*This chapter is based on a doctoral dissertation presented by Ellen Moss at McGill University and subsequent analyses published by the first author in collaboration with Dr. Fred Strayer in the International Journal of Behavioral Development. The author thanks Dr. Bruce Shore for inspiring and supporting the original research project and Michelle Dumont for her comments on this manuscript. Financial support was provided by doctoral, postdoctoral, and a 5-year National Research Fellowship awarded to Dr. Ellen Moss by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Quebec Ministry of Education. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Ellen Moss, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, C.P. 8888, Succ. "A", Montreal, Quebec H3C 3P8.

Metacognitive competence has consistently been associated with the performance of gifted children on a variety of cognitive tasks. Jackson and Butterfield (1986) have identified the superordinate processes involved in the regulation of task analysis and the self-management of problem-solving behavior as important components differentiating the performance of gifted and average children. Peck and Borokowski (1983) describe how use of planning, monitoring, and evaluative strategies accounts for performance discrepancies between gifted and nongifted 7-year-olds on problem-solving tasks. Shore and Dover (1987) and Sternberg (1986) have all demonstrated how various cognitive executive functions mediate the superior performance of gifted individuals throughout the lifespan.

Although these studies indicate that considerable progress has been made in studying individual differences in older children's metacognitive skills, the developmental pathway leading to such knowledge remains virtually unexplored. This is somewhat surprising considering that almost every chapter or article dealing with metacognitive development includes at least one or two lines referring to its hypothetical origins in early parent-child interactive contexts. For example, John Flavell (1987) writes: "Parents may unintentionally model metacognitive activity for their young children. They may also deliberately demonstrate and teach it, helping the child to regulate and monitor his or her actions" (p. 26). Borokowski and Peck (1986) speculate that parents of gifted children lay the groundwork for metacognitive competence by providing greater intellectual stimulation in the form of challenging tasks that elicit more planful and strategic problem-solving behavior.

Speculative interest in social roots of metacognitive competence is not limited to researchers interested in cognitive development. Willard Hartup (1987), a well-known researcher in the field of social development, states: "I would like to suggest that the cognitive functions most closely linked to social relationships are the executive regulators-the planning, monitoring and outcome-checking skills involved in problem-solving" (p. 76). Supportive of Hartup's idea are recent studies that link the affective quality of the primary attachment relationship with the development of cognitive executive functions-specifically those related to socially coordinated task engagement between mother and child (Bretherton & Waters, 1985; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985; Matas, Arend, & Sroufe, 1978). The mediating factor in these patterns is presumed to be the effective self-direction of behavior through selecting, accessing, and other-wise organizing components of intrapsychic working models. Internal working models, or mental representations constructed by the individual, reflect the history of interactional patterns experienced by the infant with the attachment figure. Babies who can depend on the availability of a caregiver who will provide assistance in dealing with obstacles encountered in the course of exploration are freer to take risks in attempting to solve more difficult problems. The infant who lacks this "secure base" (Bowlby, 1969) will show poorer mastery motivation in engaging objects or collaborators in play. As discussed by Klein (this volume), it is highly likely that the persistence shown by young gifted children is, in part, a derivative of the quality of mediated learning they have become accustomed to.

THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL AND METACOGNITIVE PROCESSES
Although there are virtually no longitudinal studies that have directly traced the early development of different metacognitive skills, several studies suggest that the interactive context of early parent--child relations may influence different metacognitive skills that emerge in later childhood. Flavell (1976) has identified three dimensions of metacognitive knowledge observed by later childhood: Briefly, person variables refer to cognitions about what human beings (oneself and others) are like as cognitive agents. Task variables concern awareness of different task environments and how task demands influence actions and decisions related to performance. Strategy variables are related to monitoring progress towards cognitive goals including knowledge of planning and checking operations.

Concerning social precursors of metacognitive knowledge related to person variables, Bandura's research (1977, 1983) indicates that the internal standards people use to influence their own motivation and actions are acquired through modeling and evaluative actions by significant others. Heckhausen (1987) suggests that positive self-attribution patterns emphasizing competence in learning situations will be facilitated by parental learning expectations that are developmentally appropriate and encourage child participation. Shure (1987) has shown that preschoolers' knowledge of interpersonal problem-solving skills is positively related to maternal efforts to guide and encourage the child to consider alternative solutions to problems and negatively related to maternal avoidance of communication, solution-giving, and belittling of the child's partial efforts.

With respect to metacognitive understanding of task environments, families of children later identified as musically or mathematically talented are known to have introduced their young children to these knowledge domains during informal play sessions (Bloom, 1985; Robinson, 1987). Waiters and Gardner (1986) consider that these early contacts between persons with unusual talent or potential, and pertinent materials of the field, may be initial crystallizing experiences which motivate the desire to continually reconstruct these occasions.

In the area of strategy learning, Wertsch (1985) has described the child's transition from other-regulation to self-regulation. His observational studies of mother-child interaction illustrate the gradual emergence of responsibility for co-directing joint problem solving in the preschool-aged child (Wertsch, McNamee, McLane, & Budwig, 1980). The child thus become more capable of generating a particular cognitive strategy such as using a model in a copying task, while the mother assumes a more direct role allowing maximal opportunities for the child to test and practice emerging skills. Gauvain and Rogoff (1988), in a study of 5-year-old children's planning in both adult-child and peer co texts, also found that experiences in shared decision making during collaborative tasks was related to greater planning efficiency by the child on later individual trials. These authors discuss how sharing responsibility for progress during a task requires that the metacognitive processes involved in problem definition, strategy organization, and evaluations of efficiency are made explicit. Experiences in jointly using these initial planning skills may support the emergence and organization of higher level strategies.

But how does early experience in interactive contexts influence the development of metacognitive knowledge about strategies, tasks and personal competencies? Is the pathway primarily an indirect one, as suggested by Shatz (1984) and Matas et al. (1978), whereby the sensitive and contingently responsive parent indirectly nurtures skill development? Alternatively, are we to adopt the more direct pedagogical paradigms of the instructional literature that conceptualize adults as modelers and shapers of specific skills (Brown, Palinscar, & Armbruster, 1986)? Since research to date has primarily adopted a correlational approach in analyzing the effects of parental behavior on the development of child cognitive competence, it has been difficult to distinguish between competing explanations. For example, it is empirically well established that mother-child object-oriented communication during play is a significant predictor of preschool IQ scores (Farran & Ramey, 1980; Olson, Bates, & Bayles, 1984; Wachs & Gruen, 1982). These studies support the idea that dyadic exchanges are fundamental to the development of individual cognitive processes; yet they do not help clarify the underlying psychological processes that link parent and child measures (Moss & Blicharski, 1986). In other words, is toy demonstration important to cognitive development primarily as a reinforcer to the child's own explorations, as a model of possible uses of the object, or simply because the emotional involvement of parent and child affects child motivation in a general sense?

In fact, the real picture is probably far more ambiguous than that suggested by either simple socialization or individual difference models of human development. The bi-directional influences involved in parent-child interaction can more appropriately be thought of as dynamics of interpersonal communication involving mutual mother and child adjustments that facilitate the co-construction of representational abilities (Moss & Strayer, 1990). The work of Gauvain and Rogoff (1988) and Wertsch et al. (1980) described above provide empirical models for exploring developmental changes in metacognition within co-constructive contexts. However, neither has emphasized the relationship of individual differences in child intelligence to shared problem solving. The objective of this chapter is to systematically study the early development of gifted children's metacognitive skills in the context of parent-child interactions.

SOME THEORETICAL TOOLS: INTERNALIZATION AND THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
In developmental theory, the psychologist who is perhaps best known for his conceptualization of the early establishment of a collaborative cognitive context is Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky's concept of the social origins of cognitive functions involves the gradual transfer of cognitive executive functions from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal plane. Vygotsky (1978) emphasized that patterns of co-regulation established in the context of early social relations are internalized, as individual metacognitive functions. According to his theory, children first experience active problem-solving activities in the presence of others, gradually acquiring the ability to perform these functions for themselves. As part of this process, the child must learn to share in executing and eventually directing joint activity, although the adult is initially responsible for overall coordination and regulation.

