Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) explains behavior by studying whole, purposeful human activities, not isolated actions, as its basic unit of analysis. It looks at how a person’s goals, the tools they use, and the surrounding people and rules all shape what gets done. The approach builds on Vygotsky’s idea that the mind develops through this kind of tool-mediated activity.

Key Points

Overview

Activity Theory, also known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, holds that any human activity can be described and analyzed. Every activity has a structure. It happens under certain conditions and can be carried out using particular tools, instruments, or artifacts to meet a purpose.

In Activity Theory, human activities are the unit for analysis (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006). The focus of study is how people intentionally use tools or artifacts to accomplish tasks. Consciousness and activity, the theory holds, go together (Nardi, 1996).

This means the two are not independent; they are interdependent. Activities carry intention, and consciousness is what carrying them out looks like within a social context (McAvinia, 2016).

“You are what you do,” in the words of Nardi (1996). Artifacts are the tools people use to accomplish tasks, and they can improve culturally specific ones such as language.

Tools mediate what people do. Because of this, artifacts such as computers become “crucial mediators of human experience” (McAvinia, 2016).

Activity Theory aims to describe a purposeful activity. It looks at the individual, tools or artifacts, other people, and the conditions needed for it. The result of that activity is its outcome. What the activity actually produces may or may not match what was originally intended.

Activity Theory originated in Marxist philosophy (Wertsch, 1981) and in the work of Soviet psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s.

The theory’s designers, including Aleksei Leont’ev and Lev Vygotsky, thought behaviorism and psychoanalysis were inadequate approaches to psychology. They drew instead on Marx’s critique of social theory.

Luria and Leont’ev proposed the concept of artifact-mediated and object-oriented action (CRADLE, 2011), rejecting the behaviorist idea that activities are simply responses to a stimulus (McAvinia, 2016).

In Vygotsky’s view, learning is social, and infants learn to understand the world through interacting with it and through the construction of artifacts.

Vygotsky (1978) drew on the equation of action and consciousness to argue that using and constructing artifacts is part of human development. The mind develops through doing activities.

Key Principles

Activity Theory posits that consciousness, context, and activity are the same. Context is not separate from activity. The activity itself is the context, and participants act consciously within it.

In application, an activity theorist would say that a designer cannot fix a single idea of the user when designing a computer application. That is because the designer’s intentions also shape the system.

To activity theorists, the mind is a product of particular activities. It also reflects the relationships between subject and object (McAvinia, 2016).

Internalization and Externalization

In activity theory, the mind is not separate from an activity, or distant from it. Subjects negotiate how they act and which activities they take on.

Individuals come to understand the world through their own activities. On Vygotsky’s view, they first internalize that understanding, then later externalize it to carry out a new activity.

Using mediating artifacts teaches people how those artifacts work within an activity. In turn, people can create new artifacts of their own.

Engestrom and Miettinen (1999) describe internalization as tied to the reproduction of culture, and externalization as the creation of new artifacts that make cultural transformation possible. On their view, these two processes are inseparable.

Activities are Object-Oriented and Lead to an Outcome

According to Activity Theory, humans have intentions, and they consider them consciously through cognition. What makes an activity different from other actions is that it has an object (Issroff and Scanlon, 2002).

This object motivates the activity. The activity itself is focused on turning that object into an outcome.

When people design, learn, or sell something, they are not only doing that thing. Their “dreams, emotions, and feelings are also directed toward something in the world” (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006).

Davydov (1999) describes this as an internal change. Transforming an object into an outcome, he writes, means “making evident its essence and altering it.” He distinguishes two types of transformation.

In a formal transformation, people transform things by classifying them into categories. Placing a tomato in the category “vegetable” does not physically change it.

Only its organization and categorization change.

In a dialectical transformation, by contrast, people “find resources and create conditions” (Davydov, 1999). A farmer who locates and plants seeds to produce food is a dialectical transformation: the seeds physically change as they grow. Transformations, in short, can be cognitive as well as physical (McAvinia, 2016).

Activities are Mediated and There are Mediating artifacts

Engestrom (1987) saw humans’ ability to make and use tools with intention as the key change from animals to humans. In his view, this marked the start of social order and the division of labor.

