Article Seven: Exploring Vygotskian Perspectives in Education: The Cognitive Value of Peer Interaction

Elice A. Forman and Courtney B. Cazden explored the writings of Vygotsky’s perspectives of the impact of the social foundations of cognition and the importance of instruction in development. Although Vygotsky’s perspective’s include the social relationship known as “teaching” occurring when there is a one-on-one relationship between one adult and one student, the authors of this article point to the important and not so well explored “teaching” through peer tutoring, peer conferencing and peer collaboration. Research is sparse in the United States regarding the value of peer interactions and the possible cognitive and intellectual learning it can accomplish.

In the beginning of this article, Forman and Cazden introduce us to Soviet Union researcher Makarenko. Next the authors explore Vygotsky’s pupil, Levina and her view of the possible cognitive benefits of peer tutoring. An additional experiment on peer tutoring involving observations of a second grade classroom by Kamler is included. Genevan psychologists Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont’s research on the effects of peer collaboration on logical reasoning skills associated with Piaget’s stage of concrete operations are also explored. Forman and Cazden include current research from Forman, Russian researchers Lomov and Kol’tosova and Japanese researchers Inagaki and Hatano that also support peer collaboration.

In conclusion, Forman and Cazden note that their article doesn’t mean that teachers are not needed. The authors conclude that the incorporation of general human experience in the teaching process is really the most important aspect of mental development and must ultimately be grounded in adult-child interactions. However, peer interaction also has an important role and function between social and external adult-child interactions and the individual child’s inner speech. By shifting current practices of mostly adult-child interactions in schools to include opportunities for peers to work together, children will have the opportunity to broaden what they have been taught to include cognitive and intellectual learning via self-dialogue.

Notes:
*Vygotsky: The social relationship known as “teaching” occurs when there is a one-on-one relationship between one adult and one student. Internalization occurs when “the very means (especially speech) used in social interactions are taken over by the individual child and internalized. Social interaction by and of itself does not lead to the development of problem solving, memory or other forms of cognitive development. Many of writings involved adult-child interactions. Acknowledges that discrepancy might exist between solitary and social problem solving; zone of proximal development-the difference between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. Zone of proximal development happens when interpsychological regulation is transformed into intrapshchological regulation.

*Schools can not afford to hire one teacher for every student; therefore group instruction is necessary. This poses a problem for the classroom teacher in meeting individual student’s needs. Most school lessons involve the teacher giving directions and the student nonverbally carrying them out; the teacher asks questions and the student answers, often in one or two words or phrases. Students are not encouraged in a typical classroom environment to reverse roles and give directions and ask the questions of the teacher. Although classrooms are often crowded social environments, group work is rarely encouraged. This lack of encouragement within the classroom environment may be due to no clear rationale of the benefits of group work at this time.

*Theoretically, most developmental research studies completed in the United States thus far have focused on the value of peer interaction in the socialization of behavior and personality; less focus has been completed on the possible value of cognitive development.

*Makarenko:researcher in the Soviet Union also investigating the importance of the value of cognitive development in peer interaction.

*Two types of interaction among peers put on a continuum, each depends on the amount of knowledge or skill the students bring to the table during group work.
· Peer tutoring or consultant (SU) - One child knows more than the other and is therefore expected to share their knowledge with the less capable peer. Tutor helps inform, guide, and/or correct the tutee’s work.
· Peer collaboration-Knowledge of peers is equal or as close to equal as possible and a give and take work relationship is expected. A mutual task in which the partners work together to produce something neither could have produced alone.

*Communication with less knowledgeable peer during peer tutoring may not only motivate the student acting in the role of the teacher, but also may be a means for the more knowledgeable student to internalize their own mental processes, via inner speech, what was taught receptively by the teacher.

