Acquisition of the concept of teaching and its relationship with theory of mind in French 3- to 6-year olds Leila Bensalah a, * , Marie Olivier a , Nicolas Stefaniak a, b a CLEA, EA 4296, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, 57 rue Pierre Taittinger, 51096 Reims, France b Department of Cognitive Science, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium article info Article history: Received 18 February 2011 Received in revised form 17 October 2011 Accepted 18 October 2011 Keywords: Theory of mind Teaching Preschool children Tutoring Developmental stages Social cognition abstract Little is known about how and when preschoolers master the concept of teaching, particularly in relation to the acquisition of theory of mind (ToM). We investigated the relationship between the two in children aged 3e6 years old. One hundred and seventeen French preschool pupils answered questions about different teaching situations illustrated in ten stories involving knowledge differences and/or false belief. Four change-of-location ToM stories were also administered. Our results indicate a developmental progression from understanding teaching situations to grasping the notion of knowledge gaps. Moreover, they confirm that ToM seems to be involved in understanding more complex teaching situations. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Teaching is generally defined as the ability to detect knowledge deficits or false belief in another person and the intention to supply the missing information, thereby allowing that person (usually a child) to increase his/her knowledge or clarify his/her under- standing (Olson & Bruner, 1996). Determining which processes are required to acquire the concept of teaching is an important topic for at least two reasons. First, curriculum designs generally involve tutoring situations. For example, children who have achieved a good grasp of the topic being taught may be asked to pass their knowledge on to children with a poorer understanding. This can be performed more easily when they have mastered the concept of teaching. Indeed, this means that the child-teacher has to under- stand that s/he has more knowledge than the child-learner and the child-learner must understand that s/he has less knowledge than the child-teacher (Ziv & Frye, 2004; Ziv, Solomon, & Frye, 2008). In other words, in peer tutoring conditions, if one assigns the teacher’s role to a child who has not mastered the teaching concept, the pedagogical behaviours that s/he will adopt could be less adapted than if the teacher’s role was assigned to a child who has mastered the concept. Thus, a child-teacher who does not grasp the concept of teaching may not be able to independently provide the expla- nations that the child-learner needs, since the child-teacher is not aware of the need to provide these explanations. Second, if teachers are not aware that their pupils do not necessarily understand their instructions, they may continue to use inappropriate teaching practices. Thus, an investigation of children’s mastery of the teaching concept could improve teachers’ knowledge of their pupils’ ability to understand teaching situations and help them to adapt their practices accordingly (Hindman & Wasik, 2008; Lieber et al., 1998; Lynch, 2009). The aim of the present study was thus to further explore the teaching concept and to determine its rela- tionship with the acquisition of ToM in preschoolers. The present study is in line with work in the tutoring frame- work. Indeed, according to Vygotsky (1978), tutoring is the most efficient condition for promoting children’s learning. This view is not shared by Piaget (1968) since, in his view, the individual is the agent of his/her own learning. In order to differentiate between these two views, several studies have compared children in tutor- ing conditions with children alone (Azmitia, 1988; Teasley, 1995; Tudge, Winterhoff, & Hogan, 1996). These studies produced contradictory results. According to Azmitia (1988), the tutoring condition was better than the individual condition; this finding was also supported by Teasley’s (1995) study which showed that talking in dyads was the best way to generate hypotheses. However, Tudge et al. (1996) conducted one study with children from North * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ33 3 26 91 37 02; fax: þ33 3 26 91 37 19. E-mail addresses: leila.bensalah@univ-reims.fr (L. Bensalah), marie.olivier@ univ-reims.fr (M. Olivier), nicolas.stefaniak@univ-reims.fr (N. Stefaniak). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate 0742-051X/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2011.10.008 Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 303e311