Computers in the zone of proximal development: Implications for evaluation

Compurers Educ. Vol. 17, No. I, pp. 81-91, 1991 Printed in Great Britain

0360-1315/91 $3.04 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc

COMPUTERS IN THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT: IMPLICATIONS FOR EVALUATION CROOK

CHARLES Department

of Psychology,

Durham

(Accepted

University, 24 December

Durham

DHl

3CE, England

1990)

Abstract--It is argued that the effective evaluation of computer-based interventions must be grounded in a strong theory relating cognitive development to instructional practice. Cultural psychology furnishes theory of this kind. Two themes from within that tradition, both relating to instruction, are described. They each invite closer attention to the socially-organized context in which computer experiences are arranged. At present, both practice and its evaluation is hampered by too much faith in the potency of events concentrated in the interaction between an individual pupil and her computer. The management and evaluation of computer experiences would benefit from focussing on the broader context of classroom discourse in which such experiences may be situated.

INTRODUCTION

This paper highlights some themes within current psychological thinking that are relevant to the effective adoption of computers into education. As with the other papers in this collection, the present discussion explores how we may define appropriate strategies for evaluation. In what follows, I shall dwell upon one theoretical perspective that recently has gained prominence within developmental psychology. It is a perspective strongly influenced by soviet socio-cultural theoreists, particularly the trio of Leontiev, Luria and Vygotsky. My preference is to refer to it as “cultural psychology”[l]. However, the single concept now most familiar from this literature is Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). It is in order to capture an interest in marrying cultural psychology and educational technology, that the title of this paper suggests the metaphor of computers “in” this zone. My claim is that insights from cultural psychology may help guide the implementation of educational technologies. These insights are not primarily concerned with the specialized practices of evaluation: they really concern more basic issues of cognitive development. Our link to evaluation is, therefore, indirect. It depends upon an assumption that effective evaluation is only likely when researchers are operating with a rich theory of learning. I shall argue that cultural psychology is valuable in helping define such theory. In the background to this discussion (but briefly addressed at the end) is the idea that the alternative mainstream of theory and method in psychology has not served us well in these endeavours. Scepticism about orthodox psychological theorizing is one motive for the present discussion; another is the straightforward belief that penetrating evaluation of educational technology is a valuable research enterprise. This is worth declaring because there is an alternative perspective: some commentators become impatient with formal evaluation. For them, the potency of an effective educational computer activity should be self-evident-educationalists do not need its efficacy endorsed by researchers any more than businessmen need to have demonstrated the value of the fax or the phone. Such an attitude should be exercised cautiously. Often it may indeed be self-evident that a given computer application is engaging; often it may also be self-evident that students do develop expertise in using that application. For instance, this is a typical impression of activity in classrooms using LOGO[2]. Yet the LOGO phenomenon furnishes a good example of why caution is necessary: “formal” evaluations suggest that real cognitive impact is by no means a natural consequence of sheer pupil engagement[3-51. For those of us wishing to preserve an optimistic attitude towards new technology in education, any shortfall between “self-evident” efficacy and demonstrable cognitive impact is worrying. Although few applications have been as thoroughly evaluated as LOGO, many observers might 81

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feel that such shortfalls do seem alarmingly commonplace [6]. At this point, serious optimists might suggest that the real problem merely lies in blunt or inappropriate instruments of evaluation. However, others might suggest instead that, often, the shortfall lies in the manner in which these engaging and challenging computer activities are being deployed [3]. Of course, these two problems are interconnected. Where the shortfall reflects ineffective classroom deployment, this can only be revealed when evaluators make good the shortfall in their instruments and insights-so as to explore properly where the obstacles to practice are located. Unfortunately, evaluation exercises are not always driven by a well differentiated view of the classroom processes that underpin learning-where the further “deployment” occurs. To be valuable, an evaluation must be sufficiently open ended to unravel M.hut is being learned and where the learning is located. Arguably, what is particularly needed is a tradition of evaluation research that is more formative in its orientation: more concerned with actively refining classroom practice. Indeed, there is something especially irritating about evaluations that do no more than declare whether a computer experience predicts this or that particular student achievement. There is a bootstrapping problem here of course. In order to be properly informative about the promise of some computer-based learning experience, evaluation researchers must make suppositions about which associated learning and teaching activities are the proper focus of their interest. Existing theory must inform this problem of getting oriented. The present paper addresses this relationship between theory and practice as it applies to the evaluation of technology. In summary, the view developed here is that there are contemporary themes within cognitive theory that can assist evaluation conceived in the formative spirit outlined above. In particular, they do so by encouraging attention to certain events that occur more in the periphery of the actual interaction between pupil and computer. Of course, it is not new to urge attention to the broader culture of educational practice within which any given computer application is located[3]. However, simply advocating sensitivity of that kind can only be a start. What is needed is more specification; a theoretical framework that suggests what particular aspects of practice we should be attentive to, and why. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. I shall begin by outlining some relevant tenets of the perspective identified here as cultural psychology. Then I shall focus, in turn, on two cultural themes that bear closely on the issue of instruction. In each case, their implications for computer-based practice will be drawn out. This will then underpin some comments on the necessary reach of evaluation exercises. Finally, I shall offer some provocative generalizations concerning how the more traditional mainstream of cognitive psychology may constrain our approach to evaluation. A CULTURAL

PERSPECTIVE

ON

COGNITION

What is distinctive about human development is that is occurs in an environment fashioned by the creative activity of many previous generations. Cultural psychology invites us to give special consideration to this feature of the human condition; to recognize that development takes place in a “medium” of culture. There are two particular aspects of this circumstance that should be provocative for cognitive psychology. First, there is the capacity of our species for embodying cognition within material artefacts and social practices. Thus, cognition becomes not simply a quality of individual minds, but an outcome of the interaction between individual mentality and technologies. Our contact with literacy is a vivid example of this; so also is our contact with computers. In such cases, interaction with the physical environment and with each other has become mediated by cultural tools. We might contrast this with the more direct commerce with the world that characterizes (and constrains) the learning of other species. A second orientation of cultural psychology is towards our traditions for the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. We accelerate the mastery of cultural mediations through organized practices of guidance and teaching. This creates for the cultural psychology of development a special interest in schooling-an institutionalized forum in which this transmission is deliberately managed.

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Both of these observations converge on one central theoretical commitment: a concern for interpersonal processes in development. This is partly because cultural transmission across generations is understood to be located within social interactions-particularly among those participating in education. It is also because the off-loading or externalizing of cognition is revealed within social practices as well as within material artefacts. The idea that cognition may be represented in our interactions with the material tools of culture may be particularly resonant among users of computers; the idea that social practices also acquire this status is, perhaps, less readily recognized. With these ideas, cultural approaches draw our attention to the socially grounded character of thinking and problem solving. This concern of the cultural approach to define cognition as something distributed within social practice leads it to adopt another controversial perspective; cognitive development is regarded as highly “situated”. Knowledge is more domain-specific and less general-process in character than conventional wisdom seems to admit. Our unit of psychological analysis becomes activity in a context and the study of cognitive change, therefore, must dwell on the settings in which understandings are acquired and on the circumstances that specify transfers of learning between these settings. This sketch of a cultural perspective is inevitably very sparse. A more persuasive derivation of these principles must be sought elsewhere [l, 71. However there is a growing consensus that this movement within psychology does offer theoretical concepts that help systematize an understanding of learning and instruction. I shall next focus on two particular such concepts that have been well articulated through empirical study. The first of these is the zone of proximal development, the second is the broader notion of “common knowledge”. I shall argue for adopting an evaluation framework that acknowledges such ideas. This requires a wider perspective on defining the student’s encounter with technology. Hopefully, such a framework helps evaluation specify just where any “powerful ideas”[2] arising from such experiences are cultivated. THE

ZONE

OF

PROXIMAL

DEVELOPMENT

(ZPD)

