Paper

Human Development 2001;44:126143

Cultural Tools, Social Interaction and the Development of Thinking

Mary Gauvain1
University of California, Riverside, Calif., USA

Key Words Cognitive development W Cultural tools W Development of planning W Plans W Sociocultural influences

Abstract This paper discusses the role of cultural artifacts or tools in cognitive development. It examines how social interaction with more experienced partners helps children learn how to use tools that support thinking. Of particular interest is how children come to understand and use external representations, such as plans, to guide action. The discussion is illustrated by a study in which 4- to 5- and 6- to 7-year-old children and their mothers were observed as they constructed a toy by following a step-by-step action plan. The view is expressed that in order to understand cognitive development it is important to examine thinking and its development in relation to the cultural tools that support much of the intelligent action in which humans engage.
Copyright 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel

The human intellect develops in a rich social and cultural context. At the heart of development is the adaptation of the mind to the circumstances in which growth occurs. In fact, cognitive development can be described as the process by which basic biological capabilities are shaped in ways that fit with the social and cultural context in which these capabilities will be used [Bruner, 1996; Shweder, Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus & Miller, 1998]. This remarkable coordination is essential to survival and it is far from coincidental. These constituent elements of human development, the biologi-

I am grateful to Jennifer de la Ossa and Maria Hurtado for their help in collecting the data included in this

paper.

ABC
Fax + 41 61 306 12 34 E-Mail karger@karger.ch www.karger.com

2001 S. Karger AG, Basel

0018716X/01/04430126$17.50/0

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/hde

Mary Gauvain, Department of Psychology University of California at Riverside Riverside, CA 92521 (USA) Tel. +1 909 787 4690, Fax +1 909 787 3985 E-Mail mary.gauvain@ucr.edu

cal, the social, and the cultural, grew up together over the course of human evolutionary history [Donald, 1991]. The puzzle for developmentalists is to explain how cognitive growth takes place in this complex mix. A social-contextual approach to cognitive development is explicitly concerned with this question. According to this view, which is also referred to as a sociocultural or sociohistorical approach, in order to understand intellectual development it is essential to investigate the role that social experience plays in the process. Social experience is considered in its direct form, as people interact and support one another, and in its indirect forms, in the tools, symbols, and values that influence human action. The key question about psychological development that arises from this view is how, over the course of development, does the social world become part of individual mental functioning? This paper uses a sociocultural approach to discuss one way in which the social world influences intellectual development during childhood, namely the acquisition of knowledge about external representations that guide action. Human action, especially that which involves higher mental functions, is mediated by cultural tools and signs [Vygotsky, 1978]. Thus, cognitive development involves, as a central feature, the socialized use of tools that support thinking and problem solving [Cole, 1996; Goody, 1977; Wertsch, 1998]. Important among these tools are representational forms that contain instrumental knowledge, that is knowledge about how to accomplish practical goals of everyday life. In literate communities, children come to understand (a) that such information is available and (b) that it can be useful as they participate in activities in which these tools are instrumental. This claim is consistent with Rogoffs [1998] view of cognitive development as a process of changing roles and responsibilities as children participate in the activities of the community in which development occurs. It also coincides with specific observations of tool use and opportunities for children to develop cognitive skills such as those conducted by Heath [1983] in two working class communities in the southeastern part of the United States. She identified several types of artifacts in and about the home that support cognitive activity, including street signs, telephone dials, price tags, clocks, product labels, recipes, and patterns for dress making. Children in these communities regularly observe adults using these tools to accomplish practical goals. Over development, these tools gradually become part of childrens own actions. Childrens acquisition of the representational knowledge contained in a particular type of cultural tool, namely the representation of action sequences presented in procedural or pictorial form, is the focus of this article. Common instances of this type of representation appear in directions, plans, and itineraries, all of which have historical and contemporary significance as tools of thinking. They are of special interest to students of cognitive development because of the complex intellectual base on which these tools rely in order to be used effectively. The primary purpose of this article is to examine how social experience may influence the development of knowledge about this type of artifact. To illustrate this process, recent research from my laboratory in which adults and children interacted as they used a two-dimensional plan to construct a toy is described. As a secondary goal, this article discusses how examining the development and use of cultural artifacts such as plans can broaden the study of cognitive development more generally. Representational tools like plans are but one of the many types of cultural tools available to aid thinking. The development and use of such tools are hallmarks of human intelligence and, therefore, are an important part of cognitive growth.

