Primary School Children’s Collaboration in a Dyadic Context

• In Event: Curriculum Innovation and Enactment

Abstract

A sample of 530 sixth-grade students were administered the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) test. Based on their performance, a smaller sample of 120 students were assigned to sixty dyads and were instructed to interact with a device and investigate its functioning. This procedure was based the notion of conceptualizing a scientific investigation as a dual search, a search in the space of hypotheses and a search in the space of experiments. Data were collected with observations and think-aloud protocols, as the students were jointly investigating the functioning of the device. The results showed that students spent most of the time working competitively. The results also identified participants’ main limitations in terms of several cognitive abilities.

Authors

• Nicolaos C. Valanides, Frederick University

• Charoula M. Angeli, University of Cyprus

• Andreas Chiras