Comment on Elbers' article: Which competence? For whom? For what?

In reaction to Elbers' paper, several comments are made concerning the unit of analysis used to observe children's cognitive activity, the nature of the competence assessed, and the role of the task, or the object of knowledge, in which the child and the adult interact. It is argued that the testing situation is a social event in which the adult and the child interact on a specific object and negotiate a common interpretation of the task and the situation. From this perspective, the testing situation appears to be a learning situation in which new knowledge is acquired.     

The fundamental skills of higher order thinking

It may be possible to teach reasoning strategies to subjects with poor reasoning, including many subjects with learning disabilities (LD), using curriculum designed around a sameness analysis. The higher order thinking skills of analogical and logical reasoning are defined using the sameness analysis methodology. The sameness in the strategy for forming a generalization from experience is called "reasoning by analogy," while the sameness in the strategy for applying generalizations is described by the syllogism (logical reasoning). The research base for effective instruction in analogical and logical reasoning, particularly with subjects with LD, is summarized. The wide applicability of reasoning by analogy and by syllogism as complementary strategies is illustrated through their use in a critical review of the editorial page of a daily newspaper, and in linking content material in several domains.     

Talking about cultural diversity at school: dialogical tensions and obstacles to secondarisation

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In Switzerland, as elsewhere, issues dealing with cultural diversity raise major challenges in education. At present, little is known about how...     

Negotiating the meaning of questions in didactic and experimental contracts

In recent years, the notion of communication contract has stimulated a lot of research in social developmental psychology as well as in education. This article presents two series of investigations using different methods for the study of the didactic and experimental contracts. The discussion focuses on some theoretical issues raised by these studies: the risk of sociological vs psychological reductionism, the risk of neglecting the specificity of cognitive activity and the risk of reifying the notion of context. Possible developments for future research will be suggested. The problem of the articulation between social, institutional and interactional contexts in the study of cognitive activity is a central argument.     

Children's alternative frameworks: Should they be directly-addressed in science instruction?

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of in-depth, conceptually integrated instruction delivered via a videodisc program in eliminating children's alternative frameworks in science. Prior to instruction, pupils in two eighth-grade science classes, one of higher ability and one of lower ability, were interviewed to document their alternative frameworks (informal knowledge) for explaining two science phenomena. Interviews after instruction showed that students of both ability groups did not retain their alternative frameworks. This contradicts other research findings that children's alternative frameworks are extremely resistant to change and must be directly addressed during instruction for conceptual change to occur. A well-designed science curriculum that was intelligible, plausible, and fruitful, but did not directly address alternative frameworks during instruction, changed 92% of the alternative frameworks held by students to scientific understandings.     

Learning to collaborate in a peer-tutoring situation: Who learns? What is learned?

The issue of “collaborating to learn” is tackled by analysing a peer-tutoring situation aimed at providing help to students with learning difficulties. The corpus consists of a six-lesson cycle between a 15 year-old student and her 14 year-old tutee who has difficulties with German. The analysis shows that the tutor and the tutee interactively construct the asymmetry and complementarity of their roles. As a consequence, what seemed at first sight to be the tutor’s discursive and guidance abilities appears, upon closer examination, to be the result of the students’ interactional work. In this particular case, the mode of collaboration which is achieved results in the tutor taking charge of the major part of the cognitive work.