Aspects of the social construction of causal reasoning

Background: The value of causal reasoning is widely appreciated by educators, yet little research has been dedicated to determining how it develops in social contexts. This study examined children’s construction of causal reasoning during collaborative discussions in elementary school classrooms and investigated whether they were able to transfer causal reasoning displayed during the discussions to individual tasks. Methods: Multilink causal chain models were tracked in 24 collaborative discussions involving 160 underserved fifth-graders, 154 individually written essays about the question addressed in the discussion, and 95 individual oral interviews about an analogous question. Path analyses were conducted to document connections between learning processes and products. Findings: Recurrent patterns of multilink causal reasoning were identified in 92% of the collaborative discussions. Students were found to use what they had learned about the construction of multilink causal chains in collaborative groups in an independently written essay and a knowledge transfer interview. Peer modeling played a key role in fostering the transfer of multilink causal reasoning for children who could not produce causal chains themselves. Contribution: Overall, this analysis of the social construction of multilink causal chains provides distinctive new evidence that enabling meaningful interaction among children promotes higher-level cognitive development.