Social and Cognitive Development During Collaborative Reasoning

This chapter has two goals. The first is to describe research about the potential of an approach to dialogic interaction, called Collaborative Reasoning, to promote children’s social and cognitive development. A distinctive feature of the research is that development was assessed in situ on the basis of changes over time in children’s talk and behavior as they engaged in dialogic interaction. The second goal of the chapter is to advance understanding of the mechanisms by which dialogic interaction facilitates learning and development. The hallmark of our thinking about mechanisms is that children abstract generic structures, or schemas, that represent the