Producing or reproducing reasoning? Socratic dialog is very effective, but only for a few

GOLDIN, ANDREA PAULA; PEDRONCINI, OLIVIA; SIGMAN, MARIANO

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2017 vol. 12

1932-6203

Successful communication between a teacher and a student is at the core of pedagogy. Awell known example of a pedagogical dialog is ?Meno?, a socratic lesson of geometry inwhich a student learns (or ?discovers?) how to double the area of a given square ?in essence,a demonstration of Pythagoras? theorem. In previous studies we found that after engaging inthe dialog participants can be divided in two kinds: those who can only apply a rule to solvethe problem presented in the dialog and those who can go beyond and generalize thatknowledge to solve any square problems. Here we study the effectiveness of this socraticdialog in an experimental and a control high-school classrooms, and we explore the bound-aries of what is learnt by testing subjects with a set of 9 problems of varying degrees of diffi-culty. We found that half of the adolescents did not learn anything from the dialog. The otherhalf not only learned to solve the problem, but could abstract something more: the geometricnotion that the diagonal can be used to solve diverse area problems. Conceptual knowledgeis critical for achievement in geometry, and it is not clear whether geometric conceptsemerge spontaneously on the basis of universal experience with space, or reflect intrinsicproperties of the human mind. We show that, for half of the learners, an exampled-basedSocratic dialog in lecture form can give rise to formal geometric knowledge that can beapplied to new, different problems.