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Bridging the gap between mental models and situated cognition? Theoretical and methodological considerations.

During the last decades there has been an intensive discussion about context and about the influence of context on human behaviour. The constructivist approach has been criticised from a sociocultural perspective on the grounds that it does not take contextual conditions into consideration, for example in the analysis of interview data. The construcitivists, from their point of view, have criticised sociocultural research for, among other things, being unable to account for the transfer of knowledge from one situation to another or for individual differences in performance in the same situation. In two issues of Educational Researcher, from 1994 and 1995, there was an intense discussion about the possibility and value of combining the two perspectives. The issue was actualised again in the EARLI conference in Padua in 2003 and the EARLI SIG Symposium in AERA in Montreal 2005.

With regard to the controversy concerning the ways Piaget and Vygotsky have been interpreted, it can be worthwhile to contemplate the following two quotes:

... from his earliest activities the baby is brought up in a social atmosphere, in the sense that his parents, especially the mother, intervene in all his actions (...) and in all his affections. Thus according to this point of view every action is part of a context, so that the consciousness of self does not accompany the child’s early movements in any innate manner but is only gradually revealed as a function of the contacts experienced with the behaviour of others. (Piaget, 1926/1973, p. 267)
From the very first days of the child´s development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behaviour and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child´s environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 30).

From this it appears that both of the researchers stress the interaction between the individual and his or her environment in explaining development. However, important differences remain. In a sense it can be argued that situational features are of secondary importance in constructivist approaches while mental entities are of secondary importance in sociocultural approaches.

The present symposium aims at shedding light on various theoretical and methodological issues in connection with the relationships between constructivist and sociocultural perspectives, respectively, to the fore.

This will be done by actualising the discussion of the relationship between the perspectives of Piaget and Vygotsky and by discussing the differences between the two approaches in contemporary research.

The symposium is