Tools let people carry out their intentions. But the reverse is also true: people are shaped by the tools they use (McAvinia, 2016).

Artifacts change over time. As Cole (1999) notes, they evolve to carry the modifications of everyone who has used them throughout history.

Tools can also limit what people can do, because they restrict how a person interacts with the object. Someone with a sponge and bucket must approach the goal of “cleaning a house” differently from someone with a power washer (McAvinia, 2016).

Activities Have Rules and a Division of Labor

The rules of a community and its division of labor also shape activities. This is not a limiting structure, though. Every node within an activity system is connected, and each one can influence the others (McAvinia, 2016).

Rules

An individual’s activities are mediated by the community they belong to, and by that community’s rules. These rules can be spoken or unspoken.

A doctor’s rules are written down, in the Hippocratic oath. Table manners at a dinner party, by contrast, are often tacit (McAvinia, 2016).

Division of Labor

Activities are also mediated by how labor is divided within a community, and this differs by context. A workplace divides labor by role. A classroom, on the other hand, may divide labor among everyone (McAvinia, 2016).

Operations and Actions Contribute to Activities

The activity system has three levels: activity, action, and operation.

An activity is the larger system, in which an individual aims to transform an object into an outcome. An action is goal-oriented and contributes to that overall activity. An operation is an automatic process that contributes to the actions within the activity.

Changing conditions at any level can interrupt the activity. The system can even break. Activities can become actions if they lose their object, their specific motivation.

According to Kuutti (1996), actions are undertaken consciously and have goals, but those goals are not the same as the object of the activity. The same action can contribute to different activities (McAvinia, 2016).

Contradictions in Activity Systems

Contradiction is a term used in Activity Theory to describe misfits within elements, between them, between different activities, or between different developmental phases of a single activity (Kuutti, 1996).

According to Engestrom (1987), there are four types of contradictions:

1. Primary contradictions: contradictions that happen when a subject has more than one value system; for example, a doctor who both wants to heal patients and needs to run his practice as a business (McAvinia, 2016).
2. Secondary contradictions: contradictions that occur when something new is introduced to an activity, and adapting to this change causes conflict.
3. Tertiary contradictions: when the adoption of a new method for achieving the object causes problems with other parts of the activity.
4. Quaternary contradictions: changes to an activity resulting in conflicts with other activities.

Activities are Constantly Changing

Finally, activity theorists emphasize that modeling an activity to analyze it does not mean the activity itself is fixed or unchangeable.

As activities evolve, some old aspects can remain. That is why knowing an activity’s history matters. Activity theory works as a “lens” for viewing an activity at different points in time (Russell, 2002).

Students illustrate this well. At one point, a student may focus only on getting good exam results to progress through university. At another point, the same student may instead be chasing real mastery and understanding (McAvinia, 2016).

First Generation Activity Theory

Activity theory, as formulated by Vygotsky, has three key principles, which can be modeled as three nodes: human subjects use tools to achieve an object.

The object is the motivation for the activity, and the activity is mediated by one or more artifacts, which can also be called tools, instruments, or technologies.

The process of a subject working towards an object using an artifact creates an outcome. This outcome can be the same or different from the object and even unintended or undesired.

Evidence: The Mediated-Memory Experiments

The subject-tool-object triad was not just philosophical speculation. Vygotsky and his students tested it. They used what Vygotsky called the method of double stimulation.

The clearest demonstration is the programme of mediated-memory experiments Vygotsky ran with Leontiev in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is the theory’s empirical foundation.

Aim: To test whether “higher” mental functions like deliberate memorization are built through culturally-provided tools, not simple maturation.

Memory performance was compared with and without such a tool available (Vygotsky, 1978).

Method: Children and adults of different ages tried to remember a list of items. Some did this unaided. Others were given a set of otherwise-meaningless picture cards, free to use as memory aids or not.

Participants were never told how to use the cards. This let the experimenter watch how each person solved a task beyond their unaided capacity (Vygotsky, 1978; Leontiev, 1931).

Findings: Unaided recall stayed small at every age. With the cards, performance diverged sharply by age.