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The Sociocultural Context of Cognitive Development

Two important questions can be asked about intellectual development. One of these is familiar to researchers: What is the nature of the individual mind? The other question is less familiar in that it emphasizes a different aspect of mental functioning and its development: How does the individual mind connect with the minds of others? These two related questions highlight the dual constitution of the human intellect as both an individual and a social phenomenon. Unique biological capabilities of the human organism set the stage for thinking and its development. Over the course of growth, these capabilities form the substrate of the myriad intellectual skills children develop, such as perception, language, concepts, memory, and problem solving. Higher level mental functions integrate these skills in the service of complex goals [Vygotsky, 1978]. The shape and trajectory of intellectual growth is inseparable from the social and cultural character of human experience, however. Humans are social animals and connections between individuals are a critical aspect of mental life. These connections not only help organize and sustain the human intellect, they also serve as templates for cognitive growth. As Shweder et al. [1998] explain, human mental functioning is an emergent property that results from symbolically mediated experience with the historically accumulated ideas and understandings (meanings) of particular communities [p. 867]. A sociocultural approach to cognitive development brings this process more clearly into view. This approach attends to the social forces that help shape human intelligence as well as the social conditions in which human intelligence grows.

Cultural Tools That Guide Human Action

According to a sociocultural view, people have access to the world indirectly rather than directly [Wertsch, 1991]. Material and symbolic tools mediate human behavior, and cultures have developed many types of tools to support the daily activities of people [Goody, 1977; Norman, 1993]. These include material tools, like labor-saving devices and forms of technology. Sign and symbol systems, like language, numeracy, and other representational systems, have also been developed to represent, manipulate, and communicate ideas. These tools, signs, and symbols provide people with means to organize and accomplish everyday, practical actions, and their use is passed on to succeeding generations. An important point is that these tools not only enhance human thinking they transform it. As Vygotsky [1981] stated, by being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions [p. 137]. This suggests that one important part of intellectual development is the acquisition of skills for understanding and using the symbolic, representational systems of the culture in which the child lives [Cole, 1996; Gauvain, 1995; Goodnow, 1990]. This experience helps organize the human mind in culturally specific ways. Through the gradual incorporation of culturally constructed tools over the course of mental development, culture becomes part of each individuals nature. This does not mean that cultural tools simply determine human thinking and development. People are active agents in the continuation of their symbolic and material inheritance [Shweder, Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus & Miller, 1998]. There exists a continual tension between sociocultural

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means for solving problems and individual means and motives for using them [Wertsch & Tulviste, 1994]. In other words, even though cultural tools that specify actions constrain what people do, the understanding and use of these tools is not a predetermined and passive process. According to sociocultural theory, learning to use cultural tools is dynamic, and this distinguishes this process from social behaviorism in several ways. First, when children learn skills in sociocultural context, they learn them in relation to their use in that context. How children deploy these skills later on is not predetermined but constructed by the child to meet new contextual demands. A selection and mapping process occurs that includes decisions about what tools are needed and when and how they should be used in a particular circumstance. Second, tool use is defined by the goal of the activity, their use is not the goal itself. The overall behavioral structure of an activity in which tools play a part is not a fixed set of contingent reinforcements, but a unique activity setting in which a cultural tool (or tools) is coordinated with other cognitive and social activities to reach a goal. In any particular circumstance, any number of action routines may lead to the goal [Randall, 1987]. Therefore, specific behavioral contingencies would not be useful since unexpected or diverse options typically need to be addressed. How a cultures symbolic tools become part of an individuals own repertory of thought is the key in this process and was of much concern to Vygotsky [Bruner, 1997]. This concern directs attention toward the role that the social world plays in this process because the social world is knowledgeable about the meaning and function of these tools. From a sociocultural perspective, the social contributions to tool use are evident in two ways. First, cultural tools contain, to some degree, information about the expected or appropriate actions in relation to a particular performance in a community. This is indirectly social in that it is not interpersonal, though it nevertheless stems from the social context. Second, children learn how to use these tools and incorporate them into a stream of cognitive activity by interacting with more experienced community members. This is directly or interpersonally social. Social interaction is especially critical to learning about tools because much of the information that children have to learn is implicit rather than explicit knowledge. For example, not every step of a plan is usually articulated in the plan (e.g., plans rarely tell the person to open the box in which the parts are contained) and certain conventions of use may not be specified though they may be unknown by a novice (e.g., the fact that the actions in the picture identified as 1 precede the actions in the picture identified as 2)2. Adults and other more experienced partners play key roles in communicating such tool-related knowledge to children when they engage in joint activity involving these tools. Although adults tend to assume responsibility for instructing children in these circumstances, this is not a unidirectional process. Children play an active, directive role as their developing capabilities set the stage and the boundaries for development within social context [Rogoff, 1990; Whiting & Edwards, 1988]. Children inform adults about their understanding, interests, and skill regarding the tools, and this helps direct the

2 However, sometimes seemingly obvious steps are made explicit. I recently came across an advertisement for a collapsible stroller that explicitly stated that the child should be removed from the stroller before folding.

