Paper #3

More about Perret-Clermont and argumentation. We briefly discuss here Tartas, V., Baucal, A., & Perret-Clermont. (2010). Can you think with me? The social and cognitive conditions and the fruits of learning. In C. Howe & K. Littletown (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 64–82). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

This article tackles Perret-Clermont’s most typical and recurring question: how do socio-cognitive processes impact on learning? This question, once operationalized, becomes: How should one design experiments that detect and measure the impact of social interactions on learning? The authors then describe a set experiments structured in four phases: pre-test, adult training, joint activity (among two peers), post-test.

The results of these experiments seem to suggest that social interaction clearly affects learning, and that the defining factor that explains the amount and depth of progress is the quality of the interaction between participants during stage 2 and stage 3. Both interacting with an adult and interacting with a peer can produce progress; the child might benefit from interactions with an adult that scaffolds the situation for her, or from interactions with a peer that can be easily called into question and confronted with different points of view. In either case (child or adult) the key is whether the participants can express and exchange their opinions freely; more broadly, whether there is a secure environment that encourages children to explore the problem at hand as autonomous epistemic agents.  In consonance with Piaget’s early writings, the authors claim that a horizontal relationship between participants in which each agent shares her opinions and reasoning and respectfully questions the other’s points of view produces the best results in terms of knowledge acquisition.

“Learning and thinking”, they claim, “will then appear more clearly as the collaborative result of  autonomous minds confronting viewpoints and cultural artefacts (tools, semiotic  mediations, tasks, division of roles, etc.) and trying to manage differences, feedback and conflicts to pursue their activities.”

Nice article.