Zone of Proximal Development

Historical Foundations

Vygotsky did not believe that static measures, such as intelligence tests, were useful for understanding how children learn to think and solve problems. His ideas about cognitive development differed from age-stage models, such as that of Jean Piaget, that claim children learn to think by passing through specific stages that build on each other. Differences in the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky are in part due to their originators’ cultural and educational backgrounds, which led them to ask different questions about development. Piaget was Swiss, interested in biological aspects of human development, and had extensive research laboratories. Vygotsky was Russian and interested in literature. His laboratory was a school in Moscow that served children with developmental difference such as blindness, deafness, and motor disorders. Vygotsky’s task was to understand or make sense of how these children learned. He captured their developmental changes with the concept of ZPD. The children could understand and come to use new concepts but only with the help of others. Vygotsky also saw that this help had to be at a level of understanding on the child’s part that supported accomplishment of the cognitive task with the assistance of a more experienced other, usually an adult, before they could do it without assistance. He also found thorough systematic study that the thinking of children did not change if the task presented to them was something they could already do by themselves. As he studied changes in children’s thinking, it became clear that this developed when the child could do a task with the help of the more experienced other and if this help was just enough. Too much assistance did not result in a change in thinking or problem solving, and too little assistance, or assistance that was more complex than the child could understand, was not useful. Thus, the ZPD represents that cognitive space between where a child can do something alone and cannot accomplish a task even with assistance. It is a dynamic concept of cognitive development because the zone is pliable, situational, and moveable as the child grasps a concept with assistance and then comes to manipulate this, first with and then without assistance, to expand the concept.

It became clear from Vygotsky’s studies that change within the ZPD requires that the adult [Page 2134]or more experienced person scaffold learning experiences. This scaffolding supports learning as individuals move from being a novice where others regulate the activities, to being an apprentice where they can jointly work to accomplish a task, to mastery where task completion is self-regulated. The tools for thinking are external to the individual in the beginning and, in the process of mastering a task, become increasingly invisible as they are folded into ongoing individual activity. This process is used in both assessment and intervention by Speech–Language pathologists.

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