Designing in Learning Progressions
ZPD Meets Progressive Disclosure
Instructional Design
July 2019
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) provides a helpful heuristic for thinking about how to organize a learning progression. The key concept is the use of scaffolding to challenge and support a learner’s development to guide them from hands-on instruction towards more self-directed learning to achieve.
When moving learning online (particularly with asynchronous instruction), we sometimes forget about the scaffolding required and merely post content with a test at the end and expect the learner to fill in the blanks. This is where the design principle of progressive disclosure can be a useful concept when thinking about chunking up the display and use of content from simpler skills towards more complex tasks.
This is particularly important for tasks that require multiple skills to be combined to complete the task or solve a problem. Also, opportunities for guidance from a “knowledgeable” person (whether a teacher, peer, or colleague) is critical to moving a learner from dependence to scaffolded learning to complete autonomy.