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adults actions. In this way, children and adults co-construct understanding [Rogoff, 1998; Valsiner, 1998]. And because these interactions are rooted in the practical incorporation of tools into culturally valued activities, this fosters the development of childrens thinking along culturally desired lines. Research on the use of particular cultural tools and the development of thinking illustrates this point. Luria [1928/1978] showed that the acquisition of literary changed how children remembered. Research on mathematical skills has yielded similar results. People skilled at using the abacus to calculate employ a mental abacus when calculating solutions in their heads and this skill enhances mental calculation [Hatano, Miyake & Binks, 1977]. Research by Schoultz, Sljo and Wyndhamn [2000] demonstrates the link between childrens reasoning about astronomy and their use of an artifact a globe as a tool of thinking. These researchers discovered that an account of the childrens thinking that relied solely on mental models could not explain the type of reasoning that was facilitated when children used a globe during problem solving. The artifact transformed the way the children solved the problems presented to them. Goodys [1977] historical analysis of the role of lists, tables, and recipes as modes of communication indicates that tools such as these represent a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the modes of thought that accompanied them, at least if we interpret modes of thought in terms of the formal, cognitive, and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up [p. 81]. The effect of tools on thinking may be profound in relation to many areas of cognitive development. For instance, Olson [1994] argues that reading and writing played a critical role in producing a shift in human intelligence from thinking about things to thinking about representations of those things. For Olson, this is the crucial step in the emergence of thinking about thought itself, a claim that should be of much interest to researchers studying theory of mind. The main point in these studies and other research on this topic [e.g. see Hutchins, 1996; Levinson, 1996; Olson, 1995] is that cultural tools and the thinking they support are not independent but merged. To describe thinking and its development by concentrating on one and not the other is to ignore part of the thinking process itself. An important underlying point here is that cognition takes place both inside and outside the head. A definition of human cognition and its development that ignores external contributions, such as cultural tools, to intelligence results in a biased view of the mind and what is considered cognitive [Hutchins, 1996]. This bias, which is prevalent in contemporary cognitive and developmental psychology, has resulted in a tendency to over-attribute to the mind what needs to be done in order to solve a problem. The consequence of this is research that directs most of its attention toward mental processes and largely ignores the intricate and essential fit between thinking and action and the circumstances that support both of these. As Hutchins explains, When one commits to the notion that all intelligence is inside the inside/outside boundary, one is forced to cram inside everything that is required to produce the observed behaviors [p. 355]. This leads, in the short and long run, to inquiry and theory that are not true to the nature and the expression of the human intellect. This view suggests that in the course of human problem solving, the mind is frequently engaged in interaction with objects, symbols and other people, and these are inextricably tied to the thinking that occurs. As a case in point, we are interested in some of the ways that have been devised by cultures to store and communicate information that is considered important for everyday life but that is difficult to remember. Much of

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this stored information exists in some kind of symbolic, representational form. In order to use this type of information a person needs to be able to decipher and manipulate the representation so as to meet desired goals. In fact, the ability to understand and use these representations is often critical for mature functioning in a community. Despite its import, little is known about how children develop knowledge about and learn to integrate tools of thinking with the activities in which they commonly engage. Because of the inherent social and cultural nature of this process, one way to study this is to examine how social participation in activities that rely on tool use may help children acquire the ability to understand and use these important informational forms. In sum, the presence of cultural tools transforms cognitive development and creates a particular type of connection to the social and cultural context in which growth occurs. Interaction with more experienced cultural members demonstrates and conveys to children the use of these tools along valued cultural lines. Furthermore, by using cultural tools for thinking, the childs mental functioning acquires an organized link to prior generations as sociohistorically formulated means of thinking are transmitted through these artifacts. This is a process of cognitive socialization, one that involves social partners and cultural artifacts in the creation of opportunities and constraints for cognitive development. One way in which we have been studying this process is by observing parents and children as they solve problems that require the use of a particular cultural artifact: a plan.

Learning to Use Plans: A Specific Case of Cognitive Socialization to Cultural Tools

One specialized form of symbolic representation that has much importance in literate cultures is the plan, defined in Websters dictionary [1970] as, (1) a drawing or diagram on a plane, (2) a method of carrying out a design or doing something, and (3) an orderly arangement of parts of an overall design or objective. In other words, plans, whether in the form of words or pictures or both, represent the actions required to reach a goal. They are common in literate settings and they appear in many forms: step-bystep diagrams for making objects, maps that guide travel to particular destinations, recipes for cooking and baking, patterns for sewing and construction, and directions for playing games and using equipment. Plans serve an important instrumental function in that by interpreting and following them people are able to accomplish many practical goals of life. Do children use plans? Yes, they do, and their use originates in and is related to social experience. For instance, plans tend to accompany the toys and games that parents or caregivers provide for children. In her observations of the linguistic conventions and practices in two working class communities in the US, Heath [1983] found plans, diagrams and directions in both settings though their frequency and use varied by community. She also found that these artifacts were often handled in privileged ways in the home. The term privileged is used here is a way similar to that of Wertsch [1991]. It refers to the idea that a particular mediational means, in this case the directions or plans, is considered more appropriate or efficacious than other means in a particular sociocultural setting. Plans and directions may, in some instances, be extreme versions of privileged mediational means in that they may be seen as the only way to do an activity, a view that can have cultural and cognitive consequences [Goody, 1977].

