Theories

1. Adding a Sociocultural
Element to Information
Processing Theories
BY TAYLOR CARLSON, CHRISTOPHER ROHLING, EMILY
BENSON, JENNIFER LE, AND NICHOLAS CAMACHO

2. Intersubjectivity
-Awareness of shared perceptions and understandings that
provide the foundation for social interaction.
Has three components: Shared emotion, shared
attention, and shared intention.
Seen first at around 2 months of age.
Infants and their caregivers focus on one another
through eye contact, exchanges of smiles, and the
give-and-take of vocalization.
Understanding what the other person sees,
knows, thinks, and feels.

3. Joint Attention
 When intersubjectivity becomes more complex.
 Two people (child and caregiver) have the ability to focus on the same object or event.
 Both can monitor each other’s attention.
 Both can coordinate each other’s responses.
 Occurs around 9 or 10 months of age.
 Example: Mother turns head to look at something, child follows gaze and turns their attention
to the new direction.

4. Social Referencing
 Essentially, it is looking for emotional clues about a situation in
the faces of other people.
 It can develop in children when they as young as 8 months
old.
 An example of this would be if a mother was giving a fearful
look to her child, it might stop what it was doing, but if she
gave a happy look, the child would likely continue.

5. Autobiographical Self
 The autobiographical self is a composite between what an individual remembers
about specific:
 Things
 Events
 People in their lives
 General things they know about the world.
 A mental history of important events in their lives.
 These two aspects combine together to form how each of us individually view our
lives through our memories and experiences.

6. Co-Regulated Learning
 Definition: Adult and child
share responsibility for
directing the child’s learning
process.
 The goal of co-regulation is
self-regulation.
 Through discussion and
guidance, children
internalize strategies and
become independent.
 The adult provides scaffolding
but gradually removes it as
children become self-
regulating.
 Teachers can co-
regulate learning by:
 Requesting
information
 Restating or
paraphrasing the
students
 Requesting
judgments of
learning
 Modeling thinking
 Providing prompts for
thinking and
reflecting

7. Theory Theory
 Definition: Theoretical perspective proposing that children construct increasingly
integrated and complex understandings of their physical and social worlds.
 These understandings will structure their belief system.
 As children mature, they expand on and cultivate those theories by incorporating new
knowledge and beliefs.
 Within 3-5 years, children will have formed their own theories about the world around
them.

8. Children’s Theories of
the Physical World
Nativism
 Young infants (3-4 mos) surprisingly know that
objects:
 Are substantive entities with definite boundaries
 Fall unless something holds them up
 Move in a continuous manner across space
 In preschool/elementary years, naïve theories
are developed with little instruction from adults.
 Ex. We control physical phenomena, Sun revolves
around Earth, natural phenomena have purpose.
 This theological perspective
says that infants are born with
built-in knowledge about the
physical world, or at least
born with built-in
predispositions to acquire
that knowledge very early
and easily

9. Conceptual Change
 Many misconceptions about the physical world are carried on into high
school.
 Ex. Many think that when an object drops from a moving train or plane, it
falls straight down.
 We must work to give children with misconceptions new understandings. In
other words, we must help them undergo conceptual change.
 Conceptual change happens when new information causes one’s
knowledge about a topic to be revised.