Differential Benefits from Scaffolding and Children Working Alone

Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) model of Representational Redescription (RR) describes a process by which implicit knowledge becomes progressively more explicit so that eventually it is consciously accessible and verbally statable. Previous investigations have examined the effectiveness of various interventions in relation to this model. However, none appears to have investigated the transfer of knowledge between different, but related, tasks. Such research is of practical and theoretical interest as it addresses issues about children's ability to use their knowledge of one task when later attempting to solve another related task. Our study was conducted to investigate whether experience with a balance beam task on which children succeed (balancing familiar everyday objects) could be transferred to a related problem. We examined the extent to which transfer of knowledge was assisted by adult scaffolding, a group discussion condition and a condition in which children worked alone. A total of 122 children aged between 5 and 7 years took part in the study. Overall, the scaffolding condition was the most effective. However, there was an exception to this, for one of the levels of representation, children at the abstraction nonverbal level were more likely to perform better on the transfer task if they had worked alone during the intervention. This finding provides support for Karmiloff-Smith's view that some levels of cognitive development involve endogenous processes.

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