Friendship and ‘talk’ as a facilitator of children’s learning in a ‘natural’ classroom setting: exploring ‘talk’ and ‘task progress’ to inform classroom practice

Uses of analogy, peer support, friendship and
types of talk used have all been shown to have
an impact on children’s problem solving and
reasoning (e.g., Azmitia & Montgomery, 1993;
Mercer, 1995; Mercer et al, 2004; Schacter,
1999), and to impact differently on boys and
girls (Keogh et al, 2000).
This study investigated the relationship between
sophistication of talk (from disputational
through to cumulative and finally exploratory)
and sophistication of analogy problem solving.