By the preschool period, parental directives which have been internalized b the young child are becoming manifest in social and self-directed speech. Note that, in Vygotsky's (1986) model, this egocentric speech is not evidence of the child's conceptual immaturity in a Piagetian sense, but indicative of the birth of metacognitive processes. As Wood (1989) discusses, the young child's speech serves both a regulatory and communicative function. The preschool child's verbal commentaries on (his own) experiences are evidence of the emergence of self-regulated control over (his own) nonverbal activities. At the same time, the child is learning (that he can) control over the actions of others through speech. As the child develops greater expertise in Ianguage skills, he or she both increases (his) executive abilities and heightens (his) access to socio-cultural sources of information hence becoming a more active player in the co-constructive context.

The notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) was introduced by Vygotsky to describe a dialectical relation between two states of mental organization actual and potential-mediated by the child's transactions with the socio-cultural environment (Moss, in press; Kanevsky, this volume; Valsiner & Van der Veer, 1991). The child's level of cognitive functioning under adult guidance is the proper context for observing emerging psychological functions that will subsequently come under the more independent control of the child. According to Vygotsky's multidimensional model, independent cognitive activity is an index of already developed functions or past accomplishments. Bruner's (1983, 1986) studies of adult mediation or scaffolding of infant learning represent an empirical model of how the zone of proximal development construct can be used to study environmental facilitation of the development of cognitive skills such as labeling (e.g., Ninio & Bruner, 1978). In early labeling exchanges, caregivers assign meanings to infant behaviors that qualify their function in routine interactive formats (Bruner, 1986). For example, while reading picture books, mothers will point at pictures asking questions such as "What's this?" At first, with young infants, she will accept any infant babbling as a response and then will provide the correct label herself. Through repetition of these maternal prompts, the infant learns to express the correct word in the right sequence. At this point, the mother can raise the level of exchange requesting a more elaborate response. For example, once the infant can answer "Doggie" to mother's "What's this?" question, she will change to "What's the doggie doing?"

In addition to leading the child towards more complex language acquisitions, caregivers also provide opportunities for the expression of mastery of acquired skills. Infants will display mastery in both their greater independent use and social control of a skill. For example, 2-year-olds will pick a book, point at pictures, and name objects in a sequence that replicates former adult-child joint reading contexts. They will also, show their internalization of the social roles involved in collaborative contexts by attempting to show a book to a younger child or by initiating a joint reading activity with the adult.

My collaborators and I recently completed a series of studies showing how mothers developmentally adjust their scaffolding styles during the first 3 years of life (Moss, 1983, 1990 in press; Moss & Strayer, 1990; Strayer & Moss, 1989; Strayer, Moss, & Blicharski, 1988). We observed three zones of development (acquisition, consolidation, and inhibition), each requiring a different scaffolding style with respect to the degree of child dependency on adult regulation. Our studies showed that, in general, mothers supported child acquisition of new skills, which were just emerging in the child's cognitive repertoire by frequent modeling and repetitions. They likewise allowed greater opportunities for child self-regulation of skills acquired in earlier developmental periods, thus assisting their consolidation. They also actively encouraged the inhibition of consolidated problem-solving strategies and their replacement with newly emerging skills.

Young children are most dependent on adults to orient them towards new skills and away from more facile solutions to a problem. They express greater autonomy in the application of more familiar tactics during joint enterprises. It is important to understand that adult support of children's learning consists, not only of providing the appropriate cognitive resources, but also of being able to modify flexibly the socioaffective context in keeping with the phase of learning the child is passing through. For example, when the child is acquiring a new skill under adult tutelage, it is important that instructors model the skill, evaluate the correctness of the child's attempts at learning, and coach pupils to complete the process. However, it is vital that the affective attitudes that will motivate and maintain the learning process are also modeled as an integral part of the acquisition process. For example, as suggested by Meichenbaum and Biemiller (1990), instructors should make explicit the positive self-attributions that underpin task persistence, such as "Look how well this is going!" or "I'm going to get this answer after all." When skills are consolidating, the child who has experienced tutoring that is facilitative in both a cognitive and affective sense shows mastery of the cognitive tactics involved in the skill as well as a positive sense of ownership of the outcome of the activity.

The high self-direction of gifted students can be attributed, not only to greater metacognitive understanding of task process, but also to their ability to maintain positive affect even when encountering obstacles to the realization of their objectives. At the point where the child discovers that an acquired procedure is no longer useful in solving a problem, it is necessary to inhibit these activities, replacing them with a more adapted strategy. As I have discussed elsewhere (Moss, in press) the ability to reorganize one's cognitive resources effectively may be related to earlier experiences in joint adult-child learning contexts. Taking the risk of letting go of habitual patterns may be facilitated by a history of cognitively and affectively supportive experiences in interactive learning situations. In reorganizing cognitive processes, the child needs to mobilize positively affective self-attributions which support more effortful and reflective cognitive activity. On the other hand, the child's internalization of reactions by parents or teachers that have focused on personal incompetence may cause him or her to emphasize negative affects linked to failure. Such anxious, avoidant or angry emotions interfere with the activation of more cognitively reflective activity. This model may have implications for understanding the development of some gifted underachievers. As suggested by Gross (this volume) in cases where a child of exceptional ability is not performing at a high-Ievel, exceptional cognitive abilities may not be supported by healthy levels of self-concept.

In considering how adult interventions influence young children's progress, it is also necessary to consider the various developmental challenges associated with the infancy and preschool periods. These studies also permitted us to describe how the zone of proximal development changes with age during the infancy period. Results of our studies have shown that basic dyadic social skills such as orienting the partner to one's activity or providing simple affective feedback must be in place before any kind of meaningful cognitive collaboration can occur. This is the essential focus of the zone of proximal development during the first year of life. These established nonverbal affiliative and communicative functions are extended and differentiated with the emergence of infant language. By the second year of life, mutual goal-directed communication is extended into imitative labeling exchanges where infants learn to link signs and representational symbols (Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Bruner, 1986). By the third year, we observed that these consolidated labeling skills become the building blocks for the co-construction of verbal perceptual and functional associations. The mastery of labeling skills involves flexibly incorporating object names in diverse strategies adapted to particular social and affective situations (Moss, in press). For example, the infant learns that calling "Mommy!" with a smile and outstretched hands results in getting picked up. The same word will probably function very differently when accompanied by an angry expression. The consistency of adult responses to these infant strategies plays a vital role in the construction of infant representations. For example, if the infants' affiliative "Mommy!" action sequence is as likely to elicit rejection as the angry one, then the meaning and socio-cultural value of such acts remains ambiguous to the child. The young child is dependent on adult expressions of affect in order to assimilate the meaning of acts in particular contexts (Klein, this volume; Rogoff, Malkin, & Mc Bride, 1984).

In summary, by the preschool period, the competent child has consolidated the basic representational tools needed to construct higher level strategies. On a socioaffective level, the sense of self has evolved to permit the active initiation and manipulation of these representations in socially coordinated goal-directed activity. The stage is set for the development of metacognitive strategies that involve, not only the use of more complex thinking strategies, but also the ability to further one's own conceptual development.

JOINT COGNITIVE ACTIVITY DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
With the preschool period, the zone of proximal development shifts to the coordination of representations within problem definitions, plans, and subsequent evaluations. However, development of these metacognitive operations depends, not only on learning specific planning, monitoring, and evaluative strategies, but also on providing opportunities for the child to actively participate in the problem-solving process (Gauvain & Rogoff, 1988; Moss & Strayer, 1990; Wertsch et al., 1980). To concretize these ideas, consider the range of diverse representational components involved in completing a puzzle or a matching game with a 4-year-old child. Perceptual cues are involved in comparing the size, shape, or color of pieces. Discussions about functional or contextual cues relate individual pieces to their locations on the puzzleboard. Similarly, in a matching task, prior identification or labeling of the elements to be associated is prerequisite to the application of more sophisticated strategies involving new combinations of these elements.

