Adjustment across task in maternal scaffolding in low-income Latino immigrant families

This study contrasts maternal adjustments in scaffolding in a school-like learning task and in a home-like learning task within one low-income Latino population. The authors observed 12 immigrant Latino mother-child dyads performing both school-like and home-like tasks. Quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that in the home-like task mothers purposefully scaffolded their children's learning, consistently and effectively adjusted their scaffolding to variation in task, demonstrated a greater range and variety of scaffolding strategies, and accomplished various scaffolding goals based on their social class and cultural blueprints. Implications for the integration of effective task-specific maternal scaffolding into the design of intervention programs to support learning for immigrant Latino children are discussed.