Definition

Vygotsky: the zone of the closest, most immediate psychological development of the children that includes a wide range of their emotional, cognitive, and volitional psychological processes.

In educational research: what learners can do with support and guidance from someone with more knowledge or expertise.

Why Important?

• Teachers should focus not only on what students already know, but also what they should know next.

• Learning depends on both: scaffolding (push outer boundary) and fading (push inner boundary)

• ZPD can help teachers set appropriate learning goals.

How to?

Do

• Consider individualities in ZPD: every student has a different ZPD, so their learning goals should be different.

• Provide scaffolding to push the outer boundary of ZPD
  • Channeling: reducing degrees of freedom for task
  • Focusing: Focusing attention on relevant features in task
  • Modeling: of more advanced solutions to the task

• Fade out scaffolds to push the inner boundary of ZPD
  • Freeing: allowing greater task freedom and variety
  • Fuzzing: including distractors in task
  • Furthering: modeling more advanced solutions using learning skills as routings

Do NOT

• Ignore individual differences

• Set learning goals outside of ZPD