The application of each of these cognitive tactics presents a different level of cognitive challenge to the child and consequently necessitates a different scaffolding style on the part of the adult. Metacognitive competence involves, not only the acquisition of organizational strategies like planning and evaluation, but also more autonomous selection and application of simpler tactics like subgoal sequencing and Iabeling. Although these simpler cognitive tactics may have been acquired during the infancy period, it is not until the preschool period that the child becomes conscious of these representations as potential components of self-initiated strategies (Vygotsky, 1986).

Before embarking on empirical study of the role of maternal scaffolding in metacognitive development, we attempted to situate the relative developmental challenge of various problem-solving strategies to the preschool-age child. In order to predict how maternal teaching strategies might facilitate preschool children's progress through the zone of proximal development, we conducted an extensive search of the experimental and information-processing literature concerned with instructional effects on young children's problem-solving behavior as well as of studies related to maternal teaching strategies. We regrouped the instructional components that were repeatedly associated with preschoolers, performance into three general classes: structuring, elaborative, and regulatory strategies. These classes served as the basis for specifying the multiple informational components involved in parent-child exchanges during the preschool period.

Problem Structuring-Goals, Subgoals, and Rules
At the simplest structural level, tasks can be procedurally analyzed in terms of subgoals. In order to realize the overall goal by means of intermediate subgoals, the child must organize his or her available knowledge and also apply it in an appropriate sequence. Subgoal sequencing itself may not be expected to present a major problem to 3-to 4-year-old children on a puzzle or matching task where subgoals are perceptually evident (e.g., pieces or squares on the formboard). However, keeping sight of a still-unsatisfied supergoal while carrying out these subgoals presents a cognitive task of considerable difficulty to the young child (Case, 1978; Klahr, 1978). Thus, by frequently reminding the child of the overall goal or rules, the adult may help mediate the young child's memory deficiencies and at the same time model an effective strategy for problem solution. As Wertsch (1985) explains, although many children are capable of executing the steps of a task; they do not often organize and structure their efforts in a task-appropriate manner.

Problem Elaboration--Labeling and Perceptual and Functional Cue Highlighting
Rohwer (1973) has defined elaboration as "the generation of an event that jointly implicates two or more items that are initially disparate” (p. 276). Campione and Brown (1978) have explained the goal of elaborative strategies as the creation of a meaningful context in which to imbed items. These relational contexts serve as multiple access routes to memory through the particular modality of cues that they represent (e.g., verbal, sensory, context of occurrence) (Paris & Lindauer, 1978). During the second year of life, mothers actively encourage infants to develop networks of object and event labels as described by Ninio and Bruner (1978). Once the infant shows evidence of having consolidated labeling skills during the third year, mothers decrease their demands for child labeling (e.g., "What's this?" questions), replacing them with questions about object function that encourage the development of representations based on subordinate categories. An important function of instruction during the preschool period is the explicit description of object features that the child may not spontaneously attend to. This teaching strategy is closely linked to cue highlighting (Case, 1978) and encoding training (Siegler, 1978) and is dealt with extensively in research relating to attentional and perceptual pretraining in young children (Nelson, 1977; Gibson, 1969). Hence, a prime function of instruction for this age group is the highlighting of perceptual and functional cues that can be stored in relational networks and used as access routes to memory. There is a notable parallel between these "elaborative" adult-child exchanges and the "focusing" behaviors described as part of the mediated learning experience (Feuerstein, 1979; Klein Feuerstein, 1984). As discussed by Klein (this volume), adult selection, exaggeration, and accentuation of objects and events focuses the young child's perception and selective attention. As the child internalizes these adult-structured exchanges, he or she also become capable of selectively focusing the partner's attention, thus creating the reciprocity basic to true collaboration.

Behavioral Regulation-Approval, Disapproval, and Behavioral Monitoring
As mentioned above, during the preschool period the child experiences a transition from dependency on external sources of regulation to more internalized self-regulatory mechanisms. During the infancy period, basic dyadic skills of social regulation are consolidated that enable both parent and child to keep one another on task, and to evaluate one another's contributions to the problem-solving process (Moss, in press; Strayr & Moss, 1989). Adult positive reinforcement has long been considered to be an important regulatory strategy in the experimental literature (Baer & Wolfe, 1968; Bruner, 1966) as well as by researchers who have explored the effects of maternal style on cognitive development (Farran & Ramey, 1980: Hess & Shipman, 1964; Olson et al., 1984; Sigel, 1982). Performance-contingent approval provides specific feedback as to goal attainment as well as general recognition of the child's competence. Thus rewarding activity has been identified by Feuerstein (1979) and Klein and Feuerstein (1984) as a prime mediator of the young child's developing sense of self-competence.

A developmental model of the role of various forms of adult regulation has been put forth by Deci and Ryan (1985). They suggest that the relative amount of approval, disapproval, and behavioral monitoring experienced in parent-child interactions during the infancy and early preschool years influences the child's mastery orientation. Their model describes the child's passage from an extrinsic or externally regulated motivational set to a more autonomous, intrinsically regulated one. Performance during the stage of extrinsic regulation is controlled solely on the basis of expected external contingencies. At the second level, the child regulates himself or herself with self-administered approval or disapproval applied contingently. By the third stage, early experiences in other-affirming, informationally adequate contexts are internalized as facilitative internal working models that permit organization of behavior according to value orientations. Conversely, intrusive or unstructured contexts result in internal working models dominated by superordinate, self-critical functions that interfere with the consolidation of strategies for achieving valued objectives.

Our comparison of the interaction patterns of securely and insecurely attached children and their mothers during joint problem solving (Moss, in press; Strayer & Moss, 1989) demonstrated the interdependency of social regulative and cognitive developmental processes. During socially coordinated task engagement, we noted over concentration on monitoring the partner's behavior and greater expression of disapproval in the insecure dyads. By 30 months, these relational dysfunctions were interfering with mother and child joint investment in more challenging cognitive activity. As discussed earlier, in a healthy collaborative context, partners must maintain a positive affective climate even when encountering obstacles to the realization of their objectives. An inability to do so may result in restriction of communication to less challenging levels of information exchange.

Metacognitive Abilities of the Preschool Period
According to Flavell, Speer, Green, and August (1981), between the ages of 3 and 5, the child shows a readiness to operate on his or her own mental representations-this age span may thus be seen as the beginning of the sensitive period for metacognitive development. Researchers interested in the development of self-regulation have also identified the beginning of the third year as a turning point in the acquisition of autonomous control strategies (Kopp, 1982; Vaughn, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984). As we have discussed elsewhere (Moss & Strayer, 1990), cognitive psychologists associate emerging self-regulatory ability during the third year with enhanced skills in memory, problem solving, and representation that permit redirection of attention in the service of an overall goal. Other researchers with a co-constructionist focus emphasize the importance of adult verbal modeling of the planning, monitoring, and evaluative functions they are structuring for the child during joint problem solving (Collins, Brown, & Larkin, 1982; Gauvain & Rogoff, 1988; Wertsch et al., 1980).

Brown and Deloache (1978) have identified four basic metacognitive activities that enter into the zone of proximal development during this period: (a) predicting the consequences of actions or events, (b) checking the results of one's own actions, (c) monitoring one's ongoing activity, and (d) reality testing or comparing subjective impressions with more objective criteria. In our studies with younger children, we noted that, by 30 months, children begin to verbally participate in reality testing exchanges with their mothers that involved comparisons between different social contexts that the child is familiar with. For example, mothers of day care children frequently asked: “Is our dollhouse like the one at your school?" Reality testing is remarkably similar to what Sternberg (1986) refers to as selective comparison--one of the processes involved in insightfully dealing with novel tasks and situations. As defined by Sternberg, selective comparison entails realizing the similarities and dissimilarities between new information and information acquired in the past and using these relations to better understand a current object or vent. Given that Sternberg has identified such insight skills as being of primary importance in differentiating the intellectually gifted from others, it is of considerable interest to see if these abilities are being practiced on an interpersonal plane by young gifted preschoolers and their parents.

