Rethinking Assessments: Creating a New Tool Using the Zone of Proximal Development Within a Cultural-Historical Framework

This research proposes a new assessment tool, a planning and assessment matrix (PAM), which may be used to redesign Learning Stories to study the process of development. Using the Zone of Proximal Development concept, PAM guides teachers to focus not on what children have already achieved, but on the next steps in their potential developmental trajectory. PAM offers the educational field an alternative assessment methodology and a new perspective that focuses on how the child’s potential level of development may be actualised. From this new perspective, it is not the child’s mastery of a task that is important, it is the distance in development travelled.