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According to Heath [1983], the written word can sometimes assume an authority that then limits the alternatives of expression or action that emerge. The idea that plans or directions are privileged is evident in the care and concern Heath [1983] observed when parents talked to their children about these artifacts. Parents actively promoted childrens attention to and care of directions, for example by telling children to keep the instructions in the right game box and reminding children to read the directions before playing with their toys. Heath also observed that children frequently requested help from their parents about how to use these artifacts and that parents often provided assistance. Thus, adults mediate childrens learning about plans and directions by providing guidance as children learn how to use these tools. It is important to note that guidance from adults in these instances appears in two social forms: through the provision of the plans themselves (an indirect form) and in social interactional exchanges with children regarding their use (a direct form). Children actively engage in this learning process as they request adult assistance and participate in goal-directed actions based on the plans. Despite their frequent occurrence and utility, little is known about childrens ability to understand and use established plans. Several areas of research are relevant to the sociocultural context of this developmental process, however. These include the development of planning skills, childrens ability to understand and use symbolic representations to guide action, and the influence of more experienced social partners in helping children learn in these two domains of intellectual competence.

Childrens Planning Over the past decade, the development of planning has been studied extensively [e.g., see Das, Kar & Parrila, 1996; Friedman, Scholnick & Cocking, 1987; Haith, Benson, Roberts & Pennington, 1994]. This research, which has primarily focused on childrens ability to generate plans on their own, includes little investigation of how children understand and use established plans to guide action. Although understanding and using an established plan is not the same as generating a novel plan, both rely on some of the same underlying knowledge. Both reflect understanding that future behaviors can be planned in advance of action, that an activity can be decomposed into a set of actions, and that these actions can be organized in an ordered sequence to achieve a goal. What is the developmental course of such understanding? With development, children show increasing skill at future-oriented concerns and at generating plans in advance of action. However, the development of planning is a protracted process. Infants can make rudimentary plans as early as 12 months of age [Willatts, 1990], and preschoolers are able to devise and execute simple plans in advance of action [Wellman, Fabricius & Sophian, 1985]. By 5 years of age children have a fairly good conceptual understanding of what planning is and when it is needed [Gauvain, 1989; Pea, 1982]; they are capable of planning five or six moves in advance of action [Klahr & Robinson, 1981]; they are able to use knowledge of familiar events to plan flexibly [Hudson & Fivush, 1991], and they consider more alternatives and correct their planning errors more readily during plan execution [Fabricius, 1988]. During middle childhood, children show increasing competence in devising elaborate and effective plans on a wide range of cognitive tasks [Brown & Campione, 1984; Magkaev, 1977]. On very complex tasks, such as those requiring computation and interpretation, adult-

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level performance is not reached until adolescence or later [Krietler & Krietler, 1987; Presson, 1987]. Research indicates that social interaction is an important context for the development of planning skills. Children learn about the process of planning as they coordinate plans with others and as they observe and interact with more experienced planners [Gauvain, 1992; Gauvain & Rogoff, 1989; Radziszewska & Rogoff, 1988]. In sum, research on the development of childrens skill at generating plans indicates that even young children, but especially children around the ages of 5 or 6, should be capable of understanding the purpose of an established, multistep plan and be able to use it to some degree to guide action. Since planning skills are still developing during these years and social experience can assist children as they develop these skills, children of this age can benefit in their understanding and use of established plans by working with a more experienced partner.

Childrens Understanding of Symbolic Representations In order to use an established plan successfully, children need to be able to draw inferences from one source of information to another. The ability to reason about the relations between entities is an important part of mental development during the early years [DeLoache, Miller & Pierroutsakos, 1997]. One type of relational understanding central to the use of established plans is similarity, that is the knowledge that two entities, in this case the plan and the actions to be done, are related to one another. This understanding is rooted in the identification of perceptual similarity. As early as 2-years of age children are able to use perceptual similarity as a basis for drawing such inferences [Gelman & Coley, 1990], and with development children show increasing skill at making these types of judgments. Reasoning about similarity is not sufficient for using established plans to guide action, however. Understanding the symbolic relations between the plan and the action is also important. This understanding relies on the knowledge that one thing, in this case one external piece of information, stands for the objects or actions of a referent [DeLoache, Miller & Pierroutsakos, 1997]. DeLoache and colleagues have examined young childrens understanding of external symbolic representations to guide action. By 2 years of age children can use pictures [DeLoache & Burns, 1994] or a video [Troseth & DeLoache, 1996] as sources of information about a room of which they have no direct knowledge to guide subsequent action in a space. Plans, though related to the type of pictorial representations studied by DeLoache and colleagues, are distinct from these in several important ways. Although plans typically contain a representation of the goal state, they also contain the steps leading to this state, which are partial representations of the goal. In other words, the action steps represent a sequential decomposition of the end state. Thus, to reach a goal by using a step-by-step plan requires the identification of individual features of each step and an understanding of how these features relate to each other and to the end state. Sometimes the interpretation of specialized conventions of representation is also required, such as expansion drawings (blow-outs) or more detailed insertions that depict relations that may be visually obscured. Whether young children are capable of using representations of action steps to achieve an end state, like constructing an object, is an open question. The ability to use a

