Learning in theory and practice: Vygotsky’s ZPD and physical education in primary education
Introduction
Age-graded schooling is one of the most common and conventional features of today’s academic environment. For younger learners in the primary education levels, this separation of young children from adolescents may seem on the face of it like a common sense approach to education—yet, as Gray and Feldman (2004) point out, separation such as this actually is more restrictive to the educative experience than it is facilitative. The reason is found in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) theory. Vygotsky was an early 20th century Soviet thinker… Continue Reading...
Connecticut) to a low of $16,047 in Wyoming (followed closely by Massachusetts), as representative examples (Cornman et al., 2018). Nevertheless, a study by Barth, Cebula and Shen (2016) found that inadequate spending for primary education is one of the major factors that has caused the steady increase in high school dropout rates in many American cities.
Further complicating the evaluation of the effectiveness of public high school districts in achieving their primary mission in terms of graduating students rather than losing them through attritional dropouts is the manner in which these data are calculated. In this regard, a study by Koenig and Hauser (2010), writing for the the National Research Council and the National Academy of Education, report that, “If the purpose [of… Continue Reading...