Pre-school children barely benefited. They treated the cards as a separate game, not a memory tool. School-age children showed a large jump in aided recall, actively using the cards as mediating artifacts.

Adults again showed little difference between the two conditions. But the reason was the opposite of young children’s. Their strategy had become internalized, so recall was high even without the cards.

Conclusion: Memorization develops through a genetic sequence, Vygotsky and Leontiev concluded. There is an unmediated natural form. There is an externally mediated form using a cultural tool.

Finally comes an internalized form, where the mediating operation is carried out mentally. For activity theory more broadly, the experiments were offered as evidence that higher psychological functions are built through tool-mediated activity and only later internalized.

This is first-generation activity theory’s core structure.

The studies are frequently cited as strong support for mediation being developmentally real. The reversal between children’s and adults’ reliance on the cards is hard to explain if memory simply matures with age.

Still, the original studies predate modern reporting standards. Procedures were not standardized. Much of the Russian-language material was only partially translated (Roth and Lee, 2007).

Second Generation Activity Theory

Leont’ev extended Vygotsky’s model of activity theory. He added the socially mediated nature of activity, and the roles other people play within it.

Activities, on his view, also depend on the division of labor between individuals. Vygotsky had defined activity as object-oriented action mediated by cultural tools and signs (Engestrom and Miettinen, 1999; McAvinia, 2016). Leont’ev pushed this further. He asked how activity relates to a person’s role within the group.

His version of activity theory therefore has several nodes: the individual, the mediating artifact, the object, the community, rules, and the division of labor.

Not every part of an activity is conscious. Leont’ev also accounted for its automatic, unconscious side: actions and operations.

His model, in short, has three parts: an activity driven by an object-related motive, goal-oriented actions that contribute to it, and automatic operations. These operations are set by the conditions under which the activity happens (McAvinia, 2016).

Leont’ev’s work began in the 1920s.

Even so, most of the Soviet school of activity theory stayed unknown outside the Soviet Union until it was translated and popularized in the 1970s.

Engestrom and Miettinen (1999) traced the theory’s development after the Second World War. They found it used in three areas: child psychology, language-acquisition studies, and instruction. The theory kept spreading. Since the 1980s, it has also influenced education, human-computer interaction, and discussions of situated learning (McAvinia, 2016).

Third-Generation Activity Theory

The 1980s saw a diagrammatic representation of activity theory. Yrjo Engestrom produced it. His group had conducted extensive research on the theory at the University of Helsinki.

Engestrom’s visual representation, the activity-system triangle, brings together Vygotsky’s early model and Leont’ev’s extensions.

In this model, the individual, the subject, pursues an object using mediating artifacts, or tools and instruments. The activity is also mediated by a community.

It has rules, such as laws, conventions, or unspoken norms. It also has a division of labor, describing how members of the community share the activity.

The concept of the activity is never fixed. What starts out as an object can be transformed into an outcome, then turned into an instrument, and later into a rule (CRADLE, 2011; McAvinia, 2016).

If the object of the action cannot be met, a break or contradiction happens in the system. When that happens, the object separates from the outcome. This is one reason the outcome may not be the one anticipated or desired (McAvinia, 2016).

Engestrom also believed that activities are always (McAvinia, 2016):

• goal-directed;
• multivoiced;
• historical and changing over time;
• subject to contradictions, which are sources of change and development;
• subject to the possibility of so-called “expansive transformation.”

Expansion is an important part of Engestrom’s work (McAvinia, 2016). This is an expansive process, essential for learning.

It is not necessarily confined to a formal setting such as a school. Third-generation activity theory identifies the connections between different activity systems, and Engestrom holds that these systems can have either shared or unshared objects (McAvinia, 2016).

Applications

Activity Theory takes purposeful, tool-mediated activity as its unit of analysis, not the isolated individual. That is why it travels easily into any setting where people accomplish things together using shared tools and rules.

It applies to education, workplace design, and human-computer interaction. Usually the goal is to redesign a setting, not just describe it.

Education and Classroom Design

In education, Activity Theory reframes a classroom. It is not a fixed container where learning happens. It is an activity system in its own right.

