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Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations

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Alexander Luria's book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations was published in 1976. Most of Luria's observational data was collected in the early 1930's during a time of radical restructuring in the Soviet Union. Alexander Luria was one of the founders of cultural-historical psychology. Luria wrote this book I believe to show the sociohistorical roots of all basic cognitive processes.

Luria believed that the structure of thought depends upon the structure of the dominant types of activity in different cultures. This book was written at a time when there was an opportunity to observe how all of the reforms happening during this time not only changed the broadening of outlook but also changes in the structure of cognitive process. Luria's work was at the time very ground breaking. His work was primarily focusing on cross-cultural psychology. The aim of the research in this book was to analyze the sociohistorical shaping of mental processes.
Luria focused primarily on cognitive processes like perception, deduction and inference, reasoning and problem solving, imagination, and self-analysis and self-awareness. Luria looked at the cultural development of undereducated minorities in a remote part of central Asia to collect his data. One of the main arguments of Luria in his book is that many mental processes are social and historical in origin. I thought that Luria did a very detailed job during the time period he was collecting data of creating a solid picture of the different types of cognitive processes humans go through of different cultural backgrounds. Each chapter in this book gives an account of the tools he used as a researcher to study his subjects. For each area of cognitive process, Luria would do tests with subjects he was studying. He first explains at the beginning of each chapter why it is important to do that particular cognitive process and explains the historical and cultural foundations of being able to perform a cognitive process. Luria then proceeds to demonstrate the cognitive process with his subjects and shows that data collected while working with them.

I believe this book is very relevant to our time due to the fact that we live in a nation of hundreds of different cultures coinciding. Our classrooms are made up of students of different cultural backgrounds and historical backgrounds. This work can provide further insight to how students of different cultures and the history of their cultures play into their human consciousness and the process in which they learn. This book has helped me as an educator better understand how my students learn and how their cultural background and history play a role in how my students learn. It is also relevant to how we teach students and differentiate the instruction to meet their needs.