Peer tutoring in changing children's models of the Earth

DE LA HERA, DIEGO PABLO; CALERO, CECILIA INÉS; SIGMAN, MARIANO

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXX Annual Meeting; 2015

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Teaching is believed to be fundamental to maintain and develop culture and a natural cognitive ability we are all exposed to and participate in. Surprisingly, teaching abilities have been much less studied than learning skills by neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience.Children have shown capable of teaching and of engaging in peer tutoring, i.e. teaching between individuals with similar interests, age and contexts. We thus propose this peer-mediated instruction may provide the conditions for conceptual change to occur; a goal often difficult to achieve.First, we conducted a tightly scripted face-to-face interview with 7- to 8-year-old children from two second-grade courses. The interview, based on previous work by Vosniadou et al (Vosniadou, 1992), was aimed to elicit verbal responses and drawings so as to reveal the Earth models held by these children.Then, in a separate session, some children were matched with a partner holding a different model of the Earth and one of them was instructed to explain the other they should agree on a common drawing. Other children, instead, revised their knowledge on their own. Finally, the initial interview was repeated after the intervention to evaluate response changes.As expected from previous work by Vosniadou et al for children of this age, we found diversity in the Earth models held by them. We hypothesize children who engaged in interaction with another will show greater response changes than those who did not interact.