Kristi Olivares

While in graduate school, I have conducted research on three different aspects of parent-child interaction and its effects on learning. In my first year, I focused on how parent-child conversation contributes to children’s cognitive development, more specifically focusing on how parental input leads children to understand what it means to be alive. In my second and third years, I investigated issues related to children’s language acquistion and cognitive development, particularly the active roles that parents and other people play in these processes. I was particularly interested in how likely children are to ask questions of someone other than their parent, and how likely it is they’ll receive a response. During my fourth year, I continued to look at parent's role in children's language acquisition by examining the effects adult familiarity has on children's uptake of correct grammatical forms.

Now in my fifth year, I am continuing to follow my line of research looking at how children's interactions with their parents and older siblings contributes to their cognitive development. I am currently interested why we see these differences between parents and other people, and, in particular, how does this relate to scaffolding. Previous research has found differences between parents and siblings, suggesting that mothers are more effective teachers than older siblings. However, these studies generally focus on one type of teaching comparison: collaboration versus modeling. I would like to expand the teaching literature by looking at sibling teaching effectiveness in the context of guided participation and scaffolding. It could be that collaboration is only one facet of scaffolding and instead, siblings are utilizing other dimensions of scaffolding which are just as effective.

Literature has also established that parents scaffold and that this is an effective teaching method. Currently, I am testing specific dimensions that make scaffolding successful and examining underlying factors which may account for why various people scaffold differently. More specifically, I am interested in whether or not siblings facilitate scaffolding differently from parents and peers in areas such as language, categorization, and problem-solving and if so, why do these differences exist.

I successfully advanced to candidacy in May 2010 and successfully defended my dissertation proposal in December 2010. My expected graduation is May 2012.

Contact Information