Fostering symbolic interpretation during adolescence

Although by 11 years children demonstrate impressive performance on various tasks that assess symbolic thinking in language development, research suggests that few young adolescents demonstrate evidence of symbolic processing when reading literature. This study investigated whether the difficulty might be due to a lack of adequate exposure to domain-specific knowledge. Students in the experimental groups in three age groups — preadolescence, middle adolescence and later adolescence — received concrete scaffolds designed to foster domain-specific knowledge of the symbolic process. A comparison of the experimental and control groups showed that students at all three ages who had experienced the scaffolds demonstrated significantly greater symbolic interpretation. Furthermore, despite concerns that the scaffolds might dampen the readersʹ personal response, the experimental groups at all three ages provided significantly higher enjoyment ratings of the test poems.