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important to consider them as actual children – entities in themselves, reading or non-reading – within the same. All the primary school children taking part in the research are at a significant developmental stage in their lives and any framework within which we choose to study them must take this into account.

Although the children within a particular year group could be said to be at the same or a similar stage of cognitive development, the actual developmental age of one child relative to another within the group can vary significantly. This idea is

reflected in the children with whom this research was undertaken. One cohort, the Year 5 children of 2012, were described by the Head of School as 'mainly August birthdays' – by which she intimated that not only were many of the children

74 physically younger than would be expected for an average year group but their being so made them less cognitively developed: they appeared to have shorter attention spans and were regularly more cheeky and more naughty than was to be expected. This is not to say that more cognitively developed children couldn't have similarly short attention spans or be just as cheeky or as naughty but rather, in the decades-long experience of the Head of School, in any year group – especially Year 5 and Year 6 groups where more is asked of the children with respect to, for

example, English, Maths and Science SATs – she felt that the younger children, especially younger boys, tended to be more behaviourally challenging and, academically, often found it harder to keep abreast of their older peers.

Nevertheless, primary school children are immersed in learning – at school, at home and when out and about, for example, with peers or other significant others – and so it is important to think about the ways in which children learn and develop and whether or not these ways are compatible with the theories of reader response and interpretive communities.

Many theories of cognitive development exist. They present sometimes divergent, sometimes conjoining or crossing beliefs about how children learn and develop and so offer different ideas about what it is that influences that learning and

development. Any theory so advocates specific factors that forge a child's belief systems, values and attitudes – or at least the beginnings of the same.

Thinking about how these factors might be significant to reader response theory and the theory of interpretive communities would go some way toward reinforcing the strategies with which this study is undertaken, strengthening not only the theoretical framework itself but also rendering its contribution to knowledge yet more robust.

Recognising the compatibility of the framework with both classic and more modern theories of cognitive child development will not only deepen the exploration of a child's approach to reading, the re/creation of texts and the re/creation of a child's belief systems, values and attitudes – but might also enrich the study of the re/creation of the beliefs, values and attitudes a child has about science and scientists.

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Classic Theories of Cognitive Development and the Theoretical

Framework

Although it is, of course, not the intention of this research to redefine any existing theory of development, it is interesting to consider that both classic Piagetian (Piaget, 1923/2002, 1925/2007, 1950/1955; Piaget & Inhelder, 1950/2000) and Vygotskian (Vygotsky, 1930-34/1978, 1998) philosophies of cognitive

development, together with other theories – Bruner's processes of cognitive growth in childhood (1968; Bruner et al., 1959), for instance – seem to resonate well with the philosophies of reader response and interpretive communities.

Depending upon how one chooses to define a text or an interpretive community, the idea of a person using the interpretive tools at her or his disposal in creating/ recreating that text, making meaning and so creating/recreating herself or himself could, to varying degrees, lend itself to many theories of cognitive development.

Piaget's (1955) theory of adaptation, for example, suggests that at each stage of a child's development new knowledge once taken in and understood (Piaget's

'assimilation') finds its place within the child's existing mental schema (Piaget's 'accommodation'), and thus a child adapts to the new knowledge or experience. The idea of a child adapting in this way could be considered to resonate with the ideas of reader response theory: the new knowledge/experience/text a child lives through calls that knowledge, that experience, that fresh text into being and new meaning is made. The calling into being of the new knowledge or the making of new meaning therein – or both – resonates with Piaget's 'assimilation'; the fresh meaning, in finding its place within the child's existing mental schema, that is, in the child's 'accommodation' of that fresh meaning, both the mental schema and the child are de/reconstructed and the child, so learning and developing, is

changed/adapts.

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of development (1998) suggesting that a person's cognitive learning and growth is a lifelong socially collaborative process (as opposed to Piaget's more individualistic stage and adaptation theory) could also be

considered to resonate with the ideas of reader response and the theory of interpretive communities. The social interactions that Vygotsky felt progressed a child's cognitive development – the reading of a book to a child or a simple conversation, for instance, or any social exchange – represent both efferent and

76 aesthetic transactive texts or events, and the interpretive communities of which Fish (1980) speaks are very much socially, culturally and historically constructed.

Vygotsky's and Bruner's (1968) ideas of instructional 'scaffolding', too – wherein a child's more knowledgeable parent, carer or peer supports (scaffolds) the child in the mastering of a task or in the understanding of a concept until the child fully internalises the same and is able to complete the task/articulate the concept without support – also resonate within the framework of the interpretive communities theory.

A scaffolded interaction could be thought of not only as a social exchange/an interactive – efferent rather than aesthetic (though not to the exclusion of the aesthetic) – transactional text or event but could also be defined as an actual interpretive community in and of itself. When a child is being shown a specific task or being taught a particular concept, one-to-one, for example, social

interactions/textual transactions must occur in order for the child to somehow master that task or concept. For the child, both on account of the structure and from within that structure, strategic interpretive techniques begin to burgeon and progress. The child uses, adapts and reuses these interpretive strategies to internalise the scaffolded knowledge by deconstructing then reconstructing her or his own schema until the task is eventually mastered. This scaffolded interaction could be looked upon as an interpretive community, albeit an intimate community of only two people (the child and the more knowledgeable other). It is both its specificity and its non-specificity that makes it so: its specific intention to teach a task and its non-specific 'unintention' to originate organic strategies for the child to interpret/self-teach that task and so create new meaning. A mere series of textual transactions is elevated to a self-sustaining, though temporary, interpretive

community in itself. The child 'lives through' the pedagogic transactions within this intimate community, simultaneously developing/redeveloping techniques and deconstructing/reconstructing that which is already known – to the inclusion of new meaning. When new meaning is made the scaffolding is removed: the intimate community is no longer needed and it ceases to exist. The loss of this intimate interpretive community is of little consequence to the child as she or he wasn't aware of its existence; it has served its purpose in that the child has reconstructed her or his self and is not in need of it anymore; and in all likelihood another

77 Hence, dependent upon how one defines texts, interpretive communities and their temporal and/or temporary existences, one might consider that reader response theory and the theory of interpretive communities present ideas that mesh well with Piaget's, Vygotsky's and Bruner's ideas of cognitive development.

Nonetheless, whichever cognitive theory of development one favours or however one may choose to re/define its ideas within the terms of alternative frameworks, it is interesting to think, too, about the long-standing debate as to what it is exactly that, in the very beginning, first energises, galvanises and advances a person's development of any kind: is it nature or is it nurture? That is, with respect to this research's core motif: Are scientists born or are they made?

It is important to think upon this question here because, if scientists are only ever born not made, then the idea of shaping interventions to better persuade children toward a career in science becomes somewhat moot.