Pupils and teacher (subjects) pursue curriculum objects using textbooks, whiteboards, and talk (mediating artifacts). This happens inside classroom norms, or rules.

It also involves a particular division of teaching and marking work, and the wider school community.

Analyzed this way, a lesson that “isn’t working” is treated as a contradiction between elements of the system. An assessment rule that rewards individual test performance can clash with a curriculum object that calls for collaborative problem-solving.

That is a system-level mismatch. It is not a deficiency in any one pupil or teacher.

Engestrom’s own method for this kind of redesign is called the Change Laboratory. It has been used directly in schools.

Teachers and researchers jointly examine video and documentary evidence of their own activity system. They surface its contradictions, then design a new way of working that resolves them (Engestrom, 2000).

Workplace Learning and Organizational Design

Activity Theory’s later additions, community, rules, and division of labor, were developed partly to describe collective work, not just an individual’s tool use. That makes the framework a natural fit for organizations.

Engestrom (2000) argued that most workplace problems are not individual skill deficits. They are contradictions between activity systems.

A hospital’s goal of “patient care,” for example, is pursued by different specialist teams. Their rules, tools, and divisions of labor have grown apart from one another, so a patient moving between teams experiences the seams.

Naming the contradiction, not blaming an individual clinician, is the point of the analysis.

The Change Laboratory method builds on this diagnosis. Rather than a trainer transmitting a fixed best practice, workers examine disturbances in their own recorded activity.

They model the underlying contradiction using the activity-system triangle. Then they design and try out a new way of organizing the work, a cycle Engestrom calls expansive learning (Engestrom, 1987, 2000).

Human-Computer Interaction

Activity theory has been a foundational perspective in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since the mid-1980s. In Scandinavia, the 1970s saw a number of research projects that reconsidered the introduction of computers in the workplace.

These projects took an action-research approach. They valued active cooperation between researchers and participants.

Researchers needed to commit to the workers themselves, in order to help improve their situations (Carroll, 2003).

The personal computer created a need to explore how people work on materials and objects through the computer. Developers turned to the emerging US HCI tradition.

That tradition gave little thought to how people interact with each other, or with their environment. It also gave little thought to the influence of historical and cultural factors on behavior (Norman, 1980).

Specifically, early cognitive-based scientific theories of human-computer interaction tended to have these issues (Bannon and Bodker, 1991):

• Many early advanced user interfaces assumed that the users had the same level of knowledge and technical proficiency as the person who designed them.
• Researchers did not understand the role of the artifact and how it related to the user and their materials, objects, and outcomes.
• There was a heavy focus on novice users over the concerns of experienced users who used the software every day.
• Although task analysis was seen as the starting point for most user-interface design (Carroll, 2003), researchers in Scandinavia noted that explicit task descriptions are poor means of capturing the actual actions and conditions of those using the computer and failed to capture the complexity and contingency of action in real-life (Ehn and Kyng, 1984).
• Early views of computers saw computers as being for the automation of routines, and this carried into Human-Computer Interaction. Meanwhile, Human-Computer Interaction scholars such as Ehn and Kyng (1984) treated their perspective on computers as being similar to how a craftsman uses tools and materials with the experience he has as a craftsman as a practical basis for using these tools. However, this perspective lacked a theoretical foundation.
• Human-computer Interaction tended to focus on how an individual user used a single computer over the cooperation and coordination of multiple people and computers in real work situations.
• Finally, Human-Computer Interaction tended to see people mainly as objects of study rather than sources of inspiration in design.

In response to these issues, Bodker (1991), Grudin (1990), and Kaptelinin connected the earlier development of activity theory in Russia to Human-Computer Interaction. This activity-theoretical Human-Computer Interaction has these focuses:

• Analysis and design for people at work who have different work environments, divisions of work, work qualifications, and so on.
• Analysis and design with a focus on actual use and the complexity of multi-user activity, and the idea that the artifact is a mediator of human activity.
• Focus on the development of expertise and use in general.
• Active user participation in design and a focus on use as part of that design

Critical Evaluation

Activity Theory has real strengths as a way of seeing a setting whole, but it also draws real criticism. The theory’s own literature identifies four recurring concerns.

