Vygotsky's notions of Zone of Proximal Development and Dynamic Assessment emphasize the importance of personalized learning that adapts to the needs and abilities of the learners and enables more efficient learning. In this work we introduce a novel adaptive learning engine called E-gostky that builds on these concepts to personalize the learning path within an e-learning system. E-gostky uses machine learning techniques to select the next content item that will challenge the student but will not be overwhelming, keeping students in their Zone of Proximal Development. To evaluate the system, we conducted an experiment where hundreds of students from several different elementary schools used our engine to learn fractions for five months. Our results show that using E-gostky can significantly reduce the time required to reach similar mastery. Specifically, in our experiment, it took students who were using the adaptive learning engine @math less time to reach a similar level of mastery as of those who didn't. Moreover, students made greater efforts to find the correct answer rather than guessing and class teachers reported that even students with learning disabilities showed higher engagement.
The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) plays a key role in the method we propose. The ZPD was introduced by Vygotsky as a part of a general analysis of the development of children. Vygotsky proposed a model of child development where each period is characterized by a set of relations among psychological functions (such as perception, speech, thinking), and the transition from one age period to another depends on a qualitative change in that set of relations @cite_33 . In this model, learning is a function not only of the child's qualities but also of her relationships with the environment.
@cite_33
2288663400 2163308793 2011348940 2118573764
What kind of instruction is optimal for a particular child? Without doubt, this question is immediately comprehensible to any committed teacher in virtually any country in the world, and most teachers are likely to want concrete answers to the question, not only as a theoretical puzzle, but in relation to their immediate practices. If one were to look to scientific psychology and educational research for advice in relation to this practical problem, what would the answer(s) look like? This simple question raises several profound problems. Normative and political issues about the goals of instruction and the resources available for realizing these goals must be resolved. A theory of learning that can explain how intellectual capabilities are developed is needed. If instruction is not viewed as an end in itself, then a theory about the relationship between specific subject matter instruction and its consequences for psychological development is also needed. This last problem was the main tension against which Vygotsky developed his well-known concept of zone of proximal development , so that the zone focused on the relation between instruction and development, while being relevant to many of these other problems. Vygotsky's concept of zone of proximal development is more precise and elaborated than its common reception or interpretation. The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive introduction to and interpretation of this concept, along with comments about predominant contemporary interpretations. The chapter concludes with some perspectives and implications derived from the interpretation presented here. This article reports the efforts of an elementary school teacher of Spanish as a second language to implement principles of dynamic assessment (DA) in her daily interactions with learners. DA is neither an assessment instrument nor a method of assessing but a framework for conceptualizing teaching and assessment as an integrated activity of understanding learner abilities by actively supporting their development (Poehner, 2008). DA is based on Vygotsky’s (1987) proposal of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which underscores the developmental importance of providing appropriate support to learners to help them stretch beyond their independent performance. The particular approach to DA that the teacher followed reflected her interpretation of the ZPD as well as her knowledge of her instructional context and was arrived at through consultation with the present authors. In other words, her use of DA represents a unification of theory and practice, as advocated by Vygotsky, whereby theory offers a basis to guide practice but at the same time practice functions to refine and extend theory. Examples of the teacher’s interactions with learners in her classroom are discussed with regard to the opportunities for development they create. Abstract In this article we propose an account of the early development of children's knowledge about the mind and report two studies designed to test a part of it. According to this “connections-representations” account, young children begin their discovery of the mental world by learning that they and other people have internal experiences or mental states that connect them cognitively to external objects and events-experiences such as seeing them, hearing them, and wanting them. Later, they realize that the same object can be seriously (other than in pretense) mentally represented in different, seemingly contradictory ways: for example, as A in appearance, B in reality, C according to their perceptual or conceptual perspective, and D according to another person's. The results of both studies confirmed the prediction that 3-year-olds would perform well on appearance-reality and perceptual perspective-taking tasks requiring only an understanding of cognitive connections, but perform poorly on tasks requiring an understanding of seemingly-contrary-to-fact mental representations. To illustrate, children of this age had little difficulty determining that they could hear but could not see a noise-making object located on the experimenter's side of a barrier, and that the experimenter could see it (connections-level tasks). In contrast, they were largely unable to say, for instance, that a toy bear held behind a large elephant mask and emitting a cat sound looked like an elephant, sounded like a cat, and really was a toy bear (representations-level tasks)—even though the experimenter had actually told them previously what it looked like, sounded like, and really was. The article concludes with speculations about the possible origins of connections and representations knowledge and observations about the significance of these acquisitions for the child's development. We summarize the various strands of research on peripheral vision and relate them to theories of form perception. After a historical overview, we describe quantifications of the cortical magnification hypothesis, including an extension of Schwartz's cortical mapping function. The merits of this concept are considered across a wide range of psychophysical tasks, followed by a discussion of its limitations and the need for non-spatial scaling. We also review the eccentricity dependence of other low-level functions including reaction time, temporal resolution, and spatial summation, as well as perimetric methods. A central topic is then the recognition of characters in peripheral vision, both at low and high levels of contrast, and the impact of surrounding contours known as crowding. We demonstrate how Bouma's law, specifying the critical distance for the onset of crowding, can be stated in terms of the retinocortical mapping. The recognition of more complex stimuli, like textures, faces, and scenes, reveals a substantial impact of mid-level vision and cognitive factors. We further consider eccentricity-dependent limitations of learning, both at the level of perceptual learning and pattern category learning. Generic limitations of extrafoveal vision are observed for the latter in categorization tasks involving multiple stimulus classes. Finally, models of peripheral form vision are discussed. We report that peripheral vision is limited with regard to pattern categorization by a distinctly lower representational complexity and processing speed. Taken together, the limitations of cognitive processing in peripheral vision appear to be as significant as those imposed on low-level functions and by way of crowding.