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Adapting the Zone of Proximal Development to the Wicked Environments of Professional Practice

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Adaptive Instructional Systems (HCII 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12214))

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Abstract

Many real-world questions that professionals face occur in complex, dynamic environments where information is often sparse, e.g., clinical decision-making, cyber security, stock market prediction. In many cases, problems are open-ended without a single or optimal solution. Providing effective training in these ill-defined environments presents an important challenge for educators. Using the healthcare professions as a case study, this chapter outlines a framework for knowledge acquisition in the professions. It argues that dynamic, adaptive criteria must be identified based on educational theory, psychometric techniques, and properties of expert performance. From this approach, educators must develop assessment criteria that satisfice, framing problems in terms of an order of difficulty relative to the learner’s current level of comprehension. This reflects a quantitative approach to the zone-of-proximal development (ZPD), that removes the upper-bound for knowledge acquisition. In health professions education, this approach can be used to create a competency profile. Finally, given that professional practices often focus on the efficient use of resources, I argue that measures of the speed-accuracy trade-off should be used to assess expert performance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Vygotsky did not use this term himself.

  2. 2.

    In terms of σ, the value is likely bound within a range, i.e., it should be outside a learner’s skill level. The value 1 is used here for convenience.

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Acknowledgments

Research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under the Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0223. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for the Government purposed notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Institute for Data Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    Jordan Richard Schoenherr

  2. Army Cyber Institute, Behavioral Science and Leadership Department, US Military Academy, West Point, USA

    Jordan Richard Schoenherr

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  1. Jordan Richard Schoenherr
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Correspondence to Jordan Richard Schoenherr .

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    Robert A. Sottilare

  2. Fraunhofer FKIE, Wachtberg, Germany

    Jessica Schwarz

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Schoenherr, J.R. (2020). Adapting the Zone of Proximal Development to the Wicked Environments of Professional Practice. In: Sottilare, R.A., Schwarz, J. (eds) Adaptive Instructional Systems. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50788-6_29

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