[xmca] LSV-Sakharov Procedure: The role of the experimenter

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Hi Paula, Carol, and other mavens of the LSV-Sakharov procedure.

I have been re-reading the wolves in sheep's clothing article and ruminating
about the
procedures you were using in relation to those used by LSV/Sakh and
Hanfmann/Kasanin (which
i have not gone back and studied carefully, so maybe the answer is easily
attributed to my laziness).

My major question has to do with the questions asked by the experimenter.
For example, did LSV/Sakh
ask questions such as that for your Figure 4 -- find blocks that are a
different color? When we tried
replicating this work back in the 1980's, we came a cropper of uncertainty
about what questions the
expermenter should be asking and focused as closely as we could on our
interpretation of the procedures
we had read about which seemed to start with one block and ask for others
which were in the same category,
then turning over a counter example. This got more and more complex the
further through the set we got.
And A LOT depended upon what the experimenter thought the kid was thinking.
That is, to introduce a phrase
from an adjacent conversation, there was recipient design in the adult
question, a guess at what conceptual
schema the kid was using at the time.  And these questions did not involve
word like "color" but word like "cev."
Is color an auxiliary stimulus in the experiment the same way "cev" is" ?

This aspect of the procedure is not clear to me.

Secondarily, don't we have to be sceptical about such as the van der Veer
and Valsiner quote on p. 236 in your
sentence on p. 236:  What Vygotsky is implying is that real cnocepts depend
on particular kinds of characteristics
or features that are abstract, abstracted, and system-related. This would
result in meanings that children attach to
words, and those of adults, being at different levels: "concrete features
vs. abstract definitions.".

But we can be pretty sure that adults, (the contributors to this discussion,
for example) routinely, even in our writing,
are operating at the level of pseudo concepts and, I believe, often at the
level of chaining..... at least our discussions
over time certainly have that characteristic.

in short, this old goat is having difficulty telling not only sheep from
wolves in sheeps clothing, but goats from gophers!!

mike
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