This study contrasts maternal adjustments in scaffolding in a school-like learning task and in a home-like learning task within one low-income Latino population. The authors observed 12 immigrant Latino mother-child dyads performing both school-like and home-like tasks. Quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that in the home-like task, mothers purposefully scaffolded their children’s learning, consistently and effectively adjusted their scaffolding to variation in task, demonstrated a greater range and variety of scaffolding strategies, and accomplished various scaffolding goals based on their social class and cultural blueprints. Implications for the integration of effective taskspecific maternal scaffolding into the design of intervention programs to support learning for immigrant Latino children are discussed.
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