For nearly 30 years, researchers have been proposing and testing theories of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie children’s abilities to comprehend the mental states of others and to predict behavior on the basis of those abilities. One such theory, the “theory theory,” contends that children evaluate their own understanding of others’ minds, developing a theory and expanding it when they encounter situations incongruent with their predictions. Wellman and Liu (2004) present a scale of the changes that children’s understanding of mental state representations commonly undergo as children develop a mature theory of mind. The present study aims to clarify how children pass from one stage of understanding to the next, employing a training study paradigm to examine the possible role of verbal scaffolding on children’s progression in this sequence. Specifically, the present study hypothesizes that verbally emphasizing the connection between one’s knowledge and thoughts will advance children’s performance on false belief tasks. This hypothesis was not supported. Even though children may appear to be at the same developmental level on Wellman and Liu’s (2004) scale, the variation in their performances after training may indicate more nuanced underlying processes than are currently expressed by Wellman and Liu’s (2004) scale.

The aim of this study is to analyze how four teachers work with verbal scaffolding during text talk to develop pupils' conceptual understanding in fourth grade. There are five forms of verbal scaffolding that the study focuses on. This study answers the following questions: What specific strategies does the teacher use to develop conceptual understanding? How does the teacher apply verbal scaffolding during text talk?   The questions are answered by two qualitative methods, classroom observations and interviews with the four participant teachers. The two methods interact with a shared focus directed on answering the study’s questions. The purpose of the observations was to have a focus on how the teachers used verbal scaffolding during text talk to develop pupils’ conceptual understanding. However, during the interviews, the teachers had the opportunity to express their own perception of their teaching. The study's theoretical framework is based on the concept scaffolding. To make the analysis more concrete, scaffolding has been categorized into five forms of verbal scaffolding. The result showed that all the teachers apply the different categorized verbal scaffolding during the text-talks, although with varying approaches. Furthermore, teachers advocate for different strategies to enhance pupils’ conceptual understanding.