brophy, 1988). Our approach to using computers with minority children is to focus on enrichment. We have viewed