Cognitive Development in School Context • