Which theorist promoted the idea that development is fundamentally affected by ones culture as well as their interactions in their environment?

Zone of Proximal Development

The ZPD refers to the learner's ability to successfully complete tasks with the assistance of more capable other people, and for this reason it is often discussed in relation to assisted or scaffolded learning. The creation of ZPDs involves assistance with the cognitive structuring of learning tasks and sensitivity to the learner's current capabilities. Sociocultural (e.g., Sivan, 1986) and mainstream motivational theorists (e.g., Brophy, 1999) have observed that these aspects of the ZPD make it an inherently motivational zone; the ZPD is optimally challenging (Sivan, 1986) because tasks are calibrated to the learner's level, while appropriate support and scaffolding ensure that tasks can be completed successfully. Assistance from others also helps the learner to learn how to work on difficult tasks and how to control or manage anxiety and frustration in the process. Additionally, working within the ZPD is inherently motivating because it involves the transfer of responsibility, or control, for learning, from the teacher or more capable other to the learner. This transfer of control is motivating for the student as it acknowledges student mastery of the task, and hence the learner's developing efficacy. Interaction within the ZPD is also likely to lead to the recruitment of the learner's interest in the task or knowledge domain as the learner comes to value and appreciate the knowledge which is valued by a respected, more capable other person. Furthermore, as learners come to achieve mastery in a knowledge domain, they are more likely to appreciate the relevance and value of the knowledge domain.

The ZPD can also be considered to be a relational (Goldstein, 1999) or affective zone. Goldstein (1999) has characterized the ZPD as a socially mediated space that is formed through relationships involving sensitivity and trust. In a classroom, this space is created by the interactions between students and between students and their teacher, as they engage in supportive activities that develop learner confidence and positive emotions. This consideration of the ZPD as a shared affective zone also has important motivational implications; the emotional quality and tone of interaction in the ZPD and the sense of caring engendered can have important implications for students' engagement in learning and willingness to challenge themselves.

The ZPD has been extended by Valsiner (1997) into a system of zones which recognizes not only the importance of assisted learning, but also the factors which may assist or constrain learning, and, as Pressick-Kilborn and Walker (2002) have suggested, motivation. Valsiner's system of zones has been used by Pressick-Kilborn and Walker (2002) to understand the development of interest in a classroom learning community.

The Role of Social Experience in Psychological Development

Because of his interest in the social origins of intellectual functioning, Vygotsky was less concerned with children's individual intellectual capabilities at any specific point in time than he was with the child's potential for intellectual growth through social experience. To assess this potential and to understand how intellectual development occurs, Vygotsky proposed the notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’, the region of sensitivity for learning.

2 What are the Processes of Development?

According to Vygotskij's general genetic law of cultural development, any function in the child's cultural development appears on three planes: natural, social, and psychological. Vygotskij emphasized a dynamic and emergent character of development: Each plane emerges on the periphery (‘in an embryonic state’) of the previous plane. First, it appears on the natural plane, when children find themselves in the environment when the function is used by other people. For example, in human society, people use gestures in their communication with each other and they often are inclined to interpret some of a child's actions as gestures. When a very young child tries unsuccessfully to grasp a remote object, the caregiver may interpret it as a command gesture to bring the object to the child.

The second plane of development is social: the child is an active participant in the function socially distributed among people. Continuing Vygotskij's example of the development of the index gesture, at some point young children notice that they can control adults by stretching their arm toward a desired object—the adults often bring the remote object to the child. Thus, on the social plane, children actively participate in the social function of controlling other people rather than finding themselves in the function fully organized by other people as it was on the natural plane. Finally, on the third plane, the function transforms from external social into internal psychological. The child's command of others transforms into the index gesture controlling the child's own attention. Now the stretched arm controls not others but the child him or herself, whose own attention is mediated by the index gesture. The developmental cycle is completed: the cultural higher mental function of the index gesture that initially exists only outside the child on the natural plane becomes the child's own on the psychological plane (Vygotskij 1983). According to Vygotskij, development involves nonlinear and systemic processes of changing relationships and organizations of mental functions.

The issue of the relationship between development and education led Vygotskij to introduce the notion of ‘the zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) as the gap between actual and potential development (Vygotskij 1978). Vygotskij offered two major interpretations of ZPD. The first interpretation is the ZPD as a gap between the psychological (i.e., completed) plane of development, i.e., what children can do by themselves, and the social (i.e., potential) plane, i.e., what they can do with the help of more capable others (adults or peers).

This use of ZPD defines ‘teachability’ of the child in a specific activity or in problem solving. If an activity or problem can be accomplished by the child with the help of more capable others, this activity or skill is considered possible to teach the child. If, however, the activity or skill cannot be accomplished by the child with the help of more capable others, it is considered not useful to teach to the child.

Unlike Piaget, who believed that instruction should follow development, Vygotskij argued that guidance can, should, and does lead development. They would differently define what is currently called ‘developmentally appropriate curriculum.’ Piaget insisted that learning is essentially an individual endeavor and that adults can only facilitate by providing an enriched stimulating learning environment and opportunities for children to share and discuss their egocentric thinking with each other to promote disequilibrium in the child's thinking. Adults should not interfere in the child's individual thinking because it can only lead to imposition of the adult's ideas onto the child—what Piaget called ‘sociocentrism.’ In contrast, Vygotskij encouraged adults to provide guidance and help and to engage students in activities that are beyond their individual levels of competence (‘performance before competence,’ Cazden 1992).

Currently there are attempts in education to develop ‘scientific instruction’ using a medical model of ‘educational interventions’ (Pease-Alvarez C, personal communication, 19 July 1999). The essence of these efforts is to develop educational diagnostics of students' skill deficits and prescribe an appropriate dose of standardized guidance providing no less and more help to the student than is required (Newman et al. 1989). For that purpose, some researchers have tried to develop a ‘ZPD test’—a standardized assessment of a student's teachability. However, it is doubtful that a reliable ZPD test could be developed because, as Newman et al. (1989) demonstrate, the notion of ZPD is relational. A student's teachability depends not only on the student but also on the teacher (and broader communities in which the child participates). Thus, no test of the child alone would accurately determine the child's teachability—the teacher always counts.

According to this neo-Vygotskian view, the ZPD is applied not only to the student but also to the teacher. Both the teacher and the student try to manage the uncertainty that their joint activity creates. During teacher–student instructional interaction, the student learns how to do the classroom activity while the teacher learns how to guide the student. Each engages in their own zones of proximal development, which are mutually constituted by each other—the student's learning is shaped by the teacher's guidance, while the teacher's guidance is shaped by the student's ongoing learning.

The second interpretation of the ZPD offered by Vygotskij is about the activity in which the child is involved. Vygotskij argued that at different ages, different activities become leading forces in a child's development. For young children, play is the leading activity:

play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior … As in the magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development … Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives—all appear in play and make it the highest level of preschool development. (Vygotskij 1978, p. 102)

He introduced the notion of ‘leading activity’ as an activity that determines the child's development. El'konin and Leont'ev elaborated this notion by creating a scale of leading activities from infancy to adulthood as the base of age periodization (Griffin and Cole 1984).

Bruner and his colleagues developed the didactic notion of ‘scaffolding’ in their attempts to operationalize Vygotskij's ZPD in their study of dyadic interactions involving adults tutoring children (Wood et al. 1976). Scaffolding involves a series of adult strategies that assume responsibility for children's learning, such as focusing the child on the task, simplifying the task to fit the child's current mastery, maintaining the child's motivation working on the task, managing the child's level of frustration and risk involved in the problem solving, and demonstrating an idealized version of the required act (Rogoff 1990). Like Vygotskij's ZPD, the scaffolding metaphor is aimed at explaining the gaining of skills in social interaction that the child may apply later on when working alone. It focuses on how the adult fine-tunes the extent of help he or she provides the child for each successful activity outcome while viewing the child as inept, ‘One sets the game, provides a scaffold to assure that the child's ineptitudes can be rescued or rectified by appropriate interaction, and then removes the scaffold part by part as the reciprocal structure can stand on its own’ (Bruner 1983, p. 60).

In a critique of the concept of scaffolding, Griffin and Cole (1984) emphasize the role of the child in his or her own development, ‘The metaphor [of scaffolding] becomes more problematic when we focus not on the execution of a specific task but on the changes in the child’ (p. 47). This concept makes it difficult to address the issue of the child's creativity. If adult support is the universal source of a child's development, ‘then there is a strong sense of theology—children's development is circumscribed by adults' achieved wisdom' (p. 47). If Vygotskij's concept of ZPD seems to be too focused on the child, then the concept of scaffolding seems to be too focused on the role of the adult in guidance. As a consequence, both concepts are limited by dyadic interaction between more and less knowledgeable partners. Besides, cross-cultural research on guidance suggests that scaffolding is not universal guidance strategy (Rogoff 1990).

Unlike scaffolding, the concept of guided participation developed by Rogoff (1990) can be applied in diverse cultural activities because it focuses on transformation of participation guided not only by more knowledgeable partners but also by sociocultural tools, culturally defined goals and problems, and social arrangements of joint activity:

Interaction with other people assists children in their development by guiding their participation in relevant activities, helping them adapt their understanding to new situations, structuring their problem-solving attempts, and assisting them in assuming responsibility for managing problem solving. This guidance of development includes tacit and intuitive forms of communication and distal arrangements of children's learning environments; it is often not designed for the instruction of children and may not involve contact or conversation. The model is one of routine arrangements and engagements that guide children's increasingly skilled and appropriate participation in the daily activities valued in their culture (Rogoff 1990, p. 191).

Lave insists that learning is inherent to activity and an aspect of any activity. Learning occurs even despite expectations and wills of experienced members of the community—it is not a matter of whether students learn in school but a matter of what they learn. The students might actually learn what they were not expected to learn and might not learn what was expected for them to learn. Learning is not an independent activity among other activities but, like development, it is an aspect of any activity in the world.

Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learning is situated in communities of practice. Learning is always a question about membership in the community, about participation in the community practice. A novice is not simply a person who lacks some entities called ‘skills,’ but rather a newcomer who needs to negotiate her or his participation in the community practice. A person engages in ongoing negotiation of membership/participation in different communities of practice. Learning, as a process of negotiation and renegotiation of participation in the community of practice, is often not prime-time community business; it is going on in the periphery of community activity. Because the community is aware of newcomers, the peripheral processes of negotiation and renegotiation of participation have a legitimate character. Newcomers are anticipated and usually organized by the community. An analysis of situated learning allows Lave and Wenger to construct a new productive concept of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ that becomes the main definition of learning and development.

Learning as a communal process is both a descriptive and guiding approach. A view of learning as communal processes embedded in communal practices has inspired many educational practitioners and researchers to explore and define new forms of guidance that can be used in schools, such as instructional conversations, reciprocal teaching, cognitive apprenticeship, community of learners, practice and problem-based learning, building a professional community, and dialogic inquiry. This family of instructional approaches and models shares at least the following important principles: Learning is a communal process, learning is embedded in activities and practices in which it occurs, learning involves development and negotiation of new communal identities, students' guided initiation of discourse and definition of problems and goals are crucial for becoming an active member of a community of practice, ownership for guidance and learning should be shared among students and between the students and the teacher, and a community is based on practice and communication. Nonschool sociocultural research on learning shares many of the same principles.

Abstract

Vygotsky’s theories on the zone of proximal development and the dynamic organization of psychological functions are central to understanding pediatric neuropsychological evaluations. The cardinal feature of the child is development, and Vygotsky is a founding parent of pediatric neuropsychology. Purposes of pediatric neuropsychological evaluations include providing a diagnosis, identifying interventions, clarifying future areas of risk, and facilitating child understanding. These evaluations differ from psychoeducational evaluations according to breadth, referral questions, training and experience of the clinician, and neurodevelopmental influences. Ecologically valid assessments that support the capacity of the examination to confirm, validate, and interpret referral concerns are important. We prefer assessment approaches that are aligned with traditional standards of research methodology in seeking to disconfirm competing hypotheses. Several sources of error may obfuscate the validity of pediatric neuropsychological evaluations, including issues of incremental validity, demographic characteristics of children, ecological validity, potential for malingering, and errors of clinical decision making.

Learning and Development: the Zone of Proximal Development

Another idea which is central to the sociocultural tradition, and which differs from other perspectives, is the focus on the change and dynamics of psychological processes. In fact, Vygotsky argued that when studying human beings, one always studies change. This idea he developed as a critique of the research of, among others, Piaget and his stage theory and of the representatives of traditional intelligence testing such as Binet. An assumption of such theories is that “learning trails behind development” (Vygotsky, 1978: 80). This implies that “[d]evelopment or maturation is viewed as a precondition of learning but never as a result of it” (Vygotsky, 1978). From the point of view of educating children this implies that development is seen as a more fundamental process; children can only learn it when they are at the required stage of maturation. Instruction, thus, should be adapted to the developmental level of the child.

For Vygotsky, and from a sociocultural perspective, the opposite assumption, that is, that learning is constitutive of development, is more productive. It is by appropriating cultural tools that children develop and become familiar with the accumulated knowing and skills of their community. When children begin to appropriate the basics of addition and subtraction, they become familiar with specific cultural tools and “this provides the basis for the subsequent development of a variety of highly complex internal processes in children’s thinking” (Vygotsky, 1978: 90). Expressed differently, through learning the development of the child is set in motion in a specific direction. However, learning is not identical with development; rather, it is a necessary prerequisite for the child to develop “culturally organized, specifically human psychological functions” (Vygotsky, 1978).

These ideas of the dynamics of human thinking, and that learning contributes to development, are incorporated into the famous concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Throughout his short life, Vygotsky had a strong interest in education and wanted to offer an alternative way of thinking about pedagogical practices to the ones offered by, for instance, stage theories and behaviorism. Instead of seeing maturation as a necessary prerequisite for learning, one should consider the manner in which children (or adults) appropriate cultural tools. This is done gradually and through the support the learner receives in social interaction by more expert partners. Thus, for the individual there is a ‘zone’ in which his or her familiarity with how to use a cultural tool is still at an early stage. Vygotsky (1978: 86) defined ZPD as:

the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. (italics in original)

What this idea implies at a very concrete level is that when people are allowed to cooperate with more capable peers, their performance is usually much better than when they work alone. When a child is struggling with understanding the basics of addition and subtraction, support by a teacher or a parent will assist the child in understanding how to proceed when dealing with specific problems. These hints and suggestions may be indirect and subtle but when the adult and the child share a certain interpretation of the task, the child can make productive use of the skills of the more expert person. More capable partners will thus ‘scaffold’ (Wood et al., 1976) the activities of less experienced members of an activity.

The ZPD can be conceived as a developmental path in which the child’s appropriation of a cultural tool is still partial, and where external support will be necessary to accomplish a task such as tying a knot (Nilholm and Säljö, 1996) or solving a puzzle (Wertsch, 1985). But it can also be seen as the zone in which a child is particularly sensitive to instruction from a more knowledgeable partner. It is within this zone that the child is able to profit from the assistance provided by the adult in order to develop a more independent understanding of the cultural tool and how to use it in a specific setting.

The ZPD has served as an inspiration for important developmental work in education in many contexts. The attempts to develop reciprocal teaching and guided cooperative learning by the late Ann Brown and her colleagues (Brown, 1993) is one example of this. In reciprocal teaching, the role of the teacher is “to scaffold the involvement of learners in the discussion by providing the explanation, modeling, support, and feedback that will – in time – enable full participation of students” in activities such as understanding texts and other cultural tools. The idea of the ZPD has also been used as an underlying notion for the view of learning as a process of increasing participation in social practices emphasized by scholars such as Rogoff (1990). In much of this work there is also a critique of the rather one-sided view of the adult–child relationship that Vygotsky presents, where the child is always the dependent part and the adult is in control of the progress of the activity. Several of these scholars, for instance, Rogoff in her analyses of guided participation, instead emphasize the joint efforts by all parties of maintaining mutual understanding and shared perspectives on the world when engaging in conversations. This critique also draws inspiration from the more dialogical interpretations of learning and social interaction which have emerged during recent years when Vygotskian ideas have been combined with the dialogical perspective on language and interaction that is at the heart of Bahktin’s approach to human communication (Wertsch, 1991).

Evidence from Classroom Studies

In mathematics classrooms, scaffolding has been shown to be necessary in early stages of learning particularly for students attempting to learn content just outside of their ZPD (Smit, van Eerde, & Bakker, 2013), but must be faded out successively in order to pass responsibility to the learner (Razzaq & Heffernan, 2006; Vorhölter, Kaiser, & Ferri, 2014). When scaffolds are not removed over time, combined with not taking into account the students’ competence level, performance can suffer (Schwonke et al., 2011). As with laboratory work, the successful use of scaffolding in mathematics classrooms is based on individualized instruction through computer adaptive learning or one-on-one strategies (e.g., Salden, Aleven, Renkl, & Schwonke, 2009), rather than a one size fits all scaffolding approach.

Sibling Teaching

The literature on sibling teaching has been largely guided by the work of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. He believed that teaching and learning occurred within the zone of proximal development; namely, with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled individual (usually an adult), the child is able to accomplish a task that he/she would not be able to do independently. The knowledgeable person guides or scaffolds the less knowledgeable child (e.g., provide hints, suggestions) so that this child can successfully learn to complete a task. In this respect, the pairing of an older and a younger child affords an excellent context for the younger, less-experienced child to acquire knowledge and develop skills. This may be true of both sibling pairs and mixed-age peers. Nevertheless, older siblings are particularly important socialization agents for younger children, given their history of collaborative interactions and the emotional intensity of the relationship. In support of this argument, younger children are more likely to solicit teaching from older siblings than from older peers and are more likely to participate actively in the teaching process. They also learn more from older siblings than from older peers, which may be partly due to the fact that the former provide more extensive explanations, feedback, and spontaneously instruct and correct their younger sibling more often than the latter. Apparently, older siblings are comfortable assuming the role of teacher, while younger siblings take on the corresponding role of learner during interaction.

The small literature on sibling teaching in a Western cultural context reveals considerable individual differences in children’s tendencies to use strategies such as verbal instruction, physical demonstrations, control, and learner involvement in the task. To some extent, these differences are related to age and birth-order effects. Chronologically older sibling teachers use more verbal instruction and encourage learner involvement. However, older teachers also tend to be more controlling than younger teachers. Preschoolers tend to mainly demonstrate during instruction. Nevertheless, even preschool-aged sibling teachers (when supported by their mothers) are able to provide instruction to their infant sibling, to capture the younger child’s attention and to modify instructions based on the infant’s responses. In addition to developmental effects, birth-order differences in sibling teaching are also evident. Firstborn children use more frequent and varied strategies for teaching their younger siblings when the age gap is larger rather than smaller. Furthermore, secondborn teachers are more likely to involve the firstborn learner than vice versa. On the other hand, firstborn teachers tend to be more controlling. These results are consistent with the idea that placing a high-ability child in a novice role and a lower-ability child in an expert role may facilitate more collaboration and joint construction than in pairs where the lower-ability child is the novice.

The relationship between gender and sibling teaching is inconsistent; sometimes school-aged girls are more likely than boys to teach and use a positive style of guiding; however, sometimes there are no gender differences. Many older sisters in the early school years employ an inductive method (i.e., explaining rules, describing with examples), particularly with younger brothers. In contrast, older brothers employ a deductive method (i.e., providing examples for learners to deduct the rules on their own with varying amounts of teacher help). Interestingly, older sisters provide less feedback, perhaps because their teaching style is already more informative and responsive to the younger sibling’s learning.

Unfortunately, we know little about how sibling teaching transpires naturalistically in the home setting, although there is some evidence to support the notion that it occurs, in particular that older siblings (but not younger) frequently engage in this behavior. Most of their teaching behavior involves instructing their siblings in procedural skills (e.g., for playing games or use of objects). However, older siblings also sometimes teach their younger brothers and sisters verbal skills and concept knowledge (e.g., labels, numbers). Furthermore, during play children do not often engage in direct teaching, but it is clear that a great deal of socialization occurs in this context. Namely, older siblings engage in talk about social rules and expectations, direct attention, provide missing perceptual information, use nonverbal cues, and construct simple messages. As such, they may promote more advanced levels of play in their younger brothers and sisters. Older siblings are prone to emphasizing their own competence relative to their siblings and can be highly critical, hence providing clear and unambiguous teaching messages and making the younger child’s incomplete knowledge salient. In contrast, adults tend to be more subtle and less critical. Thus, interestingly, it has been argued that when older siblings try to ‘show off’, they may be effectively socializing their sibling. In fact, children’s interactive play with older siblings tends to be more sophisticated than with adults. Younger children pay close attention to their older sibling’s cues, imitate frequently, follow directions, and request help, again suggesting the potency of the relationship for influencing siblings’ development.

Cross-cultural research reveals that the form and content of sibling teaching varies as a function of cultural practices, beliefs, and values. For example, ethnographic research examining Mayan children’s sibling teaching reveals that they teach their sibling important everyday tasks (such as making tortillas) using a distinct teaching style. This style consists of observational learning that incorporates scaffolding and contextualized talk, as well as physical closeness between teacher and learner, the expectation of obedience, and the possibility of multiple teachers. As such, verbal instruction is less important in this context than in Western culture or a formal school setting.

Building skills

Parents help children build skills. Vygotsky, a developmental psychologist from the early 1900s, noted that the key to children’s learning is challenging them at the right level (the zone of proximal development) and providing the help they need to succeed (“scaffolding”; Arnett, 2012, p. 190). While Vygotsky focused on cognitive development, the same principles seem relevant to other aspects of development. It is important not to overwhelm children but persistently challenge them to do better socially, emotionally, and behaviorally. Thus positive approaches to parenting are in no way lax or permissive. They require enormous attention to the child’s skill sets as well as supervision of the child’s behavior in order to determine when to provide needed assistance and when to allow the child to struggle on her own.

In order to promote growth and skill building, effective parents praise a child’s effort more than the outcome of the behavior. The research by Dweck (2006) shows that praising effort contributes to continued work toward a goal. Furthermore, Faber and Mazlish (2002) recommend using praise that is very specific and descriptive without value judgments. Instead of saying “good job” a parent should describe the behavior. For example, “I see you drew a yellow circle and a purple squiggle, and a red mark on this paper,” or “I see you picked up the toys off the floor and put them away,” or “I noticed you were ready when the ball was passed to you because you were paying attention during the game,” or “I noticed that when your friend was over, you asked him what he wanted to play and did what he wanted first.” These specific ways of giving feedback and reinforcement can be very effective in promoting a variety of positive behaviors.

Assisting Adaptation: Facilitative Contexts and Environmental Support

According to Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, mediation is needed to help the individual become adaptive and creative. Vygotsky posited that caring individuals are needed to help young learners interpret new knowledge. The ‘zone of proximal development’ is the conceptual space in which such interventions are most effective, the discrepancy between the children's actual mental age and the problems they can solve with assistance. Vygotsky found that instruction leads development and assists in the ripening of knowledge structures. Therefore, adults play an important role in mediating the learning process by providing hints, guidance, and correction. Through interactions with the mediator, the child internalizes problem-solving processes, thereby becoming better adapted to dealing with problems in the environment. Ideally, as the child becomes more able to generalize and transfer what is learned, the adult becomes less of a guide and more an encourager.

Psychologist, Reuven Feuerstein, also stressed that mediation plays an important role in adaptation. Feuerstein noted that intelligence is dynamic and modifiable, not static. In efforts to help the Israeli army find ways to improve the intelligence of ‘retarded performers,’ he posited that direct intervention in an individual's cognitive development through mediation by an adult optimizes the effectiveness and efficiency of that development. He also suggested that lack of mediation can result in retarded performance. The intelligent person is able to effectively gather needed information and use that information to solve problems, or to generate new information. Through the benefit of mediation, the individual becomes more open to experience and more adaptable to new situations.

