Re: Modeling as Inquiry

Ellice A Forman (ellice+ who-is-at pitt.edu)
Sat, 25 Oct 1997 15:07:04 -0400 (EDT)

Dear David,
In your message of October 20, you cited an article in Cognitive Science
by Okada and Simon on collaborative discovery in a scientific domain and
noted that some CHAT ideas were in it (but no CHAT citations). I know the
first author and have some background on this paper. Takeshi Okada was a
PhD student at CMU and he was very interested in the social context of
scientific discovery. This interest made him something of an outlier at
CMU but he did find other people, like me and Kevin Crowley, in Pittsburgh
to talk to about his interest. He eventually did his dissertation under
Herb Simon and I would guess this is the publication from it. He then did
a postdoc at LRCD and audited a class I taught on Situated Cognition in
which some readings from CHAT were assigned and actively discussed.
Unfortunately we did not read Yrjo Engestrom's work--which would have been
appropriate. Needless to say, Takeshi would not have been at liberty to
include anything from CHAT if he had wanted to do so in this paper with
Herb. Takeshi now has a faculty position in his native country, Japan,
but continues to collaborate with Kevin Crowley in the U.S. and others and
he continues to be interested in collaborative problem solving.

In my own work, I've been interested in how children's peer collaborations
support (and constrain) their discovery of scientific ideas and their
verification. A recent publication of mine (with Jorge
Larreamendy-Joerns--another friend of Takeshi's) appeared in the Dec 1995
issue of Cognition and Instruction. That issue (co-edited by me and Celia
Hoyles) is devoted to research on collaborative problem solving in math
and science.

Ellice Forman
Dept of Psychology in Education
University of Pittsburgh
5C01 Forbes Quad
Pittsburgh, PA 15260