Zone of Proximal Development

Why not measure only a child's "today"?

In the early twentieth century schools began to measure children with intelligence tests: the child solves age-graded problems alone, and the highest age level solved gives a "mental age". The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky pointed out that this shows only what the child already has today, the functions that have ripened. His comparison: a gardener who wants to know the state of his garden is wrong to count only the apple trees that have ripened and borne fruit; he must also take the ripening trees into account. Likewise the psychologist must consider not only the ripened functions but the ripening ones, not only the actual level but the "zone of proximal development".

Как садовник, желающий определить состояние своего сада, будет не прав, если вздумает оценивать его только по созревшим и принесшим плоды яблоням, а должен учесть и созревающие деревья

Vygotsky's example is simple. Two children both test at a mental age of eight. Instead of stopping there, give them problems for older ages and help them by demonstrating, asking a leading question or starting the solution: one child, with help, solves problems up to the twelve-year level, the other only up to nine. This gap between the actual level of development, set by problems solved independently, and the level reached when solving problems in collaboration, is the zone of proximal development. In the example one child's zone is four years and the other's one. Vygotsky held that the two children's development cannot be considered the same, and that at school their differences would show far more than the similarity suggested by their equal actual level.

Это расхождение между умственным возрастом, или уровнем актуального развития, который определяется с помощью самостоятельно решаемых задач, и уровнем, которого достигает ребенок при решении задач не самостоятельно, а в сотрудничестве, и определяет зону ближайшего развития.

In another lecture he called the functions in this zone "not the fruits of development but its buds, its flowers": functions not yet ripe but ripening, which will ripen tomorrow.

Why is a problem solved with help evidence of development?

The old psychology and common sense held that a problem solved by imitation says nothing about a person's own intelligence, since anything can be imitated. Vygotsky thought this was wrong: a child can imitate only what lies within the zone of its own intellectual possibilities. He gave chess as an example. If I cannot play chess, even the best player showing me how to win a game will not enable me to do it. If I know arithmetic, seeing the solution of a hard problem soon leads me to solve it myself; but if I know no higher mathematics, being shown the solution of a differential equation does not move my thought a single step.

Можно считать установленным в современной психологии подражания, что подражать ребенок может только тому, что лежит в зоне его собственных интеллектуальных возможностей.

So in collaboration a child can always do more than alone, but not infinitely more: how high collaboration can lift the child lies within a definite distance set by the child's state of development, and this distance is the most sensitive indicator of the dynamics of development. Vygotsky also drew on the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler's experiments with chimpanzees: the chimpanzee meaningfully imitates only intelligent actions it could perform on its own, and complex operations taught by drill remain habits without understanding. The human child is different; being able to advance, through collaboration and imitation, to what it cannot yet do alone is what marks human development.

How are teaching and development related?

Vygotsky introduced the concept to answer an old debate about the relation between teaching and development. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget drew a clear distinction between the two, seeing development as a spontaneous process begun and completed by the child's own efforts; teaching should wait for development to ripen and follow it. Vygotsky reversed the order. Research showed that what lies in the zone of proximal development at one stage of an age period passes to the level of actual development at the next. "In other words, what the child can do in collaboration today, it will be able to do independently tomorrow."

Иными словами, то, что ребенок умеет делать сегодня в сотрудничестве, он сумеет сделать завтра самостоятельно.

Hence his famous conclusion: "Only that teaching in childhood is good which runs ahead of development and leads development after it." A child can of course only be taught what it is already able to learn; teaching must stand on the lower threshold of completed cycles of development, but it relies on ripening rather than ripened functions and always begins with what has not yet ripened in the child. The discussion is in chapter 6 of Thinking and Speech, "A Study of the Development of Scientific Concepts in Childhood", where Vygotsky and his student Zhozefina Shif sought to show that scientific concepts learned at school develop along a different path from the everyday concepts children acquire on their own, and that schooling lifts thinking to a new level.

Только то обучение в детском возрасте хорошо, которое забегает вперед развития и ведет развитие за собой.

At the root of the concept lies Vygotsky's Marxist psychology. He held that higher mental functions such as memory, attention and conceptual thought are not biologically given but appear first in social collaboration between people and only then pass inside the individual (see this dictionary's entry Cultural-Historical Theory). The zone of proximal development is where this passage from the social to the individual happens in the classroom.

What happened to it in the Soviet Union?

Vygotsky died of tuberculosis on 11 June 1934 at the age of thirty-seven, and Thinking and Speech came out that December as a posthumous collection of his work of 1928–1934. The zone of proximal development was introduced in the last three years of his life and never fully worked out. In 1936 the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in its resolution "On Pedological Perversions in the System of the People's Commissariats of Education", effectively abolished pedology, the integrated study of child development. Vygotsky had been one of pedology's leading theorists, and his work passed into the shadows. English-language literature often states that his works were banned until Stalin's death in 1953 and that a first collection of major texts appeared only in 1956.

After 1956 Vygotsky's legacy was carried on by his colleagues Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria and by a younger generation including Daniil Elkonin and Vasily Davydov. Elkonin and Davydov's experiments in "developmental education" extended the idea of the zone of proximal development to the whole school curriculum, and Davydov edited the second volume of Vygotsky's Soviet Collected Works (1982). In the twenty-first century some Russian scholars have argued that Soviet-era editions altered key concepts, the zone of proximal development among them, in editing, and the movement to reread Vygotsky from the original texts has been called a "revisionist revolution".

How is it used in the West and in today's classrooms?

Vygotsky came to be widely read in the West with the English translation of Thinking and Speech in 1962 and the collection Mind in Society (1978). In 1976 the American psychologists Jerome Bruner, David Wood and Gail Ross, applying the zone of proximal development to education, coined "scaffolding": as scaffolding comes down when a building is finished, the teacher gives help at first and withdraws it as the learner becomes able to work alone. Vygotsky himself never used the term. This interpretation gave rise to programmes such as reciprocal teaching and dynamic assessment, and the zone of proximal development became a basic concept of educational psychology textbooks.

Its popularity has a cost. Scaffolding easily narrows the zone to the amount of help needed for a given task. What Vygotsky described, however, was the process of development passing from one stage of an age period to the next, and what he criticised was teaching that tests children alone and ranks them. The zone of proximal development sums up a social view of learning in which collaboration is the source of development. In that sense the concept translates into the language of the classroom the Marxist idea that the human mind is formed in social relations.