The concept of the ZPD is widely used to study children's mental development as it relates to educational context. The ZPD concept is seen as a scaffolding, a structure of "support points" for performing an action.^[14] This refers to the help or guidance received from an adult or more competent peer to permit the child to work within the ZPD.^[15] Although Vygotsky himself never mentioned the term, scaffolding was first developed by Jerome Bruner, David Wood, and Gail Ross, while applying Vygotsky's concept of ZPD to various educational contexts.^[4] According to Wass and Golding, giving students the hardest tasks they can do with scaffolding leads to the greatest learning gains


Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or a more competent peer helps a student in their ZPD as necessary and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary—much as workers remove a scaffold from a building after they complete construction. "Scaffolding [is] the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions."^[17] This concept has been further developed by Mercedes Chaves Jaime, Ann Brown, among others. Several instructional programs were developed based on this interpretation of the ZPD, including reciprocal teaching and dynamic assessment. For scaffolding to be effective, one must start at the child's level of knowledge and build from there