The proposed research will examine how social interaction in culturally defined contexts influences children's intellectual growth. A primary goal of the proposed research is to develop conceptual advances in the coding of children's peer interactions which can be sequentially analyzed in order to determine characteristics of peer interaction that promote and inhibit children's social cognitive development. The proposed research, consistent with a socially contexted model of development, defines cognition not in terms of the individual but, instead, as a social dialectic construct in which the ability to coordinate the perspectives of self and others is intrinsic to the process of social interactions. In the proposed research, the social context will be created by showing pairs of subjects a variety of boards and game materials and asking them to collaboratively create a board game. The materials will be so constructed that they will allow for naturally evolving outcomes subject to continuous reformulations and adjustments that will be analyzed both microgenetically and cross-sectionally. The context is highly motivating, age appropriate for children (first, third, fifth, and seventh graders) as and open to a rich variety of interpersonal negotiation strategies regarding mutually derived goals, rules, and methods of play that define cognitive capacities to coordinate self-other perspectives. After three 20 minutes sessions, a member of each dyad will be introduced to a third peer and asked to engage him or her, through instruction, in the game so that expert/novice kinds of interactions among peers can be analyzed. Transcripts and video tapes of the dyadic interactions will be coded to reflect different components of two reciprocal dimensions of cognitive development: interpersonal negotiation strategies and evolving game structures. The proposed measures of dyadic interaction will capture developmentally ordered levels of negotiation strategies which will be sequentially analyzed in terms of how they progressively interact with and affect outcome measures.