Summary
Theoretically speaking, the zone of proximal development implies that parental support be assessed in terms of individual child capacities to comprehend and incorporate information made available during joint problem solving. Empirically, we know little about how the zone of proximal development changes with age (Paris & Cross, 1988) and even less about how parents modulate their scaffolding styles to children of the same age who may differ in intellectual abilities (Moss & Strayer, 1990). The information categories described above provide the basis for an observational system describing the age-appropriate strategies used by mothers and preschool children in joint problem-solving situations. However, in order to identify differences in gifted and nongifted children's zones of proximal development, it is necessary to reorganize various tactics in terms of their relative developmental challenge to the preschool child. We have adopted Sigel's (1982) concept of cognitive distancing to represent the degree to which various representational activities focus away from more concrete aspects of single objects and events, towards their more abstract interrelations.

With reference to problem structuring, the ability continually to adapt performance to an external set of rules and to an overall goal presents the greatest challenge to the preschool child. Sequencing a series of moves is a relatively simple task once the relation between these subgoals and the overall goal and rule structure has been determined. With respect to elaborative strategies, perceptual and contextual cue highlighting should be considered normative tactics that assist preschoolers' developing categorization skills. By comparison, object labeling at this developmental period is a relatively low-Ievel distancing strategy of limited use in achieving success on problem-solving tasks adapted to the preschool period. Although labeling exchanges between adult and child are important in identifying elements of the problem space, further progress in joint problem-solving activities is dependent on isolating and recombining actions and object attributes. Problem regulation can be assumed to be in a transitory phase between dependence on adult affective and cognitive monitoring, and emerging self-regulatory strategies. The greatest developmental challenge is the acquisition of simple metacognitive skills such as predicting consequences, checking results, activity monitoring, and reality testing.

GIFTED CHILDREN AND THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
The Vygotskian model of learning suggests that children first experience a particular set of problem-solving activities in the presence of an adult and gradually come to perform these functions themselves. One way of conceptualizing the influence of early experience on the development of giftedness is that it provides a highly developmentally challenging mediated learning context (Klein, this volume). We can operationalize this context as one which encourages more complex levels of information exchange and at the same time allows the child to achieve mystery of more normative skills. The comparison of the informational context of verbal exchanges between mothers and gifted preschoolers with that of mothers and preschoolers of normal ability is a way of empirically identifying individual differences in children's zones of proximal development. For example, what proportion of verbal activity is concentrated in the elaboration of more developmentally challenging strategies as compared with more normative ones? What are the respective mother and child contributions to these exchanges in normal dyads and dyads where children have been identified as gifted?

Equally important is an examination of the social processes that, through internalization, come to structure and direct cognitive functions. As Wood (1989) has described, children who have experienced cognitively as well as socially engaging instruction are far more likely to subsequently take a more active role in facilitating their own learning than are children who have been exposed to teaching which is less attuned to compensating for their difficulties and allowing expression of areas of competency. Borokowski and Peck (1986) have suggested that gifted children gain their metacognitive advantages from an enriched environmental context prompted by parental reactions to signs of perceptual efficiency. This implies that parenting young gifted children involves somehow raising their consciousness about their memory, attention, and other skills. Klein (this volume) has described what this might entail on a practical level: "creating in the child a greater urge to focus clearly on stimuli, to search for meaning, to associate, to relate, compare, and contrast perceptions, to seek explanations, relations, and general information beyond what is perceived through the senses.

On a research level, we are faced with a number of intriguing questions: Are preschool high-IQ children more active in using normative cognitive skills during problem solving, and how is their expression of these competencies coordinated with the learning of more difficult metacognitive skills? If, as the work of Sigel (1982) suggests, parents of intellectually precocious children model metacognitive strategies to a greater extent than do parents of normal-ability children, how is such modeling related to child behavior? Is the greater metacognitive content of parental speech primarily a response to evidence of emerging metacognitive awareness in preschool high-IQ children which is not shown by normal-ability children? Do parents somehow assist the child in transforming other information-processing components into metacognitive strategies? The analysis of the interaction of mothers and their above-average and average-ability preschoolers during joint problem-solving provides a means for exploring these bidirectional influences between children's cognitive abilities and qualitative aspects of parental tuition during the preschool period (Moss & Strayer, 1990).

Mother-Child Interactions of High-IQ and Average-IQ Preschoolers
Our subjects for this study were 28 preschool children between the ages of 3 and 4 years of age. These children were selected from an initial pool of 150 middle-class nursery school students who had completed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test (Terman & Merrill, 1973). From this group, 20 children who had obtained overall IQ scores which exceeded 130 (and who are referred to here as "gifted"), and 20 who had obtained average scores, were selected for further testing. These 40 subjects completed the following battery of tests to provide additional data on cognitive and academic skills: The Block Design and Mazes subtests of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (Wechsler, 1974) assessing spatial-perceptual skills; the Numerical memory sub test of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (McCarthy, 1972) testing memory for short-term auditory stimuli; and the Reading and Math subtests of the Peabody Intellectual Achievement Test (Dunn & Markwardt, 1970) assessing preacademic skills, We combined these identification components to provide a valid, comprehensive index of intellectual precocity (Roedell, Jackson, & Robinson, 1980).

The final sample designated as "gifted" included 14 preschoolers who had obtained exceptionally high scores (at least two standard deviations above the mean) on at least one of the five tests in addition to the 130+ Binet score. The selection of a control group of 14 nongifted children who had average scores on all tests completed the final sample. Comparison of the two samples on demographic variables showed no difference with respect to family income, maternal mean age, number of hours of employment or level of education, child birth order, and number of siblings. Fathers' educational level was significantly higher in the gifted group.

Each mother and child pair completed three problem-solving activities during a filmed visit to a private apartment which served as our observation laboratory. The tasks (puzzles, a peg game, and free-block play) were designed to be informal and attractive to preschool children and to entourage adult participation. Tasks were pretested for difficulty level in order to ensure that they encouraged some form of teaching behavior from mothers and that comparable data could be obtained for all children. Mothers were instructed to do the tasks with their children, helping them as much or as little as they felt necessary. Each task was available for at least 10 minutes, with order constant for all subjects.

On arriving at the lab, mothers were shown a series of eight wooden puzzles graded according to difficulty. The puzzles, containing from 8 to 20 pieces, were colorful and attractive to young children. The mothers were asked to select one they thought their child would require some assistance to complete. When the mother-child pair had completed the first puzzle, the experimenter offered a second one. If the child's performance on the first puzzle revealed that the task had been too easy or too difficult, then a puzzle more suited to the child's ability level was presented. In order to assure comparable performance indices for all subjects, measures of interaction were derived only from the second and subsequent puzzles.

The second task, was a modified version of the "Animal House" subtest of the WPPSI (Wechsler, 1974). The mother and child were given a white peg board divided into 24 squares, and a box of colored pegs. In each square there was a hole above which was a picture of one of four animals. The top row of the form board was already fitted with appropriate animal pictures and colored pegs, constituting a model for completing the rest of the board. The child's task was to associate the demonstrated animal-color pair and to place appropriate pegs under all animals to finish the game. The experimenter first explained the task to each mother and then directed her to help the child complete the board proceeding row by row from left to right.

The third task differed from the other two in that there was no specific solution. The experimenter presented a set of multicolored blocks and asked the mother-child pair to make something together. The blocks were quite attractive, and all children readily began to play with them.

