The current state of childhood research is grounded in classical psychological theories, and Russian psychology is tied to cultural and historical theory in particular. These theories were invented to generalize and make sense of the realities of childhood as they existed at the time when these theories were created. Rapid social changes,…

In this article we report on findings from a large-scale bibliographic study conducted based on the citation practices within the field of research on adult learning. Our data consist of 151,261 citation links between more than 33,000 different authors whose papers were published in five leading international journals in the field of adult…

Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are…

This paper argues that sociocultural accounts of learning fail to answer the key question about learning--how is it possible? Accordingly, we should adopt an individualist bootstrapping methodology in providing a theory of learning. Such a methodology takes seriously the idea that learning is staged and distinguishes between a non-comprehending…

Although current interpretations of Vygotsky's theory largely assume that instruction pushes development, the issue of how this occurs has yet to be clarified. For example, the notion of "zone of proximal development" has aroused strong disagreement, and the common conceptualization of the notion of "nonspontaneous concept" has…

The article reviews the social-educational theorization of the early Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) in the light of the impact of communicative globalization in educational practice. Vygotsky proposed four "genetic domains" for investigating higher cognitive processes: the phylogenetic (humans undergoing natural…

Following calls for their greater engagement in refugee education, corporate actors have become increasingly involved in the funding and provision of education in humanitarian contexts. Their involvement has been particularly prominent in the Syria crisis, which has raised questions about the emerging role of corporate actors as global education…

The communicative potential of young children's drawings was explored through case studies of 14 children aged four - six (eight girls, six boys) at a rural English school. Informed by socio-cultural theories, the research queried "what" and "how" the children communicated through drawing, as well as "influences" on…

Objective: To examine the moderating effect of internalized media messages on ideal body shape and lifestyle in the relationships between physical exercise, self-esteem, physical self-perceptions, and body image satisfaction. Design: pre-test/posttest control group experimental design. Methods: 46 inactive women (mean age = 21.4 ± 2.1 years-old)…

This qualitative study explores networked collaborative learning in the context of an online undergraduate education course, analyzing the talk, thinking, and media that students jointly produced during a discussion hosted via video conference. Our work speaks to recent interest in online instruction, particularly in post-secondary institutions,…

The focus of this article is on the design and administration of an online computerized dynamic assessment of an important area of pragmatics: implicature comprehension (i.e., indirect meaning). The assessment centered on indirect acceptances, refusals, and opinions. Drawing on Vygotskian psychology, this assessment had a dual aim: (a) to evaluate…

This qualitative investigation used positioning theory and discourse analysis as tools to explore the evolution of the first year of a leadership team partnership between a group of university researchers and the leaders of a private non-profit literacy agency (hereafter referred to as Private Literacy Agency). The central goal of this…

A sociocultural perspective considers science textbooks as 'cultural supportive tools' with significant cultural missions. By juxtaposing symbolic, mathematical, and visual-graphical text, textbooks present the intertexts deployed by the scientific community to convey conceptual understandings in a way that no one form can. Intertextuality entails…

Teacher professional learning occurs across various contexts. Previous studies on teacher learning and changes in practice have focused on either classroom contexts or learning communities outside of school, but have rarely investigated teacher learning across multiple contexts. Investigating teacher learning across the double contexts of…

This study intended to explore elementary and middle school science teachers' metadiscourse moves (MDMs) in Vygotskian perspective. MDMs indicates teacher-led attempts to cognitively engage students in classroom's verbal occurrences. Participants of the study were 71 fifth, sixth, and seventh-grade students and their science teachers (two females,…