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representation of this sort involves two parts [Blades, 1991; Blades & Spencer, 1994]. One, an individual has to recognize that the representation is actually a representation, that is, that it corresponds to a real entity. Based on results by DeLoache and colleagues, preschoolers would be expected to possess this skill. However, childrens ability to extend this understanding to plans which contain both sequential and partial representations is unknown. Two, an individual has to be able to use the representation to carry out an activity. Information in the representation must be selected and encoded in a way that supports the activity. This involves understanding the meaning behind the representation [Perner, 1991]. A sociocultural perspective examines how the meaning of these artifacts is communicated both implicitly and explicitly by more experienced cultural members during joint activity involving these tools.

Social Interaction and Childrens Understanding and Use of Plans There have been few studies of childrens socialization in the use of plans. This is surprising in that young children are often in the company of others who have more understanding than the children themselves about how to use these types of artifacts. Thus, much of what young children learn about such tools occurs in a social context and may reflect social contributions to this developing understanding. To investigate childrens skill at understanding and using plans in social context, we observed 32 mother-child dyads as they used a plan to construct a commercially available toy [Gauvain, de la Ossa & Hurtado, 1996]. Children were 45 or 67 years old. Each dyad was videotaped as they constructed a 33-piece plastic helicopter using a 10-step pictorial plan. This toy was targeted toward children of these ages. Results suggest that children as young as 4 years of age have some understanding of representations that include multiple steps to guide action, that there are age-related differences during these years in childrens use of these representations, and that social experience may support the development of these representational skills. To describe these patterns, we examined mothers and childrens talk about and use of the plans in relation to child age. Table 1 contains the results discussed below.3 Mothers Talk about the Plan in Relation to Child Age. Child age was related to the way in which mothers talked to their children during these interactions. This suggests that mothers assume different understanding by preschoolers, compared with early school age children, of this type of cultural artifact. In particular younger children received more introductory information about the plans from their mothers than older children. Such introductory comments described either what a plan is or what its use is, as in the following remarks made by a mother to her 4-year-old daughter before they started to make the toy:
Mother: Child: Mother: OK, look at all the pieces. What do you think goes where? Do you want to look at the pictures and see? (Child looks at pieces on the table). I know where these go. Oh, look at the picture. See what the picture has. This is kind of fun huh all these pieces in here.

Interrater reliabilities for all the variables discussed here exceeded 90% agreement.

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Table 1. Mothers and childrens references to the plan by child age

Child age, years 45 Mother Provided introductory information, % Made no comments about the plan, % Used plan to direct childs action, % Referred to specific plan information, % Refered to general and specific plan information, % Child Anticipatory references to plan (average) Confirmatory references to plan (average) Made no comments about the plan, % Comments in response to mother only, % Initiated specific plan references, % Initiated general and specific plan references, % * p ! 0.10; ** p ! 0.05; *** p ! 0.01. 67

56 0 31 56 12 4.87 4.62 62 6 19 12

12*** 19* 12 25* 44** 8.87** 4.56 25** 44*** 19 12

Child: Mother:

Yeah. (Child continues to look at pieces on the table). OK, Laura, lets look at the pictures (child turns to look at the plan). See the pictures have numbers and they have little boxes with different things in it. OK, so first we need to take this piece, the red piece, and this one and put it together, OK?

Not only did younger children receive more introductory information, the information included in the introductions for the two age groups differed in character. For younger children, these comments tended to inform the child about what a plan is, as the passage above and the following statement by a mother of a 4-year-old illustrate:
Mother: OK, look, look, look. Look at the picture. See, this is what we want to make, right? And so this is where we have to start. So we have to lay this down like that, OK ... with me? OK, get one of these. Here, you do the screws. Here, Ill hold it.

Although only 2 of the older children received any introductory comments at all from their mothers, both of these assumed more knowledge of plans than was evident in the introductory remarks provided by mothers for the younger children. The following statement by a mother of a 6-year-old illustrates this:
Mother: OK, we look at the instructions, number one, right? (pointing to Step 1). This is what it is going to look like. What pieces do we need?

