Development
The concept of ZPD has been expanded, modified, and changed into new concepts since Vygotsky's original conception.
The concept of the ZPD is widely used in world to study children's mental development as it relates to education. The ZPD concept is seen as a scaffolding, a structure of "support points" for performing an action. Although Vygotsky himself never mentioned the term; instead, scaffolding was developed by other sociocultural theorists applying Vygotsky's ZPD to educational contexts. Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or more competent peer helps the student in his or her ZPD as necessary, and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction. "Scaffolding the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions." This concept has been further developed by Ann Brown, among others. Several instructional programs were developed on this interpretation of the ZPD, including reciprocal teaching and dynamic assessment.
While the ideas of Vygotsky's ZPD originally were used strictly for one's ability to solve problems, Tharp and Gallimore point out that it can be expanded to examining other domains of competence and skills. These specialized zones of development include cultural zones, individual zones, and skill-oriented zones. Early-childhood-development researchers commonly believe that young children learn their native language and motor skills generally by being placed in the zone of proximal development.
Through their work with collaborative groups of adults, Tinsley and Lebak (2009) identified the "Zone of Reflective Capacity". This zone shares the theoretical attributes of the ZPD, but is a more specifically defined construct helpful in describing and understanding the way in which an adult's capacity for reflection can expand when he or she collaborates over an extended period with other adults who have similar goals. Tinsley and Lebak found that, as adults shared their feedback, analysis, and evaluation of one another's work during collaboration, their potential for critical reflection expanded. The zone of reflective capacity expanded as trust and mutual understanding among the peers grew.
The zone of reflective capacity is constructed through the interaction between participants engaged in a common activity and expands when it is mediated by positive interactions with other participants, exactly along the same lines as the ZPD, as Wells (1999) described. It is possible to measure the learner’s ZPD as an individual trait showing a certain stability across instructional settings. The second perspective draws on work on interactive formative assessment integrated in classroom instruction. In this approach, assessment intervenes in the ZPD created by a learner’s on-going interactions with a given instructional setting. (Allal, Ducrey 2000)
Read more about this topic: Zone Of Proximal Development
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)