Verbal behavior of each mother and child was coded from video segments using a coding system designed to specify in a means-end analysis the ongoing contribution of each partner's behaviors to arriving at the final goal. Information about coding rules, descriptive validity and interobserver reliability data are reported in Moss and Blicharski (1986) and Moss and Strayer (1990). Verbal categories were arranged in five content classes graded according to the level of cognitive distancing demands (Sigel, 1982). The following (as reported in Moss & Strayer, 1990) are brief class and category definitions:

Teaching Strategies of Mothers of Gifted and Nongifted Children
Since we had chosen to observe interactive problem solving adapted to a wide range of problems, we chose three tasks (described above) differing with respect to both difficulty level and structure. Our first analyses were carried out to test whether groups differed significantly with respect to the type of strategies used on each task and whether mother or child strategies differed as a function of child sex. The answer to both of these questions was negative. In order to increase the power of any further analyses, we therefore combined data across the three tasks and across sex focusing only on child giftedness as the criterion group variable.

Tables 10.1 and 10.2 show the mean rate of mother and child use of different informational categories during the joint problem solving sessions.¹

Table 10.1. Mean Hourly Rate of Mother Strategies**

Table 10.2. Mean Hourly Rate of Child Tactics**

Comparisons on a global category level using t-tests showed that the greatest differences between mothers of gifted and nongifted children were in the highest and lowest distancing category levels. Mothers of gifted children were far more likely to use metacognitive strategies, while mothers of nongifted children were more likely to verbalize low-Ievel distancing strategies. Mother groups did not differ significantly with respect to the two categories that represented their use of normative, information levels, that is, statements and questions related to problem structuring and elaboration. If we look more closely within categories, the same pattern is evident. Mothers of the gifted group are more likely to converse at the upper limits of the zone of proximal development, while the comparison group is more likely to situate conversation in the middle range of information complexity. Results for the low-Ievel distancing category clearly show that mothers of the nongifted group provide solutions far more often than do the other mothers, who seem to structure a context in which the child is sensitively manipulated into finding his or her own solution. For example, asking the child to predict what an anticipated series of moves will lead to (predict consequences), or to judge how a projected Ian conforms to the goal and rule structure (reality testing), will help the child more autonomously restrict the set of possible solutions. Particularly in the case of young children the effective and emotionally satisfying application of strategies is dependent on such adult restrictions in problem definition (Moss, 1990). Valsiner (1984) and Klein (this volume) have also emphasized the positive function of adult mediation in reducing the complexity of the set of possible events and thus empowering the child to transcend the immediate present.

It is also apparent from the pattern of within-category results, that mothers of the nongifted group are spending more time managing the behavior of their children (conduct management) while the gifted mothers more actively encourage their children to monitor their own activity. Conduct management refers to comments aimed primarily at getting the child back on task, whereas the metacognitive skill of activity monitoring refers to adult comments that help children judge how they are proceeding while they are on task. It is likely that individual differences in children's self-controllability are affecting these maternal differences. In support of this explanation, Moss, Strayer, Cournoyer, and Trudel (1987) showed that 33-month-old toddlers of higher intellectual ability required significantly less maternal intervention during a delay of gratification task than did mothers of normal-ability children.

It is important to point out the similarities in the results of both groups. Both groups infrequently use negative feedback and disapproval, which are present in disproportionate amounts in the interactions of mother-child dyads with affective dysfunctions (Strayer& Moss, 1989). Rather, their extrinsic regulation of their children's behavior is more focused on providing positive evaluations, with mothers of gifted children being more approving or "rewarding" (Klein, this volume) in mediating their children's feelings of competence. In addition, the mothers do not differ overall in the proportion of their activity, which is concentrated on teaching normative structuring and elaborative skills, even though the gifted group is higher on some individual categories. Both mother groups also talk about subgoals and labels, tactics their children acquired at earlier ages, to a similar extent. This indicates that both mother groups are not only encouraging the learning of relatively new strategies like contextual and perceptual cue highlighting but are providing opportunities for their children to consolidate earlier acquisitions. The teaching styles of both groups can thus be considered to be informationally adequate and affectively affirmative. Contrary to certain myths, mothers of gifted children do not overcontrol the learning environment by exclusively concentrating on teaching developmentally challenging strategies. Their focus is not on restricting communication to cognitively enriching activities, but on also allowing the child to feel a sense of effectiveness and mastery with respect to the use of easier, more familiar tactics. As Renshaw and Gardner (1989) and Wood (1989) have emphasized, children who have experienced reciprocal and cognitively engaging instruction are far more likely to subsequently take a more active role in facilitating their own learning than are children who have been exposed to teaching methods which do not allow the child to express competence. As discussed above and elsewhere (Moss, in press), children need opportunities to consolidate learned skills as well as to acquire new ones.

Comparison of Gifted and Nongifted Children's Strategy Use
One of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter concerned the extent to which differences in mother's verbal behavior was associated with individual child differences. It is possible that mothers of gifted children are more verbally active on a metacognitive level because their children precociously initiate planning, monitoring and verification strategies. They are thus reacting to evidence of emerging metacognitive awareness that is not shown by nongifted preschoolers. In Table 10.2, the strategies used by gifted and nongifted preschoolers during joint problem solving with their mothers are compared. The far fewer number of statistically significant effects present here, as compared with Table 10.1, shows that the child groups are overall much less distinct than the mother groups. Both gifted and nongifted preschoolers are similar overall in focusing most of their exchanges with mother in the developmentally normative elaborative and structural categories. With respect to their use of various elaborative strategies, both gifted and nongifted children focus mostly on perceptual cues that highlight object attributes such as shape, size, and color. Both child groups request or reject help relatively infrequently.

The primary difference is in the metacognitive category. Gifted children more frequently reality test and monitor their activity. Besides these striking differences in metacognitive expression, gifted preschoolers also talk about problem rules and define goals to a greater extent than do their average-ability peers. As discussed above, these two structuring tactics present a greater developmental challenge to children of this age than does simple subgoal sequencing, since they require viewing the problem more abstractly.

These apparent differences in the rate of metacognitive strategies used by gifted and nongifted preschoolers could indicate that individual differences in metacognitive abilities are already present. Maternal differences could then simply be a reflection of differing child competence levels. However, when mean rates of all tactics used by gifted child en are compared with those of the nongifted group, it is evident that gifted children are higher in use of all strategies except for those involving low-Ievel distancing demands. This is reflected in their total rate of verbal behavior which is significantly higher than that of the nongifted group.

In order to test the hypothesis that gifted children's use of metacognitive tactics represented a distinctive strategy, we reanalyzed our data controlling for these overall differences in verbal ability by using proportional rather than rate measures. These results showed that, whereas the differences evident in maternal use of different tactics were upheld, gifted children's greater use of reality testing and activity monitoring was no longer evident when their higher verbal rates were controlled. These results suggest that, unlike mothers who showed clearer stylistic differences within and across-categories, the child differences are at least, in part, a reflection of gifted children's greater language fluency.

ANALYZING THE SEQUENCE OF INTERACTION
Although these first analyses had established contrasting patterns in mothers' use of high-level (metacognitive) and low-level (primarily solution-giving) distancing strategies, they did not clearly indicate the contribution of individual child differences to these effects. The comparison of rate and proportional measures had indicated that gifted children did not yet have a distinct metacognitive profile although their mothers certainly did. The young gifted children's emerging metacognitive competence seemed somehow connected to their superior language abilities and to their immediate social context. The link between these findings and Vygotsky's (1986) theoretical ideas about the gradual transformation of the role of language from a tool of communication to one of structuring higher level thinking was fascinating. Yet further empirical navigation of the "murky embryonic waters" of metacognition required a methodology that permitted us to explore how individual contributions to ongoing activity are combined into dyadic patterns.

The examination of correlations between mother and child individual measures was rejected as a solution to this problem, since this method is not adapted to capturing the mutual adjustments which characterize the dynamics of joint participation. As a more interesting alternative, we chose to further analyze mother--child interaction within a sequential framework. In essence, sequential analysis allows one to see if particular behaviors of one partner will regularly lead to a particular response from another partner. This technique can be useful in operationalizing certain Vygotskian concepts discussed above, such as the zone of proximal development, the transition from other-regulation to self-regulation, and internalization of higher cognitive functions (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986).