The first and most familiar educational inspiration of the cultural perspective is Vygotsky’s ZPD. This is a metaphorical distance between what a learner can achieve independently and what can be achieved in the company of a more skilled collaborator. An important idea is that the assessment of learners might be better conceptualized in the terms of this potential. However, more important for present purposes is how the metaphor has invited efforts to define the locus of cognitive change and, particularly, the nature of instructional encounters that can be created within this zone. For some, the implications for educational practice have been merely a renewed commitment to “collaborative learning” in the most general sense. But the ZPD perspective is surely rather glib if all it offers is the idea that two heads are better than one. This is not the real substance of Vygotsky’s formulation. It is not implied that the activity defining effective instruction within this zone is merely additive in its effects. Events in these encounters go beyond this and they start to become more interesting when the joint activity constitutes an integrated cognitive system: when the coordinated contribution of both participants is responsible for getting a problem solved. A further achievement is then proposed to occur within this emergent cognitive system. Supposedly, a process of internalization is associated with these experiences of joint activity. The novice in the cognitive system, the pupil let us say, appropriates the goals and strategies that are manifest in the overt, jointly organized problem solving behaviour. Much of this will be carried by the language that is exchanged within the interaction. It is in this way that the learner is said to make internal (“intramental” in Vygotsky’s terms) the events in which they have participated on an “inter-mental” level. This model of cognitive change is appealing. For practitioners, it foregrounds the role of the expert or teacher as an active agent in the learning process-where current child-centred pedagogies (such as the Piagetian) tend to ascribe them roles that are merely facilitative. For psychologists, there has been a particular interest in the relation of these joint activity experiences to the fashionable concept of metacognition. That concept has inspired a variety of interest in

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the executive or strategic deployment of cognitive resource: there is some attraction to the idea that it is those strategic skills that are especially available for internalization out of joint activity [8]. In any case, the significant point to stress is that current interest in cultural approaches to cognition has revived attention to the interpersonal dimensions of learning. The approach characterizes cognition as something distributed over cultural artefacts and practices; moreover, it then invites us to see the acquisition of cultural resources as a process founded upon special kinds of social coordination. The phrase that popularly captures such coordination is “joint activity”; we can consider next the manner in which new technology relates to this conception of where cognitive change can be organized. Computers

and the joint activity within a ZPD

The emphasis so far might seem rather bleak for the accommodation of computers to classroom life. It is bleak if we admit to the feeling voiced by many commentators on new technology: computers typically localize learning, and estrange students from the crucial social quality of classroom experience. Certainly, there are many casual observers uneasy at the prospect of learning environments that invite from pupils the solitary posture of a TV consumer. Some may be persuaded by the simple claim[9] that, in the real world outside of education, much problem solving is necessarily a collaborative enterprise and, thus, educational practice should respect the social nature of intelligence. These concerns would be endorsed here, except that the issue does go beyond the simple truth that intelligence is typically exercised in a social setting; the real issue is that it is acquired in a socially organized setting. The present concept of “joint activity” is certainly about interpersonal processes-although it does refer to something more focussed than the agreeable social bustle of a lively classroom. Thus, on the “asocial” model of using technology, the concept might also be expected to be in tension with the style of a computer classroom. However, this need not be so and, arguably ideas regarding joint activity are actually exerting a constructive influence on the way in which technology gets used within education. One first approach to marrying joint activity and technology has been to suggest that the dynamic quality of exchange with computers actually resembles a kind of “social” encounter. For example, Weir [lo] proposes that the very “interactivity” of computers may make them particularly attractive to those learners who prefer a “collaborative” style of thinking. This is an interesting reversal of the more familiar intuition that computers cultivate an asocial mode of interaction. This idea that software may create a kind of human partner in joint activity has been pursued more formally. There have been attempts to embody within the pupil
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Arguably, the second of the above points also arises partly because of a contemporary interest in the cultural approaches referred to here. In fact, the educational strategy most commonly thought to represent a meeting with joint activity perspectives is not the issue of software design outlined above: it is represented in the current enthusiasm for organizing computer work in the form of pupil collaboration. That is, interactions around the technology, rather than with it. This practice of peer group working-possibly also precipitated by scarce access to hardware-has encouraged a number of reviews of the benefits of such socially organized computer use[13-151. An awakening of support for group work practices is refreshing and certainly does reflect some influence of cultural theories of cognition. Yet this influence is somewhat paradoxical because, as it happens, the place of peer interactions as a social influence on cognitive development has been poorly articulated by cultural theorists. The original presentation of joint activity as a force for cognitive change was in terms of a novice-expert (say, teacher-pupil or parent-child) exchange: not an exchange among cognitive peers. We need not dwell here on the fact that more research is needed to illuminate fully this version of socially organized learning. The important lesson from exploring the influence of the ZPD remains: “using” computers for learning is an experience that is often arranged to involve a small community of peers. Thus, the impact of any computer application will have to be evaluated partly in terms of the kind of social energy that it generates under such typical conditions of use. The “effects” of a computer application must therefore be recognized to embrace this species of impact. In summary, it is often assumed that the main influence on computer-based practice of ZPD concepts will concern the refinement of pupilcomputer dialogue. While there may be a future for the design of such intelligent software, the more immediate impact of this tradition of theorizing has been on determining the arrangements under which computers actually get used in classrooms. This leads us to discussion of our second organizing concept derived from cultural approaches. Note that events within a ZPD setting are immediately interpersonal: the notion being that something gets internalized from the experience of joint activity. Evidently, this intensity of tutorial encounter cannot be a typical experience of classroom life. Practical circumstances do not allow it. The cultural tradition may still have sustained our interest by deflecting attention towards peer encounters but it also furnishes other attractive concepts that help identify the strongly social quality of educational experience. These concern social structures that depend less upon concentrated tutorial dialogues of the kind implied by ZPD settings. COMMON

