Collaborative Cognition: Children Negotiating Ways of Knowing

Human cognition increasingly is coming to be understood and studied as something that does not necessarily reside within individuals, but rather as something that evolves through interpersonal communication. Using the interpersonal event as the unit of analysis, the authors of Collaborative Cognition examine how children interactively co-construct knowledge and ways of knowing in social contexts. In an illustration of the idea that thinking is as much interactive as self-reflective-one that supports the cognitive developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky-this important new study examines the social origins of thought, and the inherently discursive nature of thinking itself.