Re: Evolutionary Psychology and Sociocultural Theory

Ellice A Forman (ellice+ who-is-at pitt.edu)
Sun, 5 May 1996 20:22:08 -0400 (EDT)

Bill and Vera,
You raise an interesting question about studies of peer
collaboration--the affective dimension. Most of the work I know about
ignores affect pretty well because it is experimental and affect is a
little difficult to manipulate. However, a few studies (I think Shari
Ellis did one) have included friends and nonfriends as conditions--which
does include affect as an experimental variable. Also, some of Margarita
Azmitia's work on expertise and peer tutoring hints at the role of affect
when novices who have been secretly trained to perform like experts
attempt to gain some control over the task and are prevented from doing
so by their partner (who had been the expert in a previous session).

I find that when I look at individual dyads, the affective dimension
gains more salience as struggles over dominance as well as attempts to be
mutually supportive emerge as important aspects of the social interaction
and the task motives and goals. In one study, I examined each dyad's
interactions for instances of social support and social interference.
The supportive interactions predominated throughout but there were some
notable occurances of interference. However, without doing a detailed
case study and/or discourse analysis that takes the entire context into
account, it is often difficult to evaluate the emotional tone of these
exchanges. For example, in one 4th grade dyad, the boy called his female
partner "dog face" and she pretended to strangle him with a chain of
paperclips. Our initial coding of this episode considered this to be
antagonistic but a more detailed examination showed that they were
engaged in a preadolescent form of flirting--or so it seemed to us. So
I'm sceptical about the utility of typical coding systems that aren't
very sensitive to the broader context or the subtle nuances of discourse
for characterizing affect.
Ellice Forman

On Fri, 3 May 1996 BPenuel who-is-at aol.com wrote:

> Ellice-
>
> We had been discussing the often absent accounts of affect in cognitive
> studies of learning, but I had suggested that some of the peer teaching
> research partly addresses that issue, and that your work on collaboration
> might be a resource for people interested in this area.
>
> Perhaps you or anyone else knows of some other research on affective
> dimensions of collaboration?
>
> Bill Penuel
> ______________________
> PreventionInventions
> PO Box 40692
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