Differences in the frequency and character of the introductory information provided by mothers to the two age groups suggest that children of early school age know more about this type of cultural tool than preschoolers. This is interesting in light of the fact that both groups of dyads looked at the plan the same number of times during toy construction (there was an average of 45 looks per dyad). However, it was also the case that dyads with younger children looked at the plan longer over the entire session (aver-

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aging close to 2 minutes of total study time) than dyads with older children (who averaged slightly more than 11/2 minutes of total study time). Thus, even though dyads involving younger and older children used the plan in some ways that were similar, the fact that more introductory information was provided by mothers who worked with preschoolers and that these dyads looked at the plan longer suggests different understanding of plans in the two age groups. This pattern also suggests that adults adjust the information and experiences about tools that they provide for children to fit with the developmental needs of the child. Maternal comments about the plans during toy construction (after any introductory remarks) are consistent with this claim. Maternal comments about the plans were more common in dyads involving younger than older children. All the mothers who worked with younger children commented on the plans in some way, whereas three of the mothers who work with older children never made any comments about the plan (although they used it). This suggests that mothers of older children assumed more knowledge on the childrens part about plans, and further examination of what mothers said in their comments supports this interpretation. Mothers plan-related comments were identified as either directive, that is the plan was used solely to direct the childs actions, or as informational. An example of a directive use of the plan occurred with a 4-year-old whose mother made the following comment in very soft tones as she looked at the plan positioned in front of her, What else do we see in this picture that we need? This (holds piece up). Then she handed the piece to the child and told him where to put it. This approach to using the plan was infrequent and its use was not significantly associated with child age. Most of the comments that mothers made about the plans after any introductory remarks were informational in some way. Some of these included information about how to use the plan to do a specific action. An example of this occurred when the mother of a 4-year-old said, Now what are we going to do? Can you see? It looks like something like this. In this picture right here, which one are we going to use? Other informational statements included specific action information along with more general comments about plans themselves. An example of this type of statement occurred when a mother watched her 4-year-old try to match a piece with the picture in the plan and she said, Yes, so you want to be sure you turn your piece in the same direction as they have it (pointing to the plan). There was a tendency for mothers working with younger children to refer to the plan solely in relation to specific action steps more often than mothers working with older children, as in the following exchange between a mother and a 4year-old child.
Mother: Lets see. So what piece do you need for number four? What new piece do you need. (Child holds up a piece). OK ... now what? Can you see where it goes? (Child points). Mmm. We need to get it in the same spot as this one. So where do you think it needs to go? I dont know. What does it look like here in the picture? (Child points). Yeah, those go through, but what does it go through? See whats in the picture? (Child looks at picture). OK, good.

Child: Mother:

Although in a few cases mothers working with younger children referred to plans in a more general plan way, most of their plan-related comments were of a specific nature. This suggests that mothers of preschoolers, more than mothers of early school-age children, thought that guidance directly tied to action steps was useful in supporting the childs activity.

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In contrast, mothers working with older children were more likely to provide children with both specific and general information about plans and their use. Several types of general information about plans were included in these comments, such as information about particular conventions of representation, like expansion or detail drawings, and the importance of aligning the plan with the object under construction. In the following excerpt a mother of a 6-year-old tells her son about a detail drawing:
Mother: Child: Mother: Well, lets see what you got. Umm ... look. It shows that it goes around, and they show those. See this little circle? (referring to an inset detail drawing). Yeah. This kind of blows up, shows up close what this is ... what you want to do is put the square thing on one side and this thing on another side. Then this thing. Then the screw. See how they blow it up here? Thats just showing you.

And in the following passage, a mother of a 6-year-old discussed the importance of aligning the plan with the object being constructed.
Mother: Child: Mother: Now we need this one. And you have that already. You need a nut. OK (looks through the pieces). Like this? No, lets turn this the same way as the picture. Thats the only way I could figure out how to do it. Yeah, that looks good.

These data suggest that mothers conveyed different types of information about the plans to the younger and older children. Not only do these examples illustrate mothers comments, they also show that children played active roles in this process, which we examined in more detail. Childrens Talk about the Plan in Relation to Child Age. About one quarter of the older children and two thirds of the younger children made no comments at all about the plan. Since we know that dyads involving both ages of children made use of the plan during construction, it is interesting that younger children made fewer plan-related comments than older children. This may reflect a general increase in communication skills over these years or perhaps increased skill at social interaction. This pattern is also interesting in relation to the way that the children in these two age groups used the plan. A plan can be used during an activity in one of two ways. It can be used in an anticipatory way to guide future action, which would be indexed by a person looking at the plan prior to conducting an action step. A plan can also be used to confirm actions, that is, to check ones work. We found that older children made more anticipatory use of the plan than younger children (see table 1). Child age was not related to confirmatory plan references. These data suggest that children late in the preschool years and early in the school years, at least when they work with an adult, can make use of a plan to assist their activity. They also suggest that by early school age children are more likely than preschoolers to refer to a plan before action. As shown in table 1, a substantial portion of the comments about the plans made by older children was in response to mothers comments. In contrast, few of the younger childrens comments about the plan were in response to mothers comments, and in all cases (100%) these were responses to maternal directives that pertained to the plan in some way. None of the other childrens comments about the plans that followed a comment from the mother occurred in response to a maternal directive, even though the rates of maternal directives was similar for the two ages of children. Rather, more than

