As children add words, they also add more specificity to their utterances, hence more complexity. They start to combine words with gestures, then words with other words. They advance from one word at a time to sequences of words and then combine these under the same intonation contour. The early composition of children’s vocabulary is strongly affected by adult input, and this may determine the proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives available to children early on. Their early constructions are limited in scope, tied to specific lexical items. Conversational exchanges at this stage often depend on adult scaffolding. Children distinguish ‘given’ from ‘new’ information, making use of word order and stress, as well as information from inflections, to identify word classes. Early word combinations in their first constructions are very similar across languages in the meanings expressed. Early combinations may be viewed as frozen forms, as intermediate forms, and as constructed forms, depending on their history in each child’s speech. Children learn to put together new combinations as they talk with adults and so discover more of the options in the language being acquired.

This chapter reviews research designed to inform assessment of early elementary collaborative learning. The various literatures focus on the following contexts for learning and development: classroom quality, parent–child interactions, and peer collaborations. Across these different relational contexts, certain key features that promote optimal development are identified. For example, assessments of classrooms that focus on teacher–student interactions that are attuned to the norms of children’s cultures and that promote student voice and personal connection to the curriculum are found to be highly relevant. In the parent–child interaction literature, microinteractions in which parents coregulate children’s affective and cognitive functioning influence positive child outcomes when the affective content is positive and the history of the parent–child relationship is one of sensitive responsiveness and shared goals. Within the peer collaboration literature, support for contingency, shared control, joint attention, and engagement are most crucial and can be provided by specific tools and materials, including technology. Language exchanges are most generative of new learning when there is support for exploratory talk embedded in the activity and/or supported by the teacher. These contexts vary in the extent to which they reflect traditional Western schooling versus the community participation models of learning in the majority world. The ideal context is one that is both widely culturally valid and generative for learning via collaboration.

This chapter analyzes what makes highly affective collaborations unique and how the complexity of such collaborations can be studied. Drawing on previous research, it explores in-depth innovative methodologies that are designed to capture the key elements of complexity during productive interactions. Components of these methods are then applied to two distinct settings: preschooler free play and early elementary playful learning. The qualitative analysis of free play focuses on how synchrony, intersubjectivity, and shared meaning emerge in a dialectical relationship to each other over the course of interaction and how the coding captures the vicissitudes of complexity. An adaptation of the coding scheme for preschoolers is provided for observational coding of teacher-facilitated early elementary interactions that measures both intersubjectivity and exploratory talk. The preliminary results indicate patterns in the coding of episodes that are consistent with the theoretical premise discussed previously.

Chapter 8 takes up what the subjectivity of socially embedded individuals involves. On the externalist view of individual autonomy, subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity because institutions and social relationships affect people’s choices and actions. To explain this idea, the chapter reviews the situated cognition and the embodied and distributed cognition literatures in cognitive science and psychology to explain the connection between social embeddedness and subjectivity. It then returns to the capability conception of individuals and what individual and personal identity involves. Using a two-level view of people’s capabilities, it argues that socially embedded individuals develop first-order capabilities regarding specific kinds of things that they can be and do and also a second-order self-concept or self-narrative capabilities in conjunction with one another, and rely on the latter to evaluate themselves in relation to their capability development. This discussion draws on the thinking of developmental psychologist Carl Rogers. How, and the extent to which, this understanding of individuals allows us to explain them as distinct and re-identifiable individuals closes the chapter.

Chapter 15 highlights the role of an intentional, purposeful EC professional. It provides ideas and examples of how they can plan for and teach children through their individual and collective learning experiences. The chapter highlights the important place of verbal scaffolding and lesson planning. The components of a lesson plan are described and illustrated.

Chapter 5 examines the type of language learning strategies learners’ might naturally use in the language classroom and the common characteristics of the most effective learning strategies that have been identified in recent research. Strategies differ by communicative method, and examples of each are included throughout the chapter. In addition, authors discuss how strategy-based instruction may work with learners of different ages and proficiency levels.

