My research investigates how social and cultural processes affect the acquisition, organization, and use of cognitive skills. A fundamental question about human cognition underlies my research: How do children grow up to be competent members of the community in which they live? To answer this question, I study how children's experiences with other people and with the tools of thinking available in their culture influence cognitive development. My book, The Social Context of Cognitive Development (2001), describes theory and research on social contributions to cognitive development in four areas - attention, memory, problem solving, and planning. In this book I discuss how family, peer, and community factors influence not only what a child learns, but also how learning occurs.
In my research, I have concentrated on three cognitive abilities that are critical to everyday functioning: problem solving, planning, and spatial reasoning. For example, I have conducted research on how activity goals influence how children explore and remember a large-scale space; how cultural tools, such as established plans, influence the way children solve problems that involve future-oriented thinking; how experiences in the family provide children with opportunities to develop planning skills; and how everyday spatial experiences of Navajo children relate to their ability to plan a route. Recently my collaborators and I have broadened this research focus by examining how child emotionality influences the development of cognitive skills in social context (with Susan M. Perez, Ph.D., now at the University of North Florida), how social and cultural experiences influence the development of mathematical reasoning (with Yingqiu Pan, Ph.D., now at Xiamen University, China), the ability of adolescents to plan their time as an important factor in positive youth development (with Marc Wolpoff, M.A.), how family processes such as economic stress and participation in family rituals affect parental instruction when parents and children plan together (with Amber Hammons, M.A.), processes of mother-child interaction during problem solving (with Shuheng Zhao, B.S.), and peer collaboration and children's interpretation of problem difficulty (with Heidi Beebe, B.A.).
In our laboratory, we have also been studying what children do outside of school. Our original question was "What do children do when they have nothing to do?" However, this question changed as we discovered that in the United States today children's time both in and outside of school is extensively committed. These patterns peaked our interest in the ecology of children's everyday lives and its relation to cultural values and practices. To pursue this topic, I received a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the development of planning in middle childhood. The funding supported a 3-year longitudinal study of 180 children from European American and Latino families. Children and their parents participated when the children were in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades and we conducted a follow-up study when these children entered junior high school. A few notable features of this research are that it investigates social and cognitive processes in a specific area of development (planning), it includes data from multiple contexts (home, school, peer group), it uses a range of methods (longitudinal, microanalytic, parent and child interviews, teacher reports, home assessments, and laboratory observations), and it includes information about parental beliefs and family rituals regarding child development in the two largest cultural communities in the southwestern United States. Several papers have been published and presented at conferences on our findings and several more are in progress. A recent publication in Child Development (Gauvain & Perez, 2005) describes some of these findings.
I teach a wide range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, including Child Development, Cognitive Development, Social Influences on Cognitive Development, Development in Culture, and the Psychology of Women.
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