This chapter discusses conceptual commonalities underlying emerging sociocultural approaches that examine how developmental processes at individual, social, and cultural levels constitute each other, and considers implications for the conduct of research on developmental processes in sociocultural activity. It focuses on how we conceive of developmental change, of the relation between the individual and others, and of activity as a unit of analysis. It examines issues of how to observe learning, reinterpreting some methods that have traditionally attempted to isolate individual learning and proposing alternative approaches that are more consistent with a sociocultural approach.

We begin with a general discussion of sociocultural theory and then concentrate on implications for the conduct and interpretation of research on children's learning, employing a series of studies we carried out on children solving mazes with or without their mothers' assistance, to examine transformations in how learning can be observed from a sociocultural perspective.

Sociocultural approaches

A complex of related but heterogeneous proposals for sociocultural theory are emerging from discourse across disciplines and cultural and historical communities. The various proposals represent a general agreement revolving around a view of processes of individual development as they constitute and are constituted by interpersonal and cultural/ historical activities and practices. The stance of sociocultural approaches to child development is that the development of children occurs as they participate in sociocultural activities. In this section, we provide an overview of what we see as key common ground in a variety of emerging sociocultural approaches.

Sociocultural perspectives assert that individual developmental processes are inherently involved with the actual activities in which children engage with others in cultural practices and institutions, and that variation is inherent to human functioning.