Word.ws English Dictionary

zone of proximal development

zone of proximal development noun: the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support.

Noun

zone of proximal development (plural zones of proximal development)

  1. The space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support.

Forms of zone of proximal development

pluralzones of proximal development

Origin of zone of proximal development

Calque of Russian зо́на ближа́йшего разви́тия (zóna bližájševo razvítija), coined by Soviet psychologist and social constructivist Lev Vygotsky.

Questions about zone of proximal development

What does zone of proximal development mean?
Zone of proximal development means the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support.
What part of speech is zone of proximal development?
Zone of proximal development is a noun.
What is the plural of zone of proximal development?
The plural of zone of proximal development is zones of proximal development.

Words near zone of proximal development in the dictionary

  1. zone melting
  2. zone of action
  3. zone of avoidance
  4. zone of fire
  5. zone of polarizing activity
  6. zone of proximal development
  7. zone of rarity
  8. zone of saturation
  9. zone off
  10. zone out
  11. zone picking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zone of proximal development (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “zone of proximal development.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/zone_of_proximal_development. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.