Zone of proximal development refers to the difference between what a learner can do alone and what he or she can do with the help of the other knowledgeable person; either somebody older or somebody who has more knowledge on the subject. Vygotsky sees student interaction with peers as the best way of developing skills of their own. The less able learners will develop their abilities with the help of the one who has already mastered the skill. Vygotsky believed that children could advance alone if left alone but not that far. They could not be able to discover everything by themselves. Vygotsky's theory in not only applicable to children, even adults sometimes falls into a situation where they need a little push to move forward. Like in a case where someone is employed in a banking or financial institution and he or she has never worked in one. Some people will be able to adapt to such systems so fast, but others will not be able to. They will need to be helped by those who have already mastered it. Some people in an organization may spend all their life waiting for the paycheck as their only source of income, and they will never have any problem with that. Others in the same organization will be taking loans and making huge investments. Not that the other group of people who depend on the paycheck are stupid or something like that, is that they can't think up to the level of investment alone. But after some time this group of people will be challenged by the developments made by their workmates and will in turn start investing. They may be helped to make their first or second investment, but with time they will be able to do it all by themselves. Like in high school, I remember my first day in a laboratory. I could not understand anything to do with experiments. The teacher gave us guidelines for carrying out the experiments, and at times he could sacrifice his time to guide us through experiments and how to use various apparatus. After some time I could set up the experiments entirely by my own.
REFERENCES
Roth, W. M. (2014). Zone of Proximal Development. In Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 2101-2105). Springer New York.
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