KNOWLEDGE

The phrase “common knowledge” is not to be found in the vocabulary of the original Soviet socio-cultural theorists. It has been articulated in the recent writings of Edwards and Mercer[l6, 171 who make a convincing case that the concept flows naturally from the principles of a cultural psychology. A key concern of theirs is to develop a useful conception of “context” that might empower the analysis of discourse. Traditionally, we frame context as being something to do with the material circumstances within which events occur or, in the case of talk, something to do with the publicly available details of what has just been said. Edwards and Mercer argue that while such a conception may characterize what is available to the outside observer of events, for the participants context is something that is primarily intermental in character. What we understand in discourse with another is guided by a backlog of “common knowledge” that has been constructed within the course of a (possibly lengthy) history of social exchange with that partner. As it happens, they unfold this idea through the analysis of interactions within primary school lessons. They are able to show that contemporary classrooms are indeed characterized by the atmosphere of learning-by-doing that the prevailing pedagogy would lead us to expect. However, they also show that this bustle of activity is overlaid with a well-ordered pattern of discourse. In particular, what their teachers appeared to be doing was publicly marking and documenting the children’s practical experiences such that they may become constitutive of a shared classroom

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knowledge. Such discourse is constantly imposing certain kinds of sense on what is getting done by the pupils-sense that is framed by reference to the prevailing body of common experience. A similar analysis (although less indebted to cultural theory) can be found in the classroom observations reported by Walkerdine [ 181. There is a sense in which this conception re-establishes a central role for processes of memory in educational practice. Not however the discredited memory of rote learning, but rather the socially organized activity of “collective remembering”[l9]: children are persistently invited to reconstruct earlier experiences in the terms of their current activity and its outcomes. Their exposition leaves a strong impression that a significant portion of young children’s experience of classroom learning is saturated with their teacher’s interpretative commentary and discourse. Such interpretative discourse is, thus, a salient feature of classroom life and is imposed at points where the pupils’ experiences can be integrated into developing bodies of what may be called “principled” understanding (in contrast to ritual or pragmatic understandings). Flying in th,e face of child-centred, activity-led learning theories, Edwards and Mercer are at pains to identify how this construction of an agreed common knowledge can sometimes even distort or re-present the activities that the participants actually experienced. It may be necessary to say a little more regarding just why this overlay of communication may be so important. One reason is simply the central role of a rich “context” (as defined here) in helping us benefit from new learning experiences. For example, the modest arguments of the present paper could be conveyed in a few sentences to the company of certain colleagues (those whose work has been drawn upon). But such company shares a fund of common knowledge in which these remarks get easily contextualized. With others, a great deal of context-creating effort must be invested before any possibly challenging ideas may be exposed (or dismissed). In early education, this contextualizing effort may be largely consolidated in the discourse that teachers are able to create around problem solving experiences. So the sense that gets drawn from, say, a computer simulation, may depend upon the framework in which it can be embedded. In turn, the simulation experience needs, itself, to become part of that evolving framework. The overlay of communication is important for a related reason. This concerns the particular issue of how experiences may transfer across problem solving domains. Earlier it was remarked that the cultural perspective tends to regard much learning as situated: specific to the circumstances in which it occurred. This implies that our approach to solving problems tends to be guided more by prior localized experience and less by the general principles of reasoning and thinking than many psychological traditions suppose. Much evidence now highlights this situated quality in reasoning. However, at the same time, it is undeniable that there is a sense in which our thinking does generalize across situations. The culturally influenced approach to this is to argue that an understanding of such “transfer” depends, not upon identifying the existence of some repertoire of general cognitive tools, but upon identifying the particular events that occur within one context that allow a connection to be made with another. One suggestion for how this is achieved[7] is contained in the idea that it is through language that we are led to make such links across contexts of practice. In particular, the language that may be mobilized by the expert guides who help us learn. Thus, the discourse that is involved in the creation of what we have called common knowledge is also involved in achieving the possibility of transfer. This effort towards the negotiation of a shared body of understandings is offered as a natural process within early educational settings. As noted above, it is not all that is happening nor is it happening all of the time. But, our faith in the importance of this purpose may be enhanced by considering situations of informal learning which are known to be very powerful and which, on reflection, do seem to be rich in just these activities directed at constructing a common knowledge. One example of universal significance might be found within child-adult interactions characterizing first language learning. Other more particular examples might be culled from the literature on apprenticeship [20]. Computers

