Activity theory: History, research and application

Abstract

This paper outlines activity theory (henceforth called AT), a theoretical approach developed by the psychologists of the former Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s and continuing to the present. AT defines 'activity' as a goal directed system in which cognition, behaviour and motivation are integrated and organized by goals and the mechanisms of self-regulation. The purpose of this paper is to describe AT, and to compare it to the orientations widely adopted in the West, primarily information processing and cognitive psychology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 103 citations exist upstream.