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half of the comments (57%) made by older children in response to their mother followed a statement by the mother that contained general plan information. The remaining plan-related responses (43%) made by older children followed maternal statements that included specific plan information. It seems that older children, relative to the younger children, had better understanding of plans or were trying to acquire better understanding of plans in this social situation. An entirely different type of comment about plans from the children were those that were initiated by the children themselves. As in the mothers remarks, these comments could be of a specific or more general nature. For example, one 4-year-old boy initiated plan-related talk that included information about specific pieces or moves in the construction when he responded to this mothers query that was not related to the plan (M: Howd you know its supposed to go down there?) with a specific reference to the plan (C: Cause I saw it right here [points to plan]. Right here. Now start it off [child points to next step in the plan]. Then you have to do this part.) Some children initiated plan-related talk that was more general in nature, e.g. when the mother of a 6-year-old asked the child what object they were going to make, the child responded by pointing to the plan and stating, Yeah, it (the plan) shows how to make it. I think I start right here. Children in the two age groups initiated comments about the plans, both of a specific and a more general nature, at the same rates. Even though these rates are relatively low, this indicates that children as young as 45 years of age do initiate verbal interaction regarding cultural tools of this sort. Examination of mothers and childrens comments during joint activity using plans suggests that between 4 and 7 years, children are developing skill at using pictorial plans to guide their actions to reach a goal. Although younger children made fewer verbal references to the plan than older children, younger children used the plans during the activity. Much of this use was aided by information from mothers who provided younger, relative to older, children more introductory information and more guidance in the use of the plans during specific action steps. This suggests that mothers regard children in the late preschool years as familiar with the use of such artifacts. In contrast, mothers working with older children provided more general information about the plan to their children than mothers working with younger children. Older children appeared to have more understanding than younger children of the instrumental use of plans to guide action, as evident in their greater frequency of anticipatory references to the plan. Thus, it appears that preschoolers understand the function of an established plan, but their skill at using this tool may be limited relative to that of early school-age children. The age-related patterns we observed underscore the active and developmentally organized contributions of the child in acquiring and using knowledge about tools of thinking in social context. Preschoolers and early school-age children tapped into the plan-related information available in this context in different ways. This tells us not only about the emerging understanding during these years of this type of artifact, it also tells us about the developing skill children have over these years in building upon the information available in the social context for advancing their understanding in this domain. It is important to note that different engagement of the two ages of children with the social and task context was not evident in the examination of the frequency of plan use or the types of comments made by each partner alone, but in considering the childrens comments and performances in relation to the mothers assistance. Despite these age-related differences, it is important to point out that in several dyads, primarily those involving older children, the joint activity did not proceed

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smoothly. This was largely because the pair began constructing the toy without referring to the plan and then ran into some snag in making the toy. Typically, mothers in these dyads, upon realizing this error, tended to berate themselves for not following the directions. They then stressed to the child the importance of following directions, as in the following exchange.
Mother: Well, you know what? Weve got all these extra parts here. And weve got to figure out where they go. OK, now we did that part. OK, help me here. Maybe we should start all over and follow directions, huh? Why do you do this Mom? Why do I do what? This (points to plan). Did I lose you cause we werent following it? Yep. See what happens when you dont follow directions. What happens when you dont follow directions? You dont get it right. You dont get it right. So what happened to us here? What did we learn about this? We didnt follow directions, right? So now weve go to go back and do it again, huh?

Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother:

Since this type of transaction occurred primarily in dyads with older children, it suggests that these pairs were more likely than those involving mothers and younger children to assume that they could construct the toy without using the plan. Whether this reflects an assumption of more knowledge or experience with constructing toys of this sort, or a greater propensity to jump into the construction without worrying about the plan, or some combination of both of these explanations is unknown. However, it is consistent with observations by Heath [1983] in her ethnography of home literacy traditions. In one of the communities she studied, she observed occasions, especially following a birthday or Christmas, that the family would play a new game together or assemble a toy or piece of mechanical equipment that was given to the child. In many cases, the activity proceeded largely by the participants ignoring the plan entirely. Heath points out that in these instances this often made sense in that the choice of the gift was based on an expressed interest of the child, who had some familiarity with the object already because it had been seen on television or at a friends home. As a result, Heath writes that there is usually no question of having to read the directions, since the children usually know how the game is to be played, or how the remote control race car goes together. If in doubt, some parents read the directions, but they then turn to putting together the item by common sense [p. 229]. Heath adds that she rarely observed any discussion between parents and children as to the sequence of steps in the plan or directions, where all the parts were before putting the object together, or what the participants should do if they run into problems assembling the object or playing the game. These observations suggest that parents believed that they knew, or perhaps that their children knew, what to do and that the directions were not necessary to accomplishing the activity. In our study, in each case when the partners met with difficulty constructing the toy we witnessed a similar occurrence, that is the plans were used after the problem appeared. This suggests that in the course of learning about plans during social interaction, children may not only learn about how to use plans, they may also learn that plans are often ignored or only used after something goes awry.