and the creation

of common

knowledge

There are some commentaries on current computer-based practice that resonate well with this emphasis on the creation of common knowledge, even though the link has not been articulated. One of these [21] nicely captures certain concerns regarding computer applications by high-

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lighting a popular faith that, with technology, “the opportunity does the teaching by itself”. Or, more radically, “often it is even urged that direct teaching may do mischief by forcing the issue in an unmotivated and acontextual manner”[21, p.131. These are important cautions. However, just as joint activity must mean something more precise than “collaborative work” so the creation of common knowledge is a more particular species of interaction than any notion of “direct teaching”. Arguably, faith in this idea that computer-based activities might have powerful and spontaneous effects simply through the explorations they afforded, was often associated with LOGO. It is therefore interesting that studies of LOGO use now offer the clearest examples that mere “opportunity” is not enough[22,20]. Indeed, the originator of LOGO, Papert, has adopted this position in a vigorous defense of it against a body of critical evaluation research[3]. Both the practical lessons from computers-in-use and the theoretical concepts outlined above converge on a concern for the role played by teachers in structuring and making sense of computer-based experiences. Indeed there are signs that research interest is turning to this possibility to help define the nature of the engagement that is required. Some studies of computer-based work have shown that involvement at the level of fully explaining the ground rules of an activity (rather than, say, encouraging their spontaneous discovery) makes a difference to the quality of learning[l5]. However, the message from research highlighting the creation of common knowledge is still more particular than this. It suggests that computer work must become a topic of classroom discourse such that the experience can be interpreted and blended into the shared understanding of the participants. This is a more demanding and perhaps more intrusive role for the teacher than has otherwise been identified. It is hard to find observations of computer-based practice that are informed by the idea of common knowledge and its creation in classroom discourse. What should they seek? Recall that observations reveal that early learning environments are characterized by discourse effectively directed at the construction of a corpus of shared knowledge. Children’s encounters with new experiences seem, then, to be integrated through further discourse with this shared “context” and their activities-far from being private-become the focus for interpretative commentary. What is most relevant for the case of computer-based experiences is the idea that this kind of discourse can only happen in environments where the activities and explorations of the participants have a strong public or visible character. By and large, the practices and paraphernalia of classrooms tend to ensure that this is the case and that teachers, in particular, have a clear overview on much that happens. It, therefore, becomes important to establish how far computer-based learning enters into this space of “visibility” and how far the activities it promotes thereby enter into the construction of a common knowledge. Whilst there are certainly some commentators who value computers for the public nature of the work they support [23], it is likely that this public quality will be variable across the nature of the task and the strategy of the teacher. On the one hand, with something like Turtle LOGO, for instance, the problem solving converges on a physical object whose activities are highly public and engaging. Moreover, the nature of other LOGO programming activities are sufficiently circumscribed to facilitate integrative commentary at the class level-if a teacher is so inclined. On the other hand, there are some computer-based activities where the pupils’ experiences are not so clearly manifest as a “finished product” and where much of what happens for them is lost in the highly localized and transient character of the medium’s output. So that, although what did happen might well have been challenging and compelling, its accessibility to classroom discourse may be limited. This latter situation is amplified in classrooms where the strategy for computer use is physically to isolate it from the mainstream of class work and offer it as a private (and engaging) source of relevant cognitive exercise. There are lots of reasons why computers might be deployed in this manner within education and many of those reasons make good practical sense. However, the consequence may often be computer-based activities “bolted on” to classroom life: this may be quite incompatible with any notion that further work has to be done to absorb the learning experience into a framework of common knowledge. Thus, there are two assumptions emerging from this discussion. First, that this process of integration is important to the cultivation of real understanding from whatever was experienced