1. Ecological Validity: its case-study evidence is rich but rarely comparative, making it hard to know how well findings generalize.
2. Testability: the theory is a powerful heuristic, but its key terms are hard to pin down precisely enough to test.
3. Cultural Relativism: the theory is built to explain why activity varies by culture, which cuts against claims to universal validity.
4. Individual and Biological Factors: because it studies the whole activity system, the theory says little about biological or maturational constraints on development.

Ecological Validity

Much of Activity Theory’s evidence base comes from case studies of a single classroom, hospital, or design team. These are usually analyzed qualitatively, from video, interview, and documentary material.

Comparison groups and standardized outcome measures are rare. This buys real ecological validity: Engestrom’s Change Laboratory method studies activity exactly as it happens, in the setting where it happens.

But it comes at a cost. Causal claims about whether an intervention actually worked rest on thinner ground than a controlled trial would give.

A review of 55 school-based Change Laboratory studies found the evidence was largely case-based and rarely comparative (Hopwood, 2024).

That makes it hard to say how reliably the method’s benefits generalize beyond the specific settings studied. Few of these studies used a comparison group.

Testability

The activity-system triangle is genuinely useful. It notices overlooked parts of a setting, like rules, community, and division of labor, that a narrower cognitive account would miss.

Critics disagree, though. They say the theory has become looser and harder to test. This happened while moving from Vygotsky and Leont’ev’s original philosophical concerns into an applied modeling tool.

What counts as an “activity system,” a “contradiction,” or a genuine transformation are often matters of interpretation, not measurement (Bakhurst, 2009).

Roth and Lee (2007) push back on this. They argue that much of the criticism conflates loose popularizations of the triangle with Vygotsky’s own, more precise, arguments about mediation.

The gap between the founding texts and their later applied use, they suggest, has not fully closed.

Cultural Relativism

Activity Theory inherits a view from Vygotsky. Psychological functions are built by the tools, signs, and social arrangements of a particular culture and period, not by a fixed universal architecture (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1981).

This is a considered position, not an oversight. But it creates a real tension.

A framework built to explain why activity varies by culture and history is not well placed to make universal predictions.

Findings from one activity system, a Scandinavian workplace or a Soviet classroom, cannot simply be assumed to transfer elsewhere. Fresh empirical work is needed in each new setting before a finding can be trusted there too.

Nothing here says the theory is wrong. It just marks out what it can and cannot claim.

Individual and Biological Factors

Activity Theory takes the activity system, not the individual mind, as its unit of analysis. So it has comparatively little to say about the biological or maturational constraints on development that a framework like Piaget’s (1952) addresses directly.

This is a genuine gap. It is not simply a neutral choice of focus.

A theory that treats tools and social arrangements as doing nearly all the explanatory work leaves open how much of development is shaped by maturation on its own. That question is left largely untouched, independent of any culture or activity.

It sits at the cultural-construction end of the nature-nurture debate more by default than by having directly tested biological alternatives against its own claims. A fuller account would need to test both sides.

Contemporary Research

Research since the mid-2010s has mostly extended the third-generation, Engestrom-style tradition into new settings. It has not proposed rival core principles.

The strongest recent evidence is a systematic review, not a single new experiment.

Aim: Hopwood (2024) set out to establish what twenty-five years of Change Laboratory and related formative-intervention research in schools had actually covered and found.

Method: The review screened studies using Change Laboratories or closely related formative-intervention designs in school settings. It synthesized 55 eligible studies.

Findings: Change Laboratories had been applied to a wide range of problems, including developing pedagogical practice and supporting initial teacher education. The scope was broad.

Issues of equity, inclusion, and justice appeared in this literature but were not universal. Many studies focused on process and practice change without an explicit equity lens.

Conclusion: Change Laboratory research in schools is a genuine, diverse applied tradition, twenty-five years in.

But it remains uneven. It does not always connect that process-level work to the wider social-justice aims that motivated Engestrom’s original idea of expansive learning.

A systematic review of Change Laboratory interventions in African higher education found a similar pattern. The method supported curriculum redesign and cross-institutional collaboration there too.

This extends the evidence base beyond the Northern European settings where it began (Winberg et al., 2023).