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Conclusions

Cognitive development in everyday life is nested within and emerges from a social world that contains historical, contemporary, and prospective influences. Conventions for organizing human activity, material and symbolic tools that support knowledge and its development, and social and institutional practices are inherent aspects of intelligent human action. These influences help define and steer the developmental course, and they provide opportunities for and impose constraints upon intellectual growth. These opportunities and constraints help organize the developing mind in ways suited to the needs and aspirations of the community in which growth occurs. It is in this way that the social and cultural context operate as mechanisms for cognitive change. According to Shweder et al. [1998], the cultural psychology of development is, in part, the story of developing into the customary practices of ones cultural community. Specific cultural contexts are the venue in which the universal mind is transformed into a distinctively functioning mentality. The specific cultural context of learning to use an established plan to reach a goal makes certain intelligent actions possible, namely reaching a complex goal via a specific action sequence. Both the goal and the steps to reach the goal are culturally organized, and this activity provides children and adults with the opportunity to participate in goal-directed behaviors that may not have been possible without the plan. In this way, plans help community members accomplish what Shweder et al. refer to as codified behavioral routines. Implicit in these routines are propositional attitudes about the right way to do something, such as make a toy or play a game. Cultural tools, like plans, yield multiple sometimes conflicting outcomes. They enable action, yet, at the same time, they constrain action. A plan not only directs the actor as to what to make and how to make it, its existence may regulate future encounters with the same or similar tools [Valsiner, 1997]. One insight that may emerge as people gain experience with representational tools is the knowledge that these materials may be used in other ways or that certain actions are common across plans. However, even for experienced individuals, flexibility may be limited, as Dunckers [1945] research on functional fixedness demonstrates. By examining the role of representational tools, such as plans, in adult-child cognitive activity, this paper describes one way in which culture is integrated with intelligent social activity and may become part of individual cognitive development. Experience with cultural tools is abundant in childhood. Investigators in any domain of cognitive development that involves some type of external representation may benefit by attending to the ways in which cultural tools are integrated with intelligent action and how children develop knowledge of these tools and learn to use them. It is important to point out that research on this topic may not always be easy. Representational tools often assume an invisible role in cognitive activity, as the comment of one 6-year-old illustrates. In this dyad, the child was involved in construction throughout the task and both child and mother made many comments during the interaction about the specific and general use of plans. At the end of the activity the child looked at the mother and proclaimed, I did it I built this all by myself and it didnt even take me a half hour. In this statement the child expressed ownership of the accomplishment. But in so doing, she overlooked the contributions of the plan and of her mother. This may be a fairly typical occurrence, especially for children. Foley, Passalacqua and Ratner [1993] found that young children often claim more personal responsi-

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bility for actions that occurred during a prior collaborative cognitive activity than for which they were responsible. Our observations suggest that one source of this type of attribution bias may stem from the nature of the materials themselves. Cultural tools may become integrated with intelligent human action in such a way that their contribution is easily overlooked. They often have a seamless, invisible quality, temporarily organizing the flow of action, and when the action is completed the tools simply vanish into it [Valsiner, 1997]. This makes studying the contribution of tools to cognition and its development a challenge. And even for the actor, it may not be easy to recognize that his or her own thinking was bound up with the mediational tool(s) that guided the process [DAndrade, 1995; Wertsch, 1995]. It may also be the case that parents promote such personal attributions during socialization. For instance, Rogoff, Malkin and Gilbride [1984] observed that middleclass European American adults attributed solo achievement to infants even when the adult did most of the activity. For example, in one instance an adult, while pressing down on the jack-in-box lid during joint play, exlaimed, Ooh, she got it down all by herself [p. 42]. Helping children recognize or identify individual contributions may fit with broader socialization goals of a community. There are many forms of understanding that children need in order to become competent members of their cultural community. Some of these involve the use of symbolic or representational tools such as plans. These representations depict action sequences that have been predetermined by others. Plans may satisfy many purposes, both individual and cultural. They provide a guide for action and sometimes offer shortcuts for reaching a goal. They also contain culturally preferred modes of action [Goodnow, 1990]. Guidance from more experienced social partners plays a critical role in introducing and refining childrens use of these types of cultural artifacts. This guidance is tailored to the developmental needs and interests of the child and, therefore, it provides opportunities for children to learn about tool use in ways that fit with their current understanding. Interaction involving tools such as these reflects a specialized aspect of cognitive socialization a process that sensitizes the child to these artifacts, the representational conventions they contain, their utility, and their value. The study of the development, understanding, and use of cultural tools is an important, but largely overlooked part, of cognitive development. This leaves not only a gap in our knowledge of intellectual growth, it is also puzzling, as Goody [1977] points out, that few scholars ...have paid any attention to the conditions of the reproduction of their own forms of knowledge and its influences on human thought [p. 161].

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