Each developmental period can be associated with the activity that plays a leading role in children’s lives during this period. The model of leading activities is culturally specific – leading activities are shaped by a given culture and subculture and reflect both the children’s abilities and the expectations of their parents and other mentors. Socioculturally constructed leading activities serve as a motor of child development. Within each of the developmental periods, activity-dependent cognitive and interpersonal skills lead to the formation of a new motive that corresponds to the new leading activity that becomes dominant during the next developmental period. The relationships between children and their sociocultural environment are reciprocal – the leading activities offered to children interact with children’s emerging abilities and motives, while these abilities and motives are shaped and developed by the leading activities. The following leading activities typical for industrial and post-industrial societies are examined: infancy – direct emotional contact with the caregiver; early childhood – joint object-centered activity; preschool age – sociodramatic play; elementary school age – formal learning; middle and high school age – peer interaction; adulthood – work activity.

Chapter 15 opens by asking readers to work through a complex language analysis problem, where the solution requires figuring out what the component parts mean and then making new sentences with those parts. This exercise introduces the notion of scaffolding, which goes beyond the advice that given information should precede new information. The progression from one type of information to the other will likely involve multiple steps, and attention to the order of each step should ideally be audience specific. The chapter encourages readers to describe their topics with as much technical apparatus as they want and then to break their descriptions down as much as possible. An example with vowel formants is introduced, emphasizing links back to problems with jargon and to the idea that incomplete is not incorrect. The Worked Example describes scaffolding in the formant example for the levels of explanation one might use for a young child, an older child, a teenager, a college student, and someone with expertise in a language-related field. Technical terms, materials (such as videos, spectrogram-making programs, or diagrams), and take-home messages are modified accordingly.

This chapter describes two principles for supporting trainees. The Scaffolding Principle describes how support should be adapted to accommodate a trainee’s current skill to keep them in a “high challenge/high support” learning mode. The Reflection Principle describes ways in which training should encourage active reflection in trainees so they can learn how to constantly reflect on their own performance and apply new insights to future situations. The chapter provides examples of intelligent tutoring systems that employ adaptive scaffolding techniques, along with other types of learning applications. The chapter also discusses strategies for encouraging learners to reflect on their training experiences.

The physics chapter by Klaus Wendt, Andreas Pysik and Johannes Lhotzky aims at promoting deeper understanding of the complex phenomenon of the rainbow and encourages learners to demonstrate and share their understanding through a Wikipedia article. In this deeper learning episode, learners carry out a number of experiments on spectral colours and colour sequences. They organise the information gathered and explain the physics concepts and processes underlying the phenomenon. The authors use innovative ways of scaffolding academic language development to increase the meaning-making potential of younger learners.

Philosophy, like other disciplines in the humanities (and social sciences), is one of the “soft disciplines” with a low paradigm consensus. With the plurality of ideas about what counts as philosophy and what methods are appropriate to it, it comes a special challenge in articulating any broadly acceptable vision for how best to implement undergraduate research in philosophy. Although philosophical research involves much collaboration, including layers of peer review feedback and multiple presentations of works in progress, it continues to culminate almost exclusively in the single-authored manuscript.Certainly, a common perception among philosophers has been that one’s own research is most efficiently and successfully undertaken by oneself without the drag of overseeing more or less novice, apprentice collaborators. Where the undergraduate mentee takes on research that is not connected to one’s own, the drag productivity is expected to be even greater.

Although health science disciplines may implement an element of research in the curriculum, the primary focus has been on learning clinical practice and the creation of safe practitioners. Examples of best practice include early implementation of research in the undergraduate curriculum, scaffolding, and collaboration. In order to improve practices related to undergraduate research in the health sciences, it is important to address the needs and developments required. These needs include changing the perceptions of the value of undergraduate research for both students and faculty, finding ways to add undergraduate research to an already full and potentially overwhelming curriculum, addressing the institutional barriers that prevent undergraduate research from occurring, and reducing barriers related to faculty experience and time constraints.

