This study is to address the potential impacts of children’s social orientation on their school readiness in a new social-constructivist model that classifies children’s responses to social interactions. The new constructivist model by Jyrki Reunamo (Mau & Lee, 2011), which integrates Piaget’s distinction of accommodation and assimilation and Vygotsky’s agentive and adaptive perceptions, will be adopted in this study. According to Piaget, when a child encounters new information that may upset the equilibrium of his schema, the child might assimilate this information without changing his original schema or he might change his schema and seek a new solution to accommodate the new information. In Piaget’s theory, the new equilibrium that forms a new fit of information with the environment is called adaptation, the key process of learning that is more likely to be the dominant mode of learning in the growth of young children. Viewing cognitive development as a social-cultural process, Vygotsky does not contradict Piaget’s account of assimilation, accommodation or equilibrium; however, he introduced the concept of agency to account for children’s attempt to change the environment or the social context to fit their needs.

Reunamo et al. (2013) integrated Piaget and Vygotsky’s views and proposed a new constructivist model that classifies children’s responses to social interactions (e.g., ‘You are playing a game with somebody andthe other does not follow the rule. What do you do then?’) into four possible theoretical categories: agentive-accommodative (‘I tell him/her the rules’), adaptive-accommodative (‘I do what he says’), agentive-assimilative (‘I play with somebody else’) and adaptive-assimilative (‘I play alone’). They explained cognitive development in terms of increasing the likelihoods of searching for new solutions and changing the environments as children grow older and predicted that the agentive role of children in changing environments would increasingly dominate their learning process. Their theory and prediction were supported by recent studies on Finnish and Taiwanese children (Mau & Lee, 2011), which found a generalgrowth of agentive-accommodative responses and thus revealed children’s attempt to change the social environment and at the same time accommodate it. In addition, Mau and Lee (2011) found a steady decrease in older children’s agentive-assimilative responses. This finding suggests that children's awareness of new
points of view becomes less dominant as age increases. By integrating Reunamo’s perspective into this research, we will explore and describe whether children’s social orientations (i.e., adaptive, participative, dominating and withdrawal) may affect their school readiness.

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