*Peer tutoring must be effectively modeled in a learnable fashion by the teacher in order for positive interaction and results. The teacher first models a task by providing questions until the student can complete the task independently. Secondly, the teacher allows the student to repeat the instructions for the task with appropriate prompts from the teacher for accuracy. Finally, the decay of “old” or “given” information provides the student the opportunity to internalize the task through inner speech and the student is now ready to teach a peer. When accurately teaching another, the student’s inner dialogue has been truly established.

*Levina: notes and protocols collected only include child’s speech directed back at experimenter; perspective that the need to communicate to a less knowledgeable other- such as a peer-would motivate the student; instruction of peers could be an intermediate step between receptively being directed by the speech of another and productively and covertly directing one’s own mental processes via inner speech.

*Peer conference: students work together to review written work. The writer reads their work to partner. During the reading, the writer revises work either independently or through peers questioning resulting in a more concise product.

*Kamler: found that in order for peer conferences to be successful, initially the teacher needs to consistently model the kind of interaction in which the children can learn to speak to each other- must be “learnable” by children; reciprocal model of peer assistance; makes concept of audience visible.

*Peer Collaboration: even further from traditional classroom organization; not much research in Western industrialized societies due to focus on the individual achievement of students; none of the researchers looked systematically at student’s interactions during collaborative problem solving; to test hypothesis of peer interaction enhancing intellectual performance due to individuals recognizing and coordinating conflicting perspectives of a problem, research needs to look at the process of social coordination that occurs during problem solving in order to isolate the social conditions that are most responsible for the cognitive growth; most research on peer collaboration has been based on Piaget’s idea of placing more importance on peer interaction than on Vygotsky’s adult-child interaction.

*Lomov and Kol’tsova and Inagaki and Hatanto: conclude through research on peer collaboration that peer interaction enhances the development of logical reasoning through a process of active cognitive reorganization brought on by cognitive conflict; peer interaction helps individuals acknowledge and integrate a variety of perspectives on a problem and this process of coordination produces superior intellectual results.

Perret-Clermont: can not only look at peer collaboration as a joint activity, but must also look to the confrontation between different points of views of the peers involved; systematic observations of peer collaboration continues to be needed; the impact of different types of social interactions; and in particular of partner’s strategies, on the strategy which the subject adopts in order to carry out the task needs to be included in future research.

Forman: studies look at how the reasoning strategies of collaborative problem solvers differ from those of solitary problem solvers and how some collaborative partnerships differ from others in both social interaction patterns and cognitive strategy usage using a chemical reactions task; one type of social behavior code (procedural interactions) and three types of experimentation strategy codes looked at during experiments; studies did not include measure of cognitive conflict so social coordination resulting in cognitive conflict that in turn affects problem solving skills can not be derived from her studies; too many variables. When collaborators assume complementary roles, they start to look more like peer tutors. The similarities include: the need to give verbal instruction to peers, the need for self-reflection due to a visible audience, and the need to respond to peer questioning and challenges-a reciprocal model of peer assistance is apparent in the collaborative problem-solving context.
*Procedural interactions – all activities carried out by one of both children and focus on getting the task completed.
· Parallel procedural interaction – children share materials and exchange comments about task but do not monitor work or share own thoughts with partner.
· Associative procedural interaction – children try to exchange information about some of the combinations each one has selected during task by no attempt is made by either partner to coordinate roles each takes while performing task.
· Cooperative interaction – both children constantly monitor each other’s work and play coordinated roles in completing task procedures
*Experimentation strategies included:
· Random or trail and error – a relatively ineffective, unsystematic approach to an experiment.
· Isolation of variables – effective for solving a few problems in experiment.
· Combinatorial- most effective to solving problems in experiment; highest level of cognitive ability.

*Piaget: identified four factors necessary for a theory of cognitive development: maturation, experience with the physical environment, social experience, and equilibration or self-regulation; equilibration seen as most fundamental; peer interaction and social experience derive their importance from the influence they can exert on equilibration through introduction of cognitive conflict; disequilibrium is cognitive conflict.