Piaget has su!ered a great deal of criticism that his theory of psychological development neglects the social nature of human development. Much of this criticism has come from researchers following a Vygotskian approach and comparing Piaget's approach unfavorably with that of Vygotsky. Smith (1995) refers us to Piaget's collected articles on sociology (Piaget, 1995) to argue convincingly that i...

A growing body of evidence indicates that toxic contamination, both indoor and outdoor, negatively affects sociocultural systems and that this in turn affects the social and psychological responses to the contamination. Using secondary case studies and primary survey, interview and observation data from three toxic contamination situations, this paper conceptualizes and summarizes the findings ...

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi’an Jiaotong University. He is founder of the Sociocultural Theory...

Teacher cognition, an essential concept for understanding effective instructional practice and teacher development, has been gaining considerable attention across the globe in recent years (Borg 20...

We report the findings of a detailed study of the ways in which a group of paediatric nurses think about the notion of average and variation. We describe some continuities and discontinuities between mathematical and nursing epistemologies, and draw some general conclusions about the ways in which more general mathematical meanings are constructed and 'transferred' that takes account of both co...

Purpose – To show that the neo-pragmatist position of Richard Rorty, when combined with a sociocultural perspective, provides library and information science (LIS) with a forceful epistemological tool. Design/methodology/approach – Literature-based conceptual analysis of: historical development of pragmatism in relation to other epistemological positions; neo-pragmatism as a non-dualist, both p...