How do new competences appear and how they disappear: Social interaction and cognitive development

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to examine how different theoretical points of view (constructivist, co-constructivist and dynamical systems theory) explain the mechanism of creating new cognitive competencies within social interactions and, on the other hand, to show that there is some evidence that partly cannot be explained by the conceptual framework of these approaches. All three approaches give complementary explanations from different but reciprocal points of view showing different aspects of social interaction that leads to greater achievement in the subsequent individual cognitive functioning. Constructivist approach focuses on the importance of normative facts that create a logical imbalance and are often produced within a situation of interaction, co-constructivist framework emphasizes the importance of thinking which is embedded in language and socio-cultural exchange, and dynamical systems theory seeks to describe interaction in the concept of bifurcation. These approaches are less capable of explaining the findings that cognitively more competent children who enter the interaction with the less competent but more confident partners achieve lower results than in pretest. Question is asked whether concepts such as normativity and discourse can be helpful in explaining this phenomenon and whether they play some sort of role in mechanisms of cognitive development. .