Amanda Carr

Maternal scaffolding behavior: Links with parenting style and maternal education

The purpose of this study was to specify the relationship between positive and harsh parenting and maternal scaffolding behavior. A 2nd aim was to disentangle the effects of maternal education and parenting quality, and a 3rd aim was to test whether parenting quality mediated the association between maternal education and scaffolding practices. We examined associations between positive and harsh parenting practices and contingent and noncontingent tutoring strategies. Ninety-six mother-child dyads (49 boys, 47 girls) from working- and middle-class English families participated. Mothers reported on parenting quality at Time 1 when children were 5 years old and again approximately 5 years later at Time 2. Mother-child pairs were observed working together on a block design task at Time 2, and interactions were coded for contingent (contingent shifting) and noncontingent (fixed failure feedback) dimensions of maternal scaffolding behavior. Positive and harsh parenting accounted for variance in contingent behavior over and above maternal education, whereas only harsh parenting accounted for unique variance in noncontingent scaffolding practices. Our findings provide new evidence for a more differentiated model of the relation between general parenting quality and specific scaffolding behaviors.

Towards Systems That Care: A Conceptual Framework based on Motivation, Metacognition and Affect

This paper describes a Conceptual Framework underpinning “Systems that Care” in terms of educational systems that take account of motivation, metacognition and affect, in addition to cognition. The main focus is on motivation, as learning requires the student to put in effort and be engaged, in other words to be motivated to learn. But motivation is not the whole story as it is strongly related to metacognition and affect. Traditional intelligent educational systems, whether learner-centred or teacher-centred in their pedagogy, are characterised as having deployed their intelligence to assist in the development of the learners knowledge or skill in some domain. They have operated largely at the cognitive level and have assumed that the learner is already able to manage her own learning, is already in an appropriate affective state and also is already motivated to learn. This paper starts by outlining theories of motivation and their interactions with affect and with metacognition, as developed in the psychological and educational literatures. It then describes how such theories have been implemented in intelligent educational systems. The first part of the Conceptual Framework develops the notion of a partial hierarchy of systems in terms of their pedagogic focus. These range from traditional, cognitively intelligent systems, essentially concerned with cognition up to “Systems that Care”. Intermediate classes of system include Metacognitively Intelligent systems, Affectively Intelligent systems and Motivationally Intelligent systems. The second part of the Conceptual Framework is concerned with the design of systems. This is characterised in terms of (i) the kinds of diagnostic input data (such as the learners facial expression offering clues as to her demeanour) and (ii) the repertoire of tactical and strategic pedagogic moves (such as offering encouragement), applicable at different levels of the hierarchy. Attention is paid to metacognition, meta-affect and meta-motivation covering the capability of both the learner and the educational system to understand, reason about and regulate cognition, affect and motivation. Finally, research questions and areas of further work are identified in theory development, the role of the meta levels, and design considerations.

Lo-fi prototyping to design interactive-tabletop applications for children

Interactive tabletops are an exiting new platform for supporting childrens collaboration. With design guidelines and standardized interaction principles still immature, there is a considerable need for iterative prototyping to define the task and interface. Lo-fi prototypes---using cardboard, paper, etc.---are easy to develop, flexible to adjust during design sessions, and intuitive for users to manipulate. Using them can be a valuable step in designing tabletop applications. In this paper, we detail the design process of two tabletop applications, concentrating on the role of lo-fi prototyping. TransTime is a pattern game for 5--6 year olds to engage how time progresses. OurSpace is a design tool for 7--9 year olds to arrange desks and assign seats for students in their classroom. By comparing the experiences, we arrive at a better understanding of the benefits, challenges, and limits of using lo-fi prototypes to design interactive-tabletop applications for children.

How Mastery and Performance Goals Influence Learners’ Metacognitive Help-Seeking Behaviours When Using Ecolab II

The Ecolab software is an interactive learning environment for 10–11-year-old learners designed to help children learn about food chains and food webs. In the current chapter, we discuss the results of our recent work on achievement goal orientation and help seeking within the Ecolab environment. We situate these results within the broader landscape of our previous studies and discuss the evolutionary approach we have adopted to develop a methodology to support the design of metacognitive learning tools. This methodology has been built up over a series of empirical studies with the Ecolab software that have demonstrated that children who achieved above average learning gains use a high level of system help. In the empirical work that we focus upon in this chapter, we investigate the relationships between young learners’ metacognition: specifically their help-seeking behaviour and their achievement goal orientations. This work draws together and extends two strands of our previous research: metacognitive software scaffolding (Luckin and Hammerton. Getting to know me: Helping learners understand their own learning needs through metacognitive scaffolding. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2002) and the influence of goal orientation on children’s learning (Harris, Yuill, & Luckin. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3):355–374, 2008). Our research with Ecolab shows how tracking metacognitive behaviours—choice and use of more or less specific help—in the light of children’s goal orientations, can be used to support learning.

Scaffolding: integrating social and cognitive perspectives on children’s learning at home

Since the translation and cultural assimilation of Vygotsky’s (1978) ideas into the English-speaking academic community from the 1970s, through thinkers such as Wertsch (1984), Vygotsky’s ideas continue to have a powerful influence in psychology and education, as well as being enthusiastically appropriated in other fields such as technology-mediated education (Luckin, 2003). As academics working across these disciplines, we felt the time was right to reflect on the use of socio-cultural theory, and the concept of scaffolding in particular, in understanding parent-child tutoring interactions at home, with reference to children’s academic achievement at school. Thanks to funding from the British Psychological Society, we ran a series of three seminars, and this Special Issue arises from questions raised there.