From Moscow to the Fifth Dimension: Memoir of a Slow Learner

This essay contains an account of my professional life from its beginnings as a third-generation, Skinnerian, mathematical learning theorist to its current state as an interdisciplinary developmentalist. Following completion of my PhD at Indiana University, I spent the academic year at Moscow State University where I worked under the direction of Alexander Luria, whose ideas led to my lifelong interest in cultural-historical approaches to human development. For more than a decade, I conducted cross-cultural research on the role of formal schooling in the cognitive development of children growing up in a variety of sociocultural conditions. Since the late 1970s, my research has focused on the design of educational activities involving partnerships between institutions of higher learning and their communities. A constant concern throughout this work has been the inappropriate use of psychological methods when comparing people from different culture backgrounds and a search for the means required to remediate the resulting difficulties.