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Eight papers are presented that illustrate the important impact of social factors in learning and the development of thinking. Some contributions focus on the modalities of teaching and learning and others are concerned with possible new ways of showing how learning is regarded by different social groups. (SLD) more...

In this paper, we present the recent development of a methodological approach originally devised by Perret-Clermont and Schubauer-Leoni called ‘experimental micro-histories’. This approach allows us to investigate processes of change that often seem to be underestimated in the typical experiments used in developmental psychology that focus on the average impact of certain factors. Two dyads were studied in-depth to understand how, for better or for worse, children use elements learned from previous conversations in their subsequent self-regulatory processes. Different trajectories of private-social speech were studied through different phases (child-adult scaffolding phase and a subsequent child-child interaction phase) and will be discussed in order to reconsider the necessity of adopting a micro-historical focus on developmental processes of change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] more...

This study presents a detailed analysis of collaborative interaction modes employed by 9- to 10-year-old children in a spatial problem solving a task called the Kohs cubes. All the children were videotaped during non-interactive pre-test and post-test sessions (stages 1 and 4) and two types of interactive sessions: (1) novice children training with adults (stage 2); and (2) competent instruction by children, or competent children, interacting with novice children (stage 3). Dyadic sessions between competent and novice children are analysed in more detail to show how children share their involvement with the task and how they manage to solve the problem depending on their level of task competence. Three particular dimensions of these interactive sessions have been studied: (1) making strategies explicit; (2) children's task management; and (3) modes of interaction and their evolution in the course of the task resolution. Through a qualitative case-based analysis of four dyads extracted from the experiment, the results highlight the plurality and complexity of the socio-cognitive dynamics in dyadic interactions. The discussion focuses on the processes of collaborative learning involved in such interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

The present study focuses on the observation of learning processes as they emerge in the context of conversations among two students in three successive tasks designed to foster conceptual change in proportional reasoning. The three tasks were set according to a pre-test treatment post-test paradigm. In the pre-test and the post-test tasks, the two students solved individually several items in the presence of an experimenter. In the treatment task, the two students worked as a dyad to solve similar items; they used a balance to check their conclusions and subsequently continued solving the items when the weighing did not match their expectations. We adopt a micro-genetic approach and develop new analytical tools to observe what happened in the conversation (both socially and cognitively). Throughout the three successive tasks, we observed the interplay between tools, peers, experimenter, and task demands and how they are managed through the rules of conversation. We identified four processes that involved the emergence of new high-order strategies from coordinated actions distributed among peers, the guidance of the experimenter in coordinating actions, and ways the participation in solving a previous task was actualized in a successive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...