Microdevelopment of peer interactions and scientific reasoning in young children / Microdesarrollo de la interacción entre pares y el razonamiento científico en niños pequeños

Abstract

Traditional analyses of reasoning and interactions often describe the building of knowledge by comparing general outcomes of group data (e.g., averages, frequencies and percentages) and as a result, often neglect the underlying individual processes. In this paper, we present a case study of two dyads of children (four to six years old) working on a problem-solving task and aim to capture the moment-to-moment changes in a time serial data set. Particularly, we present the changes in the types of interactions and scientific reasoning skills (SRS) during a single problem-solving task. The three descriptive techniques implemented in the data analysis are: (1) a time-series analysis to track the behaviours from moment to moment; (2) transition matrices to describe behaviour changes; and (3) a hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) with a hybrid clustering technique used to detect dyadic patterns. Our results describe the intra-individual variability of the dyads, supporting the assumption of the non-ergodicity (i.e., neither homogeneous nor static) condition of psychological processes. We show that intra-individual trajectories in the children’s behaviours are neither homogeneous nor stationary, but variable over time.