Hi, Mech, welcome to the mayhem. I found sociocultural and socio-cultural used pretty interchangeably, but I also found this:

"...There are two particularly noteworthy aspects to a Vygotskian approach to social interactions. First, it is fundamentally cultural. Caregivers are agents of culture (Trevarthen, 1988) who set an infant's nascent actions within an intimate setting that is deeply informed by the caregiver's cultural knowledge. Caregivers cannot help but view infants' expressions as meaningful within the human sphere of their own culture. Infants, in complement, are quintessential cultural apprentices who seek the guided participation of their elders (Rogoff, 1990).

"Second, the notion of a zone of proximal development reveals a pattern of developmental change in which a phase of adult support precedes a phase of independent infant accomplishment."

This is some strange language called eduspeak which purports to be English but which has absolutely null content. I was struck particularly by the last sentence, which may have some meaning to those whose minds have been warped by the process of getting a PhD in education, but no other English-speakers can interpret it.

So you can use it with or without the hyphen and it probably doesn't make a difference since it's all part of eduspeak, which has no meaning and therefore apparently no value.

Ah. One other thing--it isn't anal-retentive, it's anal:retentive. Anal:retentive has to have a colon.

TEd