Children's genre knowledge: An examination of K-5 students' performance on multiple tasks providing differing levels of scaffolding

in this article, we have taken a critical look at the issue of scaffolding in children's writing, beginning with a consideration of the ways in which children's productions of text have been supported in previous research on writing. development. From that initial look, we developed a series of tasks to explore what 24 focal children, four each at kindergarten through fifth grade, knew about two very commonly used school genres, stories and informational texts, so that we might learn more about the complex relationships among development, task, and genre knowledge. Tasks ranged from those that provided little support to children (a prompt to write a made-up story) to those that provided high levels of support (describing how children knew whether a book was an information book or a story after examining its pictures and listening to it read aloud). Our findings suggest that while scaffolding can assist children it may also, at times, hinder children in demonstrating their full range of genre knowledge. Patterns displayed in children's responses also point to periods of shift in cognition, during which children who may have implicitly performed a task may become unable to do so as their understandings shift from implicit to explicit forms, a phenomenon described in cognitive research by Karmiloff-Smith (1992). Finally, our findings have compelled us to reexamine our own thinking on the study of texts, making room for individual authors' aims in our look at genre.