Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 366

Children learn through social experience, by interacting with more experienced partners who provide assistance in completing tasks. Children learn through guided participation (also known as an apprenticeship in thinking), a form of sensitive teaching in which the partner is attuned to the needs of the child and helps him or her to accomplish more than the child could do alone (Rogoff, 2014). As novices, children learn from more skilled, or expert, partners by observing them and asking questions. In this way, children are apprentices, learning how others approach problems. The expert partner provides scaffolding that permits the child to bridge the gap between his or her current competence level and the task at hand (Mermelshtine, 2017). For example, consider a child working on a jigsaw puzzle. She is stumped, unable to complete it on her own. Suppose a more skilled partner, such as an adult, sibling, or another child who has more experience with puzzles, provides a little bit of assistance, a scaffold. The expert partner might point to an empty space on the puzzle and encourage the child to find a piece that fits that spot. If the child remains stumped, the partner might point out a piece or rotate it to help the child see the relationship. The partner acts to motivate the child and provide support to help the child finish the puzzle, emphasizing that they are working together. The child novice and expert partner interact to accomplish the goal and the expert adjusts his or her responses to meet the needs of the child.

Scaffolding occurs in formal educational settings, but also informally, any time a partner adjusts his or her interactional style to fit the needs of a child and guide the child to complete a task that he or she could not complete alone (Rogoff, Callanan, Gutiérrez, & Erickson, 2016). Mothers vary their scaffolding behaviors in response to children’s attempts at tasks. For example, they spontaneously use different behaviors depending on the child’s attention skills, using more verbal engagement, strategic questions, verbal hints, and verbal prompts when children show difficulty paying attention during a task (Robinson, Burns, & Davis, 2009). Moreover, maternal reading, scaffolding, and verbal guidance are associated with 2- to 4-year-olds’ capacities for cognitive control and planning (Moriguchi, 2014). Parents and child care providers often provide this informal instruction, but anyone who is more skilled at a given task, including older siblings and peers, can promote children’s cognitive development (Rogoff et al., 2016). Collaboration with more skilled peers improves performance on cognitive tasks such as card-sorting tasks, Piagetian tasks, planning, and academic tasks (Sills, Rowse, & Emerson, 2016).