Aaro Toomela Bücher

The book offers a comprehensive exploration of human cognitive development by integrating various psychological domains, including comparative, cultural, developmental, and neuropsychology. Contributors highlight the interplay between individual cognition and sociocultural contexts, emphasizing how cultural participation profoundly transforms psychological processes. This interdisciplinary approach also appeals to anthropologists, philosophers, and semioticians, making it a valuable resource for understanding the collective nature of human thought.

The book explores three fundamental types of thought that form the foundation of scientific thinking. It delves into the distinctions between these thought processes, providing insights into how they influence scientific inquiry and understanding. Through this examination, readers gain a deeper appreciation for the cognitive frameworks that drive scientific exploration and innovation.

The Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago, but the traces left in occupied countries by this monstrous system still affect the lives of millions of people. Under the glittering surface of newsworthy events that regularly appear in the mass media, there are many other wounds hard to heal. The system of education is one of the social structures that was fundamentally affected by Soviet power. Due to unique historical, demographic, and cultural reasons, the experiences of other countries providing education to non-native speaking students cannot be adopted in Estonia without first studying the situation thoroughly. The Estonian Ministry of Education and Research launched the longitudinal study Non-Estonian Child in an Estonian-Language School, with the aim to understand how Estonian schools cope with an increasing number of non-Estonians studying in a second language. This book brings together some results of that study.

Child development is a holistic process multiply determined by complex interactions of individual and environmental properties. It is becoming increasingly obvious that child development cannot be understood by common data analysis procedures, where data are aggregated over individuals into some group-level forms, fragmented studies of relationships between a few variables torn out of the context of the whole, and studies that are either cross-sectional or conceptualize development as a quantitative change. This collection of empirical studies aims at understanding child development in early primary school by applying a consistently systemic, person-oriented developmental approach. An immensely complex web of developmental relationships between cognitive and non-cognitive processes in educational settings is emerging in the synthesis of the empirical contributions to this book.