Child Development Theories and Examples

Figure 3-2

Development schematized as a collaborative cycle.
The collaboration of external and internal structures produces the behavioral episodes represented in the right circle. The girl and her father work at solving the puzzle, and, as a result of the collaboration, she can achieve a scaffolded mental state, which she could not achieve by herself as quickly or in the same form.
The feedback arrows running from the right circle to the left ones in Figure 3-2 show the dependence of developmental change on collaboration. By performing the task in a scaffolded interaction, the girl learns the goal of the puzzle and how to go about solving it without her father's help. She develops more sophisticated internal structures so that she is less dependent on the complex external structures provided by her father. Of course, the development of this ability takes many steps: The father constantly updates his scaffolding to fit the child's present knowledge and skill. In this way, developmental change occurs both inside the child and outside her—an often overlooked fact to which we will return.
In much human behavior there is indeed a collaboration between two or more individuals. Recent socially oriented analyses of development have emphasized this process. Sometimes the emphasis is on the joint contributions of collaborating individuals, and the process is called coregulation or something similar (see Feldman, 1980; Markus and Nurius, Maccoby, and Weisner, in this volume; Westerman and Fischman-Havstad, 1982). Sometimes the emphasis is on the role of the parent or older child in supporting and advancing the child's behavior, and the process is called scaffolding or something similar, as in Figure 3-2 (Brunet, 1982; Kaye, 1982; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1983; Lock, 1980; Vygotsky, 1934/1978; Wertsch, 1979; Wood et al., 1976; Wood, 1980).
Even when a child is acting alone, collaboration can occur because the nonpersonal environment can play the role of collaborator. Because environments have structures, every environment supports some behaviors more than others. For example, a tree that has strong branches far down on its trunk provides strong support for climbing, a tree with only high branches provides less support, and a pole with no branches provides little support.
Of course, much about human environments is socially constructed. Consequently, the collaboration between child and environment often involves other people even when no other person is immediately present, because people have constructed the physical environment to correspond with mental structures that organize their activity. Good examples include a library with a spatial/topical organization of its many books and a classroom with its desks, chalkboards, and wall displays all designed to facilitate the types of interactions needed for schooling.