Samantha Fummerton
Reading Response
Week 5
This week’s readings were about the relationship between learning and development.
There were three main ways discussed by Vygotsky that learning and development interact. The
first was that development comes before learning. In this sense a child can be too young to learn
a certain subject or grasp a certain concept. The child needs to have matured to a certain level so
he or she is capable of learning the concept. This means that “development or maturation is
viewed as a precondition of learning but never the result of it” (Vygotsky 30). The second
relationship between learning and development is that learning is development. In this sense
development is seen as the “mastery of conditioned reflexes”. In other words a child is
developing if he or she has acquired and mastered “habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior”
(30). Some believed that learning and development cannot be separated. The third relationship
between learning and development is a combination of the previous two. The third position is
based on “two inherently different but related processes” (30). All three of these positions have
been rejected by Vygotsky.
Vygotsky has a new approach of looking as learning and development he calls the Zone
of Proximal Development. It is based off a student’s actually development level and their
potential development level. A students development and learning is measured by “The distance
between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the
level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in
collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 33). This basically means that what a child
can do on their own is their actual level of development, and what a child can do with guidance
is their potential level of development.