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and, second, the idea that this is a process that is not so likely to be activated by the solitary learner or even occur within the discourse of a peer group. In other words, there is important complementary work to be done outside of the computer interaction itself and the discourse that this involves is probably distinctively part of a teaching “attitude”. That is, it is something that is not only outside what can be achieved by programmers, it is also not a natural feature of individual reflection and it may not be readily evident within the exchanges of peer group work. The conduct of evaluation must surely incorporate a search for these experiences,

CULTURAL

PERSPECTIVES IN

ON THE EVALUATION EDUCATION

OF

COMPUTERS

Cultural psychology alerts us to the context in which learning occurs and, in particular, to its socially distributed character. It is not crucial to the present argument that this theoretical tradition is credited with fashionable themes within current educational practice: it remains true that there is a growing recognition of the value of collaborative structures for computer-based learning and there is an appreciation that teacher-driven integrative activity is likely to matter. My own prejudice is that the cultural perspective does help us articulate these basic insights. I take the significance for evaluation research to be as follows. In order to expose where and how computers are proving potent, the design of evaluations must be sensitive to events that are of the individual learner-computer interaction. In particular, taking place in the “periphery” evaluation should be amenable to the idea that the properties of any computer application include the character of the social processes that it supports during the circumstances of use. However, there must also be a recognition that-as with other classroom experiences-there is a need to explore how a computer experience is integrated into the discourse of learning as it is typically organized by teachers. To use the terms favoured here: how it enters into and extends the common knowledge of the learning community. Two questions naturally arise: do the methods of current evaluative research on computers permit this reach? And, does the state of classroom practice (in respect of computer use) suggest that evaluation researchers would actually find such vital activity going on in the “periphery” of computer interaction-is theory influencing practice in this domain? Space only permits brief commentary here on these two issues. In respect of the reach of current evaluation, the extent to which researchers are penetrating the broader context in which computer-based learning is taking place still seems limited. However, there undoubtedly is a growing enthusiasm for studying the quality of pupil talk in situations where computers are used collaboratively [24]. However, studies of peer dialogue during learning may often go only part of the way towards There remains a need for a strong theory of identifying how a computer experience is “working”. how that dialogue functions to support the learning process. Onlookers with a commitment to cultural psychology might express two particular reservations about contemporary research strategy in this area. First, there is a tendency for researchers to view peer dialogue as a “window” on to something else+ognitive processes. Their real aim is to characterize events that are ultimately in the minds of the participants. This, quite naturally, reflects the mentalistic bias of psychological thinking. An alternative approach, more favoured by discourse analysts[25], is to identify the cognition in (not behind) the dialogue. This invites a reorientation to the corpus of discourse such that it may be used to reveal the construction of distributed cognitive processes. The “cognition” is not reflected in the dialogue, it is constituted therein. Second, there is a danger that we become preoccupied with events inside the collaborating peer group as if these dialogues were the only source of discourse material relating to the social quality of learning. This focus reflects the problem of drawing evaluation researchers towards those integrative activities identified here under the framework of constructing a common knowledge. If we fracture computer-based learning from the rest of classroom life (either as teachers or researchers), something important will be missed that surely contributes to the effect of such experiences. What in particular gets neglected is the commitment (or its absence) of the teacher towards appropriating pupil experience to a body of shared understanding. It is not