Both Vygotsky and Feuerstein focused on the role of the adult in interpreting both the inner and the outer worlds for the child in order to assist in the adaptive process. For instance, when a parent says to her 3-year-old son, “You are really angry that Sammy took your truck. Could you think of another way of getting it back, instead of hitting him?” the description of the child's feelings and experiences helps him adapt to both the specific situation and to other similar occurrences. Such early mediation appears to promote successful adaptation to the world, and may even promote creative development.

Mediation provided by caring others also may support the work of mature creative people. Gruber's studies of highly creative individuals suggest that social support is essential for full development of creative ideas. For example, in his study of Charles Darwin, Gruber found that Darwin's concerns about contradicting the social values of his time, as well as his desire for social support, inhibited completion of The Development of Species for some 20 years. This can be construed as a desire for mediation – the need to discuss and share with like-minded others, or with those more knowledgeable who can facilitate thinking. It may be that mediation early in life prepares the individual for adaptation to the environment while allowing the individual the internal freedom to modify that environment. Paradoxically, however, enough tension, adversity, and challenge need to be present to develop adaptive strategies. And at the same time, the creator must interpret the cultural and contextual boundaries and what might be accepted or rejected out-of-hand.

b Do parents effectively tailor their support to the needs of the child?

In order for social interaction to facilitate the development of self-regulation, according to Vygotskian theory, caregivers must sensitively tailor their instructional support to the age and competence level of the child, working within the child's “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978). Research has shown that mothers of younger children offer more assistance than mothers of older children and that mothers who work with their child on a difficult task offer more assistance than mothers who work with their child on an easier task (e.g., Baker et al., 1990; Freund, 1990; Kontos, 1983; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch et al., 1980). However, more compelling evidence that adults foster a transition from regulation by others to self-regulation requires a demonstration that individual mothers modify their interventions in response to their own child's ability to complete the task. Such evidence is considerably more limited, although Baker et al. found that most of the mothers in their sample appropriately adjusted their strategic assistance in response to their preschool child's ongoing patterns of successes and failures during the course of the interaction.

One aspect of sensitive instruction that seems particularly critical to the development of self-regulated learning is the adult's gradual withdrawal from the regulatory role and ceding of responsibility to the child. Wertsch et al. (1980) observed the use of regulatory behaviors as mothers worked with their preschool children on a model-copying task. An instance of regulation was coded when the child gazed at the model and correctly placed a piece in his or her own puzzle. Of interest was whether the gaze reflected self-regulation (the child initiated the gaze) or regulation by another (the mother instructed the child to gaze at the model). The investigators sought but failed to find evidence of a microgenetic transition from regulation-by-other to self-regulation during the course of the session. However, the total length of the session was only 20 min, a duration that may be too short for such a shift to occur. Using a different means of assessing regulation, Diaz et al. (1990) compared the first half of a joint problem-solving session with the second half and found that the extent to which mothers relinquished control of the regulatory role was positively correlated with their 3-yr- old child's takeover of the role, even given the short session duration of 5 min. Nevertheless, as Diaz et al. noted, “we do not have a clear description of how the caregiver's sensitive withdrawal and the corresponding takeover of the regulatory function by the child actually occur” (p. 129).

A related question is whether individual differences in the sensitivity of parental instruction are related to individual differences in children's independent performance. A few researchers who explored the effects of social guidance on subsequent performance have attempted to answer this question, with mixed results. Freund (1990) found that children of mothers who transferred responsibility for regulation of crucial task components to their children had better independent performance than children of mothers who retained responsibility. In contrast, Diaz, Neal, and Vachio (1991) found that sensitive maternal withdrawal from the regulatory role was not related to children's subsequent independent performance. However, in neither of these studies was the measure of sensitivity based on a contingency analysis. Baker et al. (1990) evaluated maternal sensitivity based on whether mothers modified the nature of their strategic assistance in response to the ongoing successes and failures of their children. With this contingent measure, maternal sensitivity was moderately correlated with children's independent performance on a concept matching task.