How the Zone of Proximal Development Strengthens the Professionalization of Education
"Learning" and "development" are always mentioned together, yet we rarely distinguish between the two, and therefore cannot go on to attend to the relationship between them. Vygotsky held that whether we can undertake meaningful educational research depends on a prerequisite: whether we can accurately pose the most fundamental and most central question. The question of the relationship between "learning" and "development" is precisely the core question that deserves the greatest attention when we discuss educational psychology; if we ignore this question, or lack a clear understanding of it, then all our other efforts are in vain. This is because the essence of educational practice is to carry out effective teaching activities on the basis of theories of child development, so that children achieve effective learning.
Three views on the relationship between “learning” and “development”already exist:
The first view holds that learning is merely a manifestation of developmental maturation, and that learning cannot promote development. That is, children's cognitive development has age-specific characteristics: if a child has not yet formed the cognitive capacity to learn a certain piece of knowledge, then no matter what teaching method is used, the child cannot understand that knowledge. Vygotsky argued that Piaget's "clinical conversation" method is based on precisely this conception, in that it uses questions far beyond children's prior experience in an attempt to test what stage of development the child's "pure" cognitive capacity (that is, capacity uninterfered with by prior experience) has reached. In fact, this view is quite common. For example, every country has a statutory school entry age, because people believe that if a child is not yet ready in terms of "development," "learning" cannot take place; education thus seems to become a kind of passive waiting.
The second view holds that learning is development. Influenced by behaviorism, this view reduces learning to the acquisition of behavioral habits, and development to the individual's mastery of different behaviors; learning and development are therefore inseparable and constitute one and the same process. Education is the organization of acquired behavioral habits and behavioral tendencies. The most representative work is Thorndike's research. He held that learning ability is domain-specific, that learning does not change our overall capacity for concentrating attention, and that each activity depends on the material it operates on; development therefore refers to the development of a series of specific, independent abilities or habits.
Vygotsky argued that these two views share the same presupposition: that human beings are innately endowed with a system of "innate responses," and that later development consists in refining or continually upgrading this system.
The third view, influenced by the Gestalt school, appears very "clever": it attempts to combine the two views above and weaken their extremeness. It acknowledges both that development is the foundation of learning and that learning promotes development, so that "learning" and "development" influence each other. The Gestalt school held that the learning process can by no means be simply reduced to the formation of skills, but is rather the formation of an intellectual order, in which general principles discovered in solving one task may be transferred to other tasks. The scope of development is broader than that of learning. For example, the classical education we have long upheld has children learn ancient languages, mathematics, and other formal disciplines, because we believe that even if such knowledge is itself not closely related to daily life, subjecting children to this kind of formal training helps exercise their cognitive abilities, and they can "transfer" these cognitive abilities to the learning of other knowledge. This is also the main tenet of faculty psychology, which regards the mind as a composite of various capacities, such as observation, attention, memory, and thinking, and holds that the improvement of any particular capacity leads to a general improvement of all capacities. Thus, if a child's observation and attention have been effectively trained, the child can transfer this excellent observation and attention to the learning of other content. It seems that these fundamental capabilities of the mind can be independent of specific "learning content" and "operating material."
It is easy to say "vaguely" that two things influence each other, but explaining clearly the nature of this mutual influence is something people readily evade. Thus, at this juncture in the history of theory, the question Vygotsky wanted to answer is: what exactly is the mechanism by which "learning" and "development" influence each other?
First, Vygotsky held that this question needs to be broken down into two questions:
The general relationship between "learning" and "development"
What fundamental change occurs in the relationship between "learning" and "development" when children enter the school age and begin learning at school
Vygotsky held that school learning is concerned with the assimilation of the foundations of scientific knowledge. So what, then, is the essential difference between learning in the preschool period and school learning? The general view is that the former is unsystematic learning whereas the latter is systematic learning. But this does not explain the "qualitative change." Vygotsky held that to explain "why school learning brings about a qualitative change in children's learning," it is necessary to introduce the concept of the "zone of proximal development."
Vygotsky acknowledged that instruction should be matched to the child's level of development, but he held that teachers cannot stop at determining the child's actual developmental level, that is, what tasks the child can complete independently at this stage. This is because a child's learning ability is influenced by their developmental level, but this does not mean that a child's learning ability is determined by their developmental level. For example, two children can both complete the same task, yet with the same assistance, one child can go further and complete a more difficult task, whereas the other cannot. Therefore, if we are to judge a child's true developmental level, the indicator we should look at is what the child can do with the assistance of others. This is more indicative of their level of psychological development than looking at what tasks they can complete on their own.
On this basis, Vygotsky gave the definition of the zone of proximal development: the distance between the actual developmental level, as determined by independent problem solving, and the potential developmental level, as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers, is the "zone of proximal development." The zone of proximal development defines those learning capacities that the child already possesses but that have not yet matured.
Teachers must both retrospectively see what the child is already able to do and prospectively foresee the maximum level of development the child can reach, on the basis of this ability, with effective support. The relationship between learning and development is therefore manifested as follows: learning is both based on the child's actual developmental level in a given domain and able to promote the child's further "development" in that domain. Learning is not passive waiting for development; learning actively "creates" the ZPD.
Vygotsky held that this concept transformed psychology from a tool for diagnosing children's existing developmental level into a discipline capable of explaining the psychological mechanisms through which education actually takes effect, that is, why a given instruction is effective, and scientific, for a given child's learning of a specific content. The internal mechanism between the teacher's teaching behavior and the child's learning behavior thus becomes analyzable and explicable, which greatly enhances the degree of professionalization of education.
This concept can also help people clearly understand what kind of learning is effective: namely, learning that is able to go beyond the individual's actual developmental level; learning is therefore a highly individualized activity.
Based on the theory of the "zone of proximal development," that is, on the general relationship between "learning" and "development," we can now answer this key question: why does school learning bring about a qualitative change in children's learning?
This is because, in contrast to the "everyday concepts" that preschool children accumulate through spontaneous, experiential learning, school learning introduces "scientific concepts." Scientific concepts possess a quality of generality and systematicity, and help children reorganize and transform their existing everyday concepts. The scientific concepts taught at school usually exceed the level at which the child can currently solve problems independently, that is, the actual developmental level, yet remain within the range that the child can understand through adult guidance and peer collaboration (that is, the ZPD). School learning is therefore a kind of learning that continually and actively creates the zone of proximal development, aiming to help the child's developmental potential mature.
Although this distinction no longer accords with the facts in the context of early childhood education today, Vygotsky's distinction can help us understand what kind of learning and teaching is effective and active. Therefore, rather than saying that Vygotsky's discussion distinguishes between learning in the "preschool period" and the "school-age period," it is better to say that he distinguishes between "passive learning (learning lagging behind development)" and "active learning (learning attempting to surpass development)," because even in the "preschool period," children can, with effective support, engage in learning that goes beyond their existing developmental level and reaches the "zone of proximal development."