We can trace developmental changes in the zone of proximal development by examining how particular sequences of mother-child behavior change as a function of age. Whereas some patterns are more probable at later ages, others that may have dominated the interactive repertoire at an earlier age become extremely rare events. For example, whereas mothers and toddlers engage in frequent imitative labeling sequences, this kind of interaction is quite infrequent during the preschool period. Changes in the zone of proximal development can thus be traced in terms of the stability of particular combinations if social and cognitive tactics at different ages.

Assessing whether one partner "other-regulates" the behavior of the other to a greater extent, or whether interaction is more reciprocal, involves looking at each interactant's contribution to the exchange. If one partner's probability of using a particular cognitive tactic alters in response to a behavior performed by the other, then the first act can be interpreted as dependent on the second act. For example, if mothers of gifted children primarily use metacognitive strategies contingent to their children's statements at the same high-distancing level, then it is reasonable to conclude that the child act is directing the maternal response. Alternatively, if gifted children's metacognitive tactics are expressed contingent to maternal metacognitive initiations then the former's behavior can be considered to be largely under maternal control. If children can demonstrate their metacognitive competence freely regardless of what maternal act precedes, then they are showing considerable self- regulation in its use.

The developmental examination of changing initiation and response tendencies of partners engaged in joint cognitive activities also gives empirical meaning to the Vygotskian concept of internalization. For example, one indication of a child's increasing autonomous control over a particular strategy is decrease in the extent to which the child's use is dependent on external elicitation. Certain planning or evaluative tactics may, at first, only be used following direct maternal elicitation. An example of a metacognitive exchange directly controlled by one partner is a mother asking her young 3-year-old child, who has placed a large block over two smaller ones, "What will happen to your tower if you put that big one on top?" and the child answering, "It'll fall down." Several months later, the child's prediction of consequences may be elicited as a response to a less direct maternal initiative, such as "There's something funny about your tower." When the child has fully consolidated a tactic, he or she should not only use it more frequently but be able to initiate it independently, combine it with other tactics and thus play a greater role in integrating the skill in newly created strategies.

Sequential Dependency in Gifted and Nongifted Mother-Child Exchanges
In order to see if the pattern of interactive dependencies was similar for the two groups, tactics used by both mothers and children in the gifted group were combined into two contingency tables. One table represented child responses to maternal initiations, while the second regrouped maternal responses to child initiations. The same procedure was followed for the nongifted group resulting in a total of four contingency tables.

Our first sequential analyses were aimed at determining if there was an overall pattern of dependency of maternal acts on child acts. In other words, is there a general tendency for particular maternal responses to follow particular child initiations? If, for example, it was found that maternal responses were largely controlled by the quality of preceding child activity, then this finding would support the hypothesis that individual child differences are largely responsible for the qualitative differences in the verbal behavior of mothers. Chi-square goodness of fit tests of the contingency tables representing maternal responses to child initiations were used to test this hypothesis.² The results of these sequential analyses were nonsignificant for both gifted and nongifted dyads. This indicated that mothers did not modulate the complexity of their verbal behavior as a function of specific child verbal initiations.

To test the alternative hypothesis that the quality of children's strategy verbalization was largely dependent on mothers' cues, this series of analyses was repeated on the two remaining tables, which showed gifted and nongifted child responses to maternal initiations (Table 10.3). This time the results of the chi square tests were highly significant for both groups. Both gifted and nongifted preschoolers use of particular strategies was highly dependent on the type of strategy initiated in the directly preceding maternal utterance. Thus, mothers appear to control the level of verbal information exchange irrespective of individual child differences. It was clearly not the case that the metacognitive teaching style of mothers of gifted children was a response to gifted children's autonomous expression of self-regulatory tactics like reality testing and activity monitoring. Similarly, the solution-giving style of mothers of nongifted children could not be considered to be directly dependent on any particular child verbal activity.

Table 10.3. First-Order Transitions in Mother-Initiated Exchange**

Our finding of dependence of child verbal acts on preceding maternal statements prompted us to undertake further analysis of the two child-response matrices using chi square tests (Table 10.3). This time the focus was on the particular tactics rather than on global patterns. What patterns were evident within each group, and did these exchange patterns differ between groups? For example, what was the probability of gifted children using metacognitive tactics in conversational sequences initiated by mothers, compared, with that of nongifted children? These results indicate striking similarity in the communicative context of both groups during joint problem-solving activity. Preschool children are most likely to verbalize a particular tactic just consequent to maternal utterance of the same strategy. This pattern of child matching of maternal strategy level simultaneously facilitates the development of cognitive, communicative, and affective processes (Strayer & Moss, 1989). On a cognitive level, such mutual comparison of subjective representations of objects and actions during joint activity extends the child's understanding of the conceptual group of which a particular object is an exemplar. On a communicative level, child matching of maternal tactics becomes a mechanism for the child to play a role in the coconstruction of joint activity (Trevarthen, 1979). On an affective level, reciprocal, repetitive acts with familiar partners both convey a sense of shared intimacy and constitute a vehicle through which the child actively differentiates self from other (Nadel, 1986). In this sense, gifted and nongifted children's verbal expression of strategies is largely dependent on the other-regulation provided by the mother.

The comparisons of gifted and nongifted children's response tendencies during unmatched exchanges with their mothers also shows emerging differences in more independent application of skills. Consolidating the acquisition of a skill involves knowing how to apply it in a new context (in this case, a pattern other than matching) as well as restricting it in inappropriate contexts. It is interesting that the two nonmatched transitions in the gifted dyads' contingency table both involve metacognitive responses, while the one other effect for the nongifted group involves elaboration. These results suggest that these preschoolers may be at a developmental crossroad between dependency on other-regulation by the adult and more independent control of strategies.

Gifted children use metacognitive strategies, not only in a modeling context, but also in a more generalized response style. Table 10.3 shows that gifted children also plan, monitor, and evaluate following maternal structuring cues such as goals, rules and subgoals, and after receiving mother's approval. For example, Mother might say, "Let's make a house together" and the child replies with an idea for a plan such as, "I want our house to look like a king's palace." Gifted children are also significantly more likely to express their emerging metacognitive competence following their mothers' positive remarks about their child's competence. For example, after mother says, "You did that item very well!" the child replies, "I hope the next one is just as easy." The last finding supports the idea discussed at the beginning of the chapter of a dependency between gifted children's emerging metacognitive competence and parents' modeling of the positive self-attributions that underpin task persistence. Parental emphasis on these positive affective attitudes which will motivate and maintain the learning process are modeled as an integral part of the acquisition process. When metacognitive skills are consolidating, the child who has interactive experiences that are both cognitive and affectively facilitative shows mastery of the procedures involved in the skill as well as a sense of ownership of the outcome of the activity.

Whereas these consolidating metacognitive patterns are not evident in the responses of nongifted children, these children are displaying control of elaborative tactics. Normal-ability preschoolers show that they can generalize a perceptual or functional elaborative response also following more indirect maternal elicitation. For example, when mothers say, "This piece belongs here," the child will elaborate in saying, “Blue and blue belong together." We interpret these patterns as an empirical illustration of the Vygotskian model that suggests that problem-solving strategies are first used as responses in adult-controlled contexts, and subsequently used as responses to more indirect elicitation before the child becomes capable of independently generating these strategies. Further evidence to support this interpretation is afforded by comparing the overall probability of gifted and nongifted children's responses for each different category. Twenty-one percent of gifted children's responses are at a metacognitive level, compared to only 8% of those of the nongifted group. Forty-eight percent of all nongifted children's responses involved elaboration, compared to 40% of gifted children's. These figures indicate distinctive response profiles even though, as our first analyses showed, the children's initiation profiles are not clearly differentiated. We suspect that these profile differences will continue to widen with development, showing much clearer differences in gifted children's independent initiation of metacognitive tactics by the early school-age period, as shown by Borokowski and Peck (1986).

