Vygotsky also observed that adults and older peers' instructions to children become less directive across time; a process he called "scaffolding." When working with very young children, adults and older peers are naturally prone to provide a lot of structure and direction, telling children exactly what to do and how to do it. As time goes by, however, and children gain experience with problem solving on their own, adults/peers will naturally decrease the amount of prompting and direction they provide to children. Based on this observation, Vygotsky became a great proponent of reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning. He urged schools to set up learning environments in which older or more accomplished peers were assigned to help younger or struggling peers grasp a subject or learn a new skill, based on the idea that this arrangement would produce the most effective learning.
Information Processing Theory is another theory that has been used to explain children's cognitive development during middle childhood. Basically, this theory describes how children retain, organize, and use information while learning and how these abilities change over the course of children's cognitive development. This is a single minded theory that views children squarely in terms of their ability to consume, digest and regurgitate information. Accordingly, children take "inputs" from their experiences, process them internally, and create behavioral "outputs." There are no specific developmental stages associated with this theory. Instead, children's attention and memory abilities are thought to undergo more or less continuous improvement. The major utility of information processing theory with regard to the middle childhood time period is that it provides concepts and language useful for understanding children's mental abilities in the context of school environments and