Child Development Theories and Examples

Toward A Remedy

If the foregoing diagnosis is accurate, any remedy must explicitly counteract the tendency to drift toward attributing cognitive structures to either the child or the environment. What is needed seems to be a framework providing constructs and methods that force researchers to explicitly deal with both child and environment when they characterize how new structures emerge in development.
What might such a framework look like? Many would recommend general systems theory, because it views the child as an active component in a larger-scale dynamic system that includes the environment. To date, however, systems theory does not seem to have been successful in promoting research explicating the interaction between child and environment in development. Many investigators appear simply to have learned the vocabulary of the approach without changing the way they study development. Apparently, the concepts of systems theory lack the definiteness needed to guide empirical research in cognitive development toward a new interactional paradigm. A few provocative approaches based on general systems concepts have begun to appear in the developmental literature (e.g., Sameroff, 1983; Silvern, 1984), but they seem to bring to bear additional tools that specifically promote interactional analyses.
It is in such practical tools that the proposed remedy lies. To promote interactional analyses, a framework needs to affect the actual practice of cognitive-developmental research. We would like to suggest that the concept of collaboration may provide the basis for such a framework.

The Collaborative Cycle

Human beings are social creatures, who commonly work together for shared goals. That is, people collaborate. Often when two people collaborate to solve a problem, neither one possesses all the elements that will eventually appear in the solution. During their collaboration, a social system (Kaye, 1982) emerges in which each person's behavior supports the other's behavior and thought in directions that would not have been taken by the individuals alone. Eventually a solution—a new cognitive structure—emerges. It bears some mark of each individual, yet it did not exist in either person prior to the collaboration, nor would it have developed in either one without the collaboration. Indeed, even after the structure has developed, the individuals may be able to access it only by reconstituting the collaboration. Of course, besides having the same two people collaborate again, it is also possible for one of them to collaborate with a different partner (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1982; Brown et al., 1983; Maccoby and Hartup, in this volume).
Figure 3-2 shows this developmental process as a collaborative cycle. The two left circles represent, respectively, structures that are external and internal to an individual. Consider a girl engaged in solving a puzzle with her father. The father provides external structures to support or scaffold her puzzle solving by stating the goal of the task, lining up a puzzle piece to highlight how it fits in its particular place, providing verbal hints, and so forth (Brown, 1980; Kaye, 1982; Wertsch, 1979; Wood, 1980). The child's knowledge and skills for solving the puzzle constitute the core of the developing internal structures.