THE ROLE OF CHILD LANGUAGE AND ATTENTION IN ELICITING MATERNAL RESPONSE
Although these results clearly demonstrated the role of mothers in influencing the development of problem-solving strategies, we were somewhat uncomfortable with the picture they presented of the child's contribution. Firstly, where were the bidirectional effects which Schaffer (1984) has nicely summarized as follows: "The recent picture of parent-child relationships which has emerged is that of parents taking great care to fit their behavior to the child's, sensitively taking account of his particular state and condition at the time, adjusting their behavior accordingly, and all along ensuring that their stimulus input is properly adapted to the child's abilities to meaningfully absorb it" (p. 169)? Secondly, what was the contribution of gifted children's greater verbal fluency which was related, as shown by the comparison of the rate and proportional analyses, to their use of metacognitive tactics like reality testing and activity monitoring?

These issues prompted us to undertake yet another series of sequential analyses focused not only on direct exchange of information but also on children's individual expression of tactics. One indication of verbal fluency is the child's ability to talk about a series of object or event representations. For example, "This is a house with a three-car garage and it is located in Westchester," is a combination of three tactics in our coding scheme labeling, perceptual cue, and contextual cue. It is easy to imagine an adult replying to this child's statement with the question "Do you think it costs a lot of money?" which would be coded according to our taxonomy as a metacognitive cue encouraging the child to reality test. It is a lot more difficult to move the exchange to this more complex, integrative level in response to a more simple child description involving only one descriptive element, for example, "This is a house." We therefore compared the children in relation to the number of different tactics they were able to verbalize sequentially before eliciting a maternal response.

We found that gifted preschoolers regularly combined several informational components before a maternal intervention whereas nongifted children were more likely to note single object attributes or problem subgoals. On a communicative level, the verbal fluency of the gifted preschoolers results in their being more likely to engage their partners in more prolonged and higher level conversations. These overt signs of readiness to engage in task-oriented dialogues may be considered to be important social and cognitive cues of the child's emerging ability to combine and manipulate his or her own mental representations. The adult can build on the child's self-regulatory competence by combining it with the learning of specific procedures for reorganizing representational components in means-end analysis.

Since the contribution of maternal interventions and child independent abilities are necessarily confounded in a joint play situation, it was difficult to identify further components of gifted children's self-regulatory competence that might exist independently of maternal structuring. Furthermore, in deciding to choose difficult cognitive tasks for this study, we placed the children in a situation of greater dependency on adult verbal directives. A separate study of preschoolers co-ordination of self-control tactics during a delay of gratification task (Moss et al., 1987) enabled us and our collaborators to take a closer look at the relation between IQ and more independent child self-regulatory competence.

In this second study, in order to identify associations between intellectual ability, competence in self-control, and differential use of self-regulatory tactics, 48 toddlers aged 33 months were observed during two delay-of-gratification tasks with mother present (Moss, Strayer, Cournoyer, & Trudel, 1987). Since task demands were relatively easier than those of the study discussed above and the tasks were not predefined in a collaborative framework, these tasks elicited far more child than maternal activity. More than 80% of children's activity during the delay period consisted of nonverbal as compared with verbal behaviors. Previous research has shown the importance of looking away from forbidden materials in maintaining delay behavior (Vaughn, Kopp, Krakow, Johnson, & Schwartz, 1986). Our results showed that the child's ability to shift attention away from the task material covaried significantly with child IQ scores as assessed by the Stanford-Binet (Terman & Merrill, 1972). Interestingly, this delay tactic was not associated with any kind of maternal assistance of a verbal or nonverbal nature. In fact, the mothers of the highest controllers intervened significantly less than did those of the average group. Intellectually advanced children's ability to shift attention to and from objects as a function of task objectives can thus be considered to be an autonomously generated and executed cognitive operation by the third year of life.

The presence of this nonverbal self-regulatory mechanism can also be seen as a cue to mothers of the child's readiness to move to a more metacognitive level of problem solving. In combination with indices of verbal fluency, these child contributions to interactive situations help parents assess the child's individual zone of proximal development and modulate the complexity of information exchange accordingly. We noted also that the ability to shift attention was not associated with any other child behaviors which were shown to facilitate success on the delay task suggesting that our subjects could not yet coordinate this cognitive operation as a component in an overall strategy. As Vaughn et al. (1986) and Yates and Mischel (1979) have noted, very young children do not seem to be conscious of specific plans which will facilitate delay but rather engage in tacit, unconscious strategies which later come under direct cognitive control.

In summary two cognitive characteristics which distinguish, young gifted children from those of average ability are the ability to verbalize a series of problem-solving tactics and to control attention to objects and events more flexibly and appropriately. In performing these operations, gifted children show considerable self-regulation by the age of 3 years. These qualitative differences in gifted children's information processing prepare them for a level of interaction which extends these existing competencies to a greater range of situations and problems. These conclusions are supported by other research, as summarized by Kanevsky (1990), which has identified gifted children's greater ability to solve problems, to quickly access and flexibly use stored knowledge and to benefit from feedback and information. It is likely that parents of gifted children are encouraged to focus interactions on a metacognitive level by these cues evident in their children's task performance and conversational style (Moss, 1990). In summary, the emergence of metacognitive functions in gifted children seems to depend on how social interaction helps to mediate and organize the young child's representational processes.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
At the beginning of this chapter we posed several questions about the contributions of instructional contexts and individual child differences to the emergence of metacognitive competence in gifted children. In essence, we found that the level of metacognitive ability manifested by gifted and nongifted children during joint problem solving is a function of (a) the quality of instruction the child receives, (b) the extent to which the child is able to benefit from adult assistance, and (c) a relational context which permits flexible and reciprocal negotiation of roles as a function of ongoing task demands. Mothers of gifted children seem to direct development toward the metacognitive level globally in advance of the emergence of autonomous metacognitive strategies in their children's problem solving. However, the way in which the child demonstrates his or her ability to self-regulate acquisitions of earlier periods is an important clue to the adult about how quickly to progress within this zone of proximal development. Thus, the achievement of metacognitive levels of exchange also depends on the gifted child's greater cognitive flexibility in combining verbal representations and redirecting attention.

In what ways are the teaching strategies of mothers of gifted and nongifted children similar and how do they differ? Our results suggest that the interactive styles of both groups of mothers could be labeled as generally facilitative and comprehension-fostering. Both groups are generally approving of their children and do not overly criticize child behavior. It is expected that both groups of children will develop motivational styles that lead to the general feeling of being a competent learner. We base this conclusion on the fact that there were relatively few differences related to the acquisition of basic developmentally appropriate cognitive skills. Our analyses showed similar patterns for the gifted and nongifted groups in the matching of structuring and elaborative tactics. Few differences exist in how other groups assist their preschoolers in making functional and perceptual connections between objects and actions and foster vocabulary extension related to the acquisition of verbal labels. These normative teaching strategies are so salient to preschool development that they can be expected to be fostered in the parent-child interactions of normal populations.

However, the results obtained in this study can certainly not be simply described as different child responses to similar maternal teaching styles. This study suggested that mothers of gifted and nongifted young children differ most in terms of their mediation of skills that were clearly at the upper limits of the preschool child's zone of proximal development. It would be easy to say that mothers' stylistic differences were simply a result of gifted children's greater responsiveness to maternal metacognitive initiations. However, our results do not support this conclusion. With respect to nondistancing and metacognitive tactics, it is important to point out that both gifted and nongifted preschoolers followed their mothers' lead in the use of both of these categories. Nongifted children had established a significant response pattern for using metacognitive tactics following maternal initiation just as the gifted children did. However, the former were exposed to such initiations far less frequently than were the latter group. At the same time, the nongifted children participated more often in exchanges in which the adult provided solutions.