A smaller strand of recent work applies the theory’s core structure, subject, object, mediating tools, community, to new technological settings.

One example comes from museum learning. Hite et al. (2024) propose an extended activity-theory model using extended-reality technology.

This kind of work demonstrates that the model can be extended to a new setting. It is not proof that doing so improves outcomes.

Sannino and Engestrom (2018) argue that the theory’s central explanatory tools, contradiction and expansive transformation, still need sharper conceptual development.

The framework must keep pace with the more complex, networked forms of activity it is now applied to.

References

Bakhurst, D. (2009). Reflections on activity theory. Educational Review, 61(2), 197–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131910902846916

Bannon, L., & Bødker, S. (1991). Beyond the interface: Encountering artifacts in use. Designing interaction: Psychology at the human-computer interface, 227-253.

Bødker S. (1991). Through the interface: A human activity approach to user interface design. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carroll, J. M. (Ed.). (2003). HCI models, theories, and frameworks: Toward a multidisciplinary science. Elsevier.

Cole, M. (1999). Cultural psychology: some general principles and a concrete example. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R.-L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 87–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CRADLE. (2011). CRADLE (Center for research on activity, development and learning) website. Retrieved from: http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/index.htm

Davydov, V. V. (1999). The content and unsolved problems of activity theory. Perspectives on activity theory, 1, 39-52.

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental work. Helsinki: Orienta Konsultit.

Engeström, Y., & Miettinen, R. (1999). Activity theory: A well-kept secret.

Ehn, P., & Kyng, M. (1984). A tool perspective on design of interactive computer support for skilled workers. In M. Sääksjärvi (Ed.), Proceedings from the Seventh Scandinavian Research Seminar on Systemeering (pp.211–242). Helsinki: Helsinki Business School.

Grudin, J. (1990). The computer reaches out: The historical continuity of interface design. Evolution and Practice in User Interface Engineering, Proceedings of ACM CHI’90 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp.261–268). New York: ACM Press.

Hite, R. L., Childers, G. M., & Hoffman, J. (2024). Cultural-historical activity theory as an integrative model of socioscientific issue based learning in museums using extended reality technologies. International Journal of Science Education, Part B. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/21548455.2024.2324854

Hopwood, N. (2024). Twenty-five years of change laboratories in schools: A critical and formative review. Educational Action Research, 33(4), 571–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2024.2379343

Issroff, K., & Scanlon, E. (2002). Educational technology: The influence of theory. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 6.

Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi, B. A. (2006). Acting with technology: Activity theory and interaction design. MIT Press.

Kuutti, K. (1996). Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.), Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction (pp. 17–44). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Leontiev, A. N. (1931). Razvitie pamyati: Eksperimental’noe issledovanie vysshikh psikhologicheskikh funktsiy [The development of memory: An experimental investigation of the higher psychological functions]. Uchpedgiz.

McAvinia, C. (2016). Online learning and its users: lessons for higher education. Chandos Publishing.

Nardi, B. A. (Ed.). (1996). Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction. MIT Press.

Norman, D. (1980). Twelve issues for cognitive science. Cognitive Science, 4, 1–32.

Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. International Universities Press.

Roth, W.-M., & Lee, Y.-J. (2007). “Vygotsky’s neglected legacy”: Cultural-historical activity theory. Review of Educational Research, 77(2), 186–232. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654306298273

Russell, D. (2002). Looking beyond the interface: activity theory and distributed learning. In M. Lea, & K. Nicoll (Eds.), Distributed learning: Social and cultural approaches to practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Sannino, A., & Engeström, Y. (2018). Cultural-historical activity theory: Founding insights and new challenges. Cultural-Historical Psychology, 14(3), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.17759/chp.2018140304

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the development of children, 23(3), 34-41.

Wertsch, J. V. (1981). Trends in Soviet cognitive psychology. Storia e critica della psicologia.

Winberg, C., Garraway, J., & Wright, J. (2023). A systematic review of the literature on change laboratory interventions: Lessons from Africa. Journal of Education, 92, 206–227. https://doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i92a12

Further Reading

• Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: Exploring a Theory to Inform Practice and Research
• Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)