Mother-child engagement in a categorisation activity: implications for parental pedagogy and early education research

ABSTRACT

Maternal support for children's cognitive competence has received considerable attention in the developmental and early childhood education literature. However, little research has examined the link between maternal behaviour and children’s categorisation performance. The current study explored the strategies that mothers and children used as they engaged in a categorisation task. Twenty-seven mother–child dyads from middle-class mothers and their three-to-five-year-old preschool children were videotaped while engaging in a categorisation activity. Total testing time, including video recordings, did not exceed one hour. The mother-child interaction codes were analysed using frequency analyses to extract empirical estimates. Certain maternal strategies (e.g. interrogative strategies) were positively related to children’s verbal responses. However, maternal stylistic (taxonomic and thematic) differences were not associated with children’s strategies. The study found that mothers use a variety of strategies to engage with their children in the categorisation activity. Theoretical perspectives and implications of the current research for parental pedagogy and early childhood education research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive development in children
• parent-child interactions
• coding strategies
• categorisation skills
• categorisation strategies

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of George Woodbury (Miami University alumnus) for their assistance in statistical analysis for this publication.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made substantial, direct, and intellectual contributions to the work and approved it for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).