Peer Influence on Children's Development of Multilink Causal Reasoning

• In Event: Collaborative Reasoning and Social Processes in Education and Psychology

Abstract

This study aims to understand peer influence on children’s development of multilink causal reasoning, namely the ability to connect ideas into coherent causal chains. The construction of reasoning chains was investigated in 24 collaborative discussions involving 160 underserved fifth-grade children, as well as in an individual essay that children wrote to express their opinions on an environmental policy issue after the discussion. Results indicated that children who produced more causal chains during the discussion also generated more causal chains in the essay. A causal analysis showed that peer dialogue mediates the effects of social and cognitive characteristics on chain production in the essay and the mediating effect increases with increases in the number of peer-generated causal chains during the discussions.

Authors

• Shufeng Ma, Tsinghua University

• Richard C. Anderson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign