The role of imitation and the limitation of scaffolding

When reading Wood et al (1976)’s article, the point came out to me most was that children would imitate doing something that they have already been able to do. In other words, during the process of imitation, which happens at the very first developmental stage of learning, an individual does not generate the process of thinking and meaningful learning by oneself, but simply parrot-like, copy-and-paste behavior.

It seems plausible at the first glance, with the provided instance, “they can already do fairly well” when imitating. To me, imitation is a natural response and inevitable behavior when an individual sees something he or she hasn’t seen before. But I don’t perceive it as a unconscious action. It is pretty common in early children from my personal observation in the kindergarten. Children had lots of fun imitating the teacher’s or peers’ behaviors, without thinking the meaning of them. For example, they would imitate the action of pooping when they read a picture book about animal’s poop in a collective activity and they saw the teacher modeling the behavior. The book has an educational meaning, aiming at instructing children learning how to develop the behavior of pooping by demonstrating animal’s similar behavior. 

Children’s action could be called imitation, however, they are not doing it without thinking. They do it maybe because the behavior resonates their personal experience, or maybe they do it just for fun. It is possible their experience of imitating the behavior would influence them in the future. For example, they might pretend playing as they are animals in the book under certain circumstances. It is hard to say whether, what and how they learned through imitation, but it could initiate different forms of subsequent action.

Another issue is to set the outcome of merely imitation into a problem-solving oriented setting. Wood et al (1976) tried to avoid the situation that children solely rely on the instructor’s, or the helper’s, explicit guidance. This made me rethink about the result of imitation launched by direct instruction. It is very crucial for understanding the role of instruction and guidance in an educational setting. It is undeniable that we cherish originality and always encourage children to come up with their own idea to solve a problem. However, I wonder whether the task selected should be correct-answer oriented. In scaffolding, there are several disciplines restricts the selection of tasks themselves, such as controlling procedures required to reach solution, and satisfying task-taker’s own interest. The selective feature of scaffolding limits the applicability of this kind of instruction. The notion of the zone of proximal development might exist in individual development, but the approach of scaffolding does not seem to be always suitable for them. The task can be very domain specific. For scientific task, every deduction process and be logically reasoned step by step, and finally leads to the certain answer. On the contrary, for those tasks pertaining to social science, an issue could be analyzed from various perspectives and the discussion might be endless.