The interactive climate of parent-child play is as important in determining learning outcomes as the cognitive level of instruction. Mothers and their gifted children were significantly more likely to exchange metacognitive information about the problem-solving task than were the comparison group. Gifted children at first only used metacognitive tactics as responses to direct maternal elicitation. In order to appropriately scaffold their preschoolers' metacognitive development, it was critical that their mothers sought to raise the level of cognitive exchange with their preschoolers beyond the normative level. It was equally critical that the children complied with maternal initiations of these more advanced tactics by accepting the challenge to operate on their own mental representations-the essential operation involved in metacognitive thinking. The interactional pattern of mothers and gifted preschoolers shows both children's acceptance of mother's guiding role in facilitating their acquisition of difficult metacognitive strategies, and mothers' sensitivity to ceding control to their children in the application of more familiar problem-solving strategies.

Gifted and nongifted children's early joint cognitive experiences may leave the children with different internal working models of the kinds of adult help they can expect in learning situations. These models may subsequently influence the development of their different learning styles in the school context. Cullen (1985) has identified types of learning styles in 8-year-olds that are associated with different responses to perceived failure in individual learning situations. This author reports that strategy-oriented children showed effective high-Ievel coping responses such as using study skills or renewing effort by checking or monitoring strategies. Action-oriented children also showed active and constructive, but less strategic attempts to deal with failure usually involving requests for help or general effort renewal. Como and Rohrkemper (1985) have described such self-regulated learners as those who can intentionally “deepen and manipulate the associative network in a particular content area and monitor and improve that deepening process" (p. 9). An essential component of these transformational processes is learning to conceptualize the forms of influence in learning situations and use the social resources available to accomplish objectives. The joint experiences in activity monitoring and reality testing engaged in by gifted children and their mothers involves the early practice of these skills on an interpersonal plane. Through these experiences, gifted children may come to attribute greater efficiency to themselves as self-regulated learners.

Before concluding, I would like to point out certain limitations of this study. This microlevel investigation has attempted to clarify further how the dyadic context might facilitate the young child's strategy expression. We have been very cautious about making any connections between children's actual performance of the task and parental verbalization of different strategies since our data do not include nonverbal behavioral indices. It is likely that mothers are responding to child differences that have not been measured in this study, such as task performance and other child characteristics not situationally evident. However, we reject the idea that performance differences alone explain maternal differences in strategy use. In other words, mothers are not solely guided by their children's evident success or difficulty with the task in choosing their strategy level. If this was the case, then clear differences in mothers' strategy level should have been apparent on at least two of our three tasks. As described earlier, our puzzle task was individually adjusted so as to be above each child's ability level, whereas the matching task was the same for all subjects. Presumably then, even if the gifted children performed better on the common task than did their nongifted peers and subsequently influenced their mothers to adopt a higher metacognitive level, this was not the case for the puzzle task, which was equally difficult for all subjects. However, as we discussed earlier, mothers did not change their overall styles as a function of the difficulty level presented by the task. In studies we are currently conducting of differences between gifted and nongifted dyads, which include detailed measures of nonverbal behavior, we will have the opportunity to more directly test the relationship between child performance and maternal strategy level.

In this chapter, our primary focus has been on how early patterns of mother-child co-regulation affects the emergence of metacognitive abilities during the preschool period. Given the significance of the preschool period for the emergence of self-regulatory cognitive skills and the hypothesized importance of social experience in the development of such skills, comparison of joint problem solving of gifted and nongifted preschoolers with their mothers has both theoretical and practical significance for the wider fields of developmental and educational psychology. There are currently two prevailing viewpoints among researchers in cognitive development. Those primarily concerned with age-stage commonalities in development focus almost exclusively on the measurement of individual cognitive attainments related to logical structures or information-processing abilities. More recently, there has been extensive preoccupation with the examination of social and cultural processes which scaffold or guide cognitive development (e.g., Rogoff, 1984). To date, there has been little specification of how the sociocultural context of cognitive development both contributes to and is itself molded by individual differences in child ability levels.

As we have discussed elsewhere (Moss & Strayer, 1990), a great deal of research supports the idea that, during the infancy period, contingent responsiveness facilitates child learning of basic cognitive skills. The child may thus come to expect that the difficulties likely to arise when new skills are practiced will be corrected by more expert social partners. However, by the preschool period, such solution giving may inhibit the activation of more cognitively reflective activity. In contrast to earlier periods of development, optimal scaffolding during the preschool period may involve less contingent responsiveness. This provides the preschooler with opportunities to coordinate already-acquired tactics such as labels and subgoals and exercise emerging self-regulation. For example, allowing the child to verbalize a series of functional and perceptual representations before proposing a restructuring metacognitive strategy facilitates the child's mental separation in space and time from the ongoing observable field (Moss & Strayer, 1990). The child may be learning the essential metacognitive skill noted by Flavell (1976), that comprehension will improve with time and effort rather than only by asking for adult help. This kind of response is structured enough to provide the consistency of response to the results of the child's actions with which to develop evaluative structures. At the same time, it affords enough autonomy to the child as initiator and regulator of future occurrences of the action.

The way in which the child demonstrates his or her ability to self-regulate acquisitions of earlier periods may be an important clue to the adult about how quickly to progress within the zone of proximal development. Children who are more advanced in the acquisition of basic language skills by the preschool period are more suitable as partners for metacognitive verbal exchanges in which verbal skills are the tools for creating new combinations of strategies. The development of more complex representational abilities is thus directly related to language in two ways: both by allowing the child to direct his or her own cognitive activities through self-regulating speech, and to benefit from other's language that structures and directs thinking and concept formation processes. Moreover, gifted children's ability to attend spontaneously to several object features without explicit instruction means that mothers can more easily shift the dialogue to a more superordinate level. This finding supports Borokowski and Peck's (1986) speculation that gifted children gain their metacognitive advantages from an enriched environmental context prompted by parental reactions to signs of perceptual efficiency. Similarly, the ability to shift attention in the service of an overall goal indicates gifted children's greater readiness to participate in joint planning and monitoring operations with an adult. Finally, the general enthusiasm for joint cognitive enterprises evidenced by gifted children's maintenance of longer interaction sequences shows children's acceptance of mother's guiding role in facilitating their acquisition of difficult metacognitive strategies.

Gifted preschoolers are not more likely independently to initiate planning, coordination, and verification strategies than are nongifted preschoolers. They are, however, far more likely to do so in a matching context and also show emerging ability to respond with metacognitive tactics following more indirect maternal prompts. Although at preschool age, gifted children's metacognitive competence remains bounded within the other-regulation provided by the adult, they appear to be at a developmental crossroad. The fact that gifted children's response style already reflects maternal problem-solving style suggests a widening profile difference that, at a higher developmental level, will show stronger differences in the children's independent use of metacognitive strategies.

From a Vygotskian point of view, interactive contexts serve as a primary channel for the child's active learning of sociocultural information. Internalization of early patterns of mother-child co-regulation influences the developmental organization of cognitive procedures for engaging in socially mediated learning and problem solving. However, along with the internalization of operations and procedures in early social learning contexts, the child has also internalized self-concepts and social representations associated with domains of knowledge. Knowledge of how to analyze problems is acquired along with models of how to engage social resources in facilitating one's cognitive efforts and expectations about the outcomes of such collaborative endeavors. Thus, the metacognitive knowledge and abilities emerging by school-age are, in part, transformations of components of established social, affective, and cognitive schemas formed in the context of early relationships. As stated by Albert and Runco (1986), "We have assumed all along that the attainment of eminence involves the gifted child's family in a number of ways-as product, as experience, as canalization and as the outcome of the family values and emphases involved in its expression (p. 332). We hope that this chapter has contributed to the clarification of some of these processes. Further research should focus on how differences in the early interactive context continue to influence metacognitive performance in both individualized and collaborative situations.

**Please refer to original for all tables.

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Permission Statement

To Be Young and Gifted, Pnina S. Klein, and Abraham J. Tannenbaum, ©1992 by Ablex Publishing Corporation. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit operating foundation, which nurtures and supports profoundly intelligent young people and to provide opportunities for them to develop their talents and to make a positive difference. For more information, please visit http://www.davidson-institute.org, or call (775) 852-3483.

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