A Socioculturally Microgenetic Scrutiny on the Mediational Role of Teacher/Peer Scaffolding via Dialogic Collaboration in EFL Speaking Development

Parnafes and diSessa [this issue] present a useful description of the process of doing microgenetic analysis of qualitative data and report interesting findings about how students’ reasoning changes as they gain relevant experience. We are pleased that microgenetic approaches are being applied to educational issues and agree with the authors that new knowledge can be gained by closely examining...

summary writing is associated with lots of cognitive and metacognitive complexities that necessitates instruction (hirvela & du, 2013). contrary to majority of studies carried out on summarization instruction, the present study addressed the underlying processes or microgenetic developments of the iranian efl learners’ summary writing. to this end, 41 male and female undergraduate students ...

Microgenetic methods were used to document young children’s (N = 36; M age = 3;5) acquisition of false belief (FB) understanding and investigate developmental mechanisms. A control group received no experience with FB; 2 other groups received microgenetic sessions designed to promote FB understanding. Over consecutive weeks, microgenetic groups received implicit feedback about their performance...

Dynamic assessment (DA) as an alternative to psychometric-based testing focuses on the collaborative dialogue between the learners and the mediator to move the learners from their current capabilities. This study represents a web-based qualitative inquiry in online DA which aims at addressing the inadequacy of the diagnostic feedback of the web-based DIALANG test in reflecting learners’ potenti...

The process of change represents a main, central issue for the study of development. Basic and applied researchers in developmental science have aimed their research work at answering several key questions related to the problem of change. How does change occur? What mechanisms produce change? What conditions are likely to promote the emergence of change in development? Another related question...

A central tenet of constructivist models of conceptual development is that children’s initial conceptual level constrains how they make sense of new evidence and thus whether exposure to evidence will prompt conceptual change. Yet, little experimental evidence directly examines this claim for the case of sustained, fundamental conceptual achievements. The present study combined scaling and expe...