Learning as a social process
I’ve always guessed that learning can be very effective as a social activity. This article seems to agree.
Having found that the mental age of two children was, let us say, eight, we gave each of them harder problems than he could manage on his own and provided some slight assistance; the first step in a solution, a leading question, or some other form of help. We discovered that one child could, in cooperation, solve problems designed for twelve-year-olds, while the other could not go beyond problems intended for nine-year-olds. The discrepancy between a child’s actual mental age and the level he reaches in solving problems with assistance indicates the zone of his proximal development. . . . Can we really say that their mental development is the same? Experience has shown that the child with the larger zone of proximal development will do much better in school. This measure gives a more helpful clue than mental age does to the dynamics of intellectual progress.
Ironically, when I was teaching graduate school, I used a similar technique. I didn’t give timed exams and generally let students take as long as then needed to on tests. However since this could go to extremes, at what would be a normal “time limit” of the testing period, I would walk around to the approximately 10% of the class still taking the exam and ask them where they needed help.
Of these students, some only needed a gentle push in the right direction, and were able to answer questions correctly or mostly correct. In some cases, their grades were improved by half a letter or more. Others just didn’t “get it” and no amount of assistance, aside from just giving out the answer, seemed to help.
Perhaps on exams we should let students, “buy a vowel,” losing a couple of points to get a hint at how to gain a lot of points.