Psychology in Russia: State of Art (Dec 2022)
Orienting Activity of the Subject as a Mechanism for Instruction, Learning and Development
Abstract
Background. The 120th anniversary was celebrated in 2022 of the birth of the outstanding Soviet scientist P.Ya. Galperin (1902–1988), who made a signi# cant contribution to the development of Russian psychology. Objective. To analyze the signi# cance of P.Ya. Galperin’s concept of “orienting activity” for the study of processes of mental development, learning and instruction. Design. ! e concept of “the zone of proximal development” (L.S. Vygotsky) is interpreted in light of the doctrine of orienting activity, presenting three examples from di$ erent areas of research, where the concept of orienting activity is used to analyze the phenomena of mental development in children and adults. Results. 1. ! e concept of orienting activity makes it possible to substantially concretize the psychological content and mechanisms of “the zone of proximal development.” 2. ! e subject’s orienting activity plays a key role, which is implicitly present in the method of “cognitive learning” developed in the Geneva psychological school and reproducing (according to the followers of J. Piaget) “an autonomous process of constructing new operational structures”. 3. ! e study examines the organization of orienting activity in the process of children’s mastery of the concepts of combinatorial thinking in a learning experiment based on Galperin’s method of stage-by-stage formation of mental actions and concepts. 4. ! e role of a client’s orienting activity is explicated, and its special organization by the psychologist who is counseling parents on the mental development and upbringing of children and adolescents. Conclusion. P.Ya. Galperin’s discovery regarding the structure of human activity and introduction of the concept of “orientation,” and the creation of a method for studying the orienting component of action as distinct from the executive component, lead to a much deeper understanding of the central problem posed by L.S. Vygotsky: the interrelation and mechanisms of connection between the processes of learning, instruction (teaching) and development.
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