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just that teacher talk often gets overlooked within much evaluation research: where such talk is approached it is with the kind of coding schemes that tend to blur our perception of how understanding is being constructed as a communicative activity. Edwards and Mercer provide a valuable contrast of their own discourse analytic measures with those of other traditions for the analysis of language [ 161. Traditions of evaluative research practice in this area often suffer from an impoverished model of where the learning “takes place”. If so, how far do traditions of actual classroom practice with information technology reflect similar shortcomings? One straightforward question we might like clearly answered concerns just how far the computer does tend to become decoupled from other classroom learning experiences. Unfortunately, while there do exist classroom ethnographies that include accounts of computer use, much research is located in situations where a high degree of commitment and computer integration is already established-or, perhaps, the business of being observed serves to cultivate it. However, even in energetic situations such as these, the LOGO evaluation literature has indicated that the focal activity is often allowed to coast forward with relatively modest teacher intrusion. From other observations we can also say that, even where commitment is high, there can be a strong preference to conceptualizing computer-based learning as something that “frees up” the teacher to do other things[26]. Another familiar image is one that refers to the pupil “autonomy” that this technology fosters. In both cases, there is some suggestion that what is happening within computer settings can be allowed to free wheel away from other classroom experiences. Both the model of liberation for the teacher and that of creative autonomy for the pupil have a natural appeal. But it is important to have a firmer appreciation of how far, and in what particular realizations, these circumstances contribute to the development of new classroom understandings. Some caveats Naturally, it is proper to acknowledge serious gaps in our understanding of the significance of these socially organized supports for learning-particularly in respect of the important concept of common knowledge. One gap would be an uncertainty as to whether discourse characteristic of peer groups actually can carry some of the force that Edwards and Mercer locate in their teacher talk. My own view is that this form of integrative commentary is actually a rather unnatural mode of communication to occur among problem solving participants and peers: it may be something peculiarly forthcoming from (and, perhaps, peculiarly exhausting of) those charged with the task of “teaching”. A second gap in our understanding concerns the developmental account of context building discourse: that is, how it may manifest itself differently across the (developmental) levels of education. Most research cited here has been grounded in primary school classrooms; we may well inquire as to the significance and formation of “common knowledge” at later points. These are modest caveats, they invite more research and that research should in turn suggest further refinement of strategy to optimize evaluation exercises. The force of what is being argued here should stand-our practice and its evaluation needs to be directed by a model of cognition and cognitive development that places these human attributes in a full cultural context. Lest some of this invitation seems too uncontroversial, this paper will conclude by identifying alternative, and prevailing, themes in psychology that can be seen clearly to contrast with the present approach. SOME PARALLEL

INFLUENCES

FROM

PSYCHOLOGY

In the mainstream of psychological research there seems to be a temptation to equate “empirical” with “experimental”. This is a dangerous attitude if it should exert too much influence over conceptions of educational evaluation. Consistent with its analytic approach to theory, in dealing with mental life psychology seems happiest with a style of research that “controls” the settings of human activity in order to isolate the effects of discrete variables. This purifying technique may sometimes prove powerful; however, a conception of cognition such as that pursued here-as something culturally organized+learly will not permit it to be easily fragmented for study in the

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experimental frame. The important events are simply not to be isolated in this way without disrupting the continuity of the whole process. In seeking “effects” that underly development, it may also be that psychologists are implicitly biased to discover discrete, even traumatic influences that exert sustained impacts. This attitude has certainly been exposed in relation to the lively “early experience” debate concerning the significance of events during the first year of life[27]. It was also characteristic of the philosophy underlying cognitive intervention research such as that exemplified in Headstart[28]. On a more modest scale, we should perhaps be wary of adopting similar revolutionary expectations of the educational effects of computers. The cultural view here would be to stress that such understandings as do emerge in these settings are likely to be of transient significance unless they are transferred to, and supported in, the mainstream of a pupil’s cognitive life. The metaphor of a mindstorm may be just too vivid if the mental energy released is not harnessed into the flow of activity outside of the immediate learning setting. Of course, this is a principle that, like others discussed here, applies widely beyond computing innovation. Finally, we should note the strong bias of cognitive psychology towards framing its subject matter in terms of the internal processes of thinking indiuiduafs. I will not adopt the extreme position of suggesting that progress simply cannot be made within such a theoretical tradition, but I do believe that there is something very important about the nature of cognition that gets discarded when we isolate and individualize human mentality in this way. Within the educational and developmental traditions most pertinent to this paper, this has caused us to develop a narrowly child-centred psychology that is preoccupied with manipulative activity and that strives to construct abstract principles of cognitive functioning. The alternative is to recognize that all development occurs in the uniquely human medium of culture and that children are supported in the growth of their understandings by sensitive and highly evolved patterns of social practice. Cognitive development is a fundamentally interpersonal achievement and psychology should be distracted from any suspicions that the social context can be regarded like any other independent variable in an experimental matrix. Thus, we can not successfully evaluate the current developments in computer-based learning by dislocating these activities from this context. REFERENCES a once and future discipline. In Nebraska Symposium on Mofioarion: Cros~cultural I. Cole M., Cultural psychology: Perspectives (Edited by Berman J.). University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln (1989). Harvester Press, Brighton (1980). 2. Papert S., Mindsrorms. 3 Papert S.. Computer criticism vs. technocratic thinking. Educ. Res. 17, 22230. (1987). 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