Early years teaching programs at undergraduate level introduce student teachers to sociocultural theorists such as Vygotsky, Bruner and Rogoff. Situating teaching techniques within these theoretical perspectives encourages student teachers to work with children within the metaphor of a ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky) to ‘scaffold’ (Bruner) children from one level of knowledge to the next through ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff). Understanding pedagogical interaction as a social and collaborative event between teacher and child is fundamental, but these metaphors can be challenging – particularly for pre-service teachers – in the practical implementation of early years curricula frameworks. Excerpts of real-life everyday interactions between teachers and young children explored using conversation analysis can demonstrate what the role of the early years teacher might look like when participating in a ‘zone of proximal development’ with children. The skilful ways in which teachers ‘scaffold’ learning with children through ‘guided participation’ in verbal and non-verbal turn taking will then be demonstrated. Through this exploration, the chapter brings together contemporary socio-cultural approaches to early years teaching and ethnomethodology’s concern with the practical achievement of participation to explain how participation frameworks provide a useful lens for understanding pedagogical interaction between children and teachers.

This chapter starts with an overview of the research on young children’s storytelling both in the home and in preschool settings. It will then turn the reader’s attention to research concerned with the interactions of children aged from 1 year 11 months to 3 years in the home, collected in Australia. It aims to illustrate how storytelling in story book reading and in recounts is achieved and changes over time. The chapter ends with a discussion about practical implications for teachers.

This chapter shows how very young children’s intentions in interaction are made visible in sequences of action through a very common sort of child-initiated exchange, one that is founded on their emerging joint attention capacities: object presentations. These exchanges, which consist at minimum of two turns – an initiating action by the child and a response by the adult – can be oriented to by adults and extended in ways that facilitate child learning.

Understanding individuals’ interest, motivation, and engagement is essential to designing for meaningful learning. We typically think of engaged learners as those who have a more developed interest in content (e.g., math, robotics, swimming) and are motivated to learn. But learners who are not engaged or who are unmotivated can also be assisted to meaningfully engage with content in ways that lead to deep learning. This chapter summarizes research on two questions for how to design for meaningful learning: What supports unmotivated individuals to become motivated to learn? How do we design tasks that enable those who are already engaged to continue to deepen their interest? The chapter summarizes five research studies that provide converging evidence that designing for meaningful learning requires (1) addressing the differences in learners’ interest, motivation, and engagement; (2) supporting learners in engaging in thinking about content with others. Learning environments can be designed to enable all learners, regardless of their initial engagement with material, to develop meaningful connections to content, thus optimizing their learning.

This chapter reviews collaborative argumentation, where a community of learners works together to advance the collective state of knowledge through debate, engagement, and dialogue. Engagement in collaborative argumentation can help students learn to think critically and independently about important issues and contested values. Students must externalize their ideas and metacognitively reflect on their developing understandings. This chapter summarizes the history of argumentation theory; how arguing can contribute to learning through making knowledge explicit, conceptual change, collaboration, and reasoning skills; how argumentation skill develops in childhood; and how argumentation varies in different cultural and social contexts. The chapter concludes by describing a variety of tools that scaffold effective argumentation, including through computer-mediated communication forums and argumentation maps.

Scaffolding is the support provided to students by the learning environment, which includes the teacher but also curricular design, technological tools, and classroom social practices. Scaffolding is a social encounter between a teacher and a student and can involve tutoring and mentoring, but is more effective when both teacher and learner participate jointly in a complex and authentic disciplinary practice. Scaffolding simplifies a task so that it is within reach of the learner; it supports learners in participating in authentic disciplinary practices even before they have mastered the discipline; it helps learners focus on the most important aspects of the problem. Effective scaffolding is adaptable and contingent on the learner’s evolving understanding – the degree of structure should be gradually reduced or “faded.” This can be done by inferring a learner’s current understanding using digital traces or dynamic software.

This chapter investigates why output, alongside input, is considered essential for the language learning process and what sort of output is most likely to lead to successful language acquisition. It draws on research in second language acquisition to define output, and uses an example from a classroom to demonstrate how engaging in output may have afforded learning opportunities for the student. It discusses the notion of ‘pushed output’ and suggest ways that learners may be encouraged to ‘push’ their output, including classroom examples. The different advantages, for the language learner, of opportunities for written (as opposed to spoken) output are discussed and examples from the classroom are included along with teacher comments. Referring to the idea of the importance of ‘challenge’ accompanied by ‘support’, teachers describe how they support students to deal with the challenge of producing language output. An example of an extended dialogue between a teacher and student is used to show how output may be viewed through the lens of sociocultural theory. This dialogue is used to discuss how learning may have been promoted as the teacher ‘pushed’ but also ‘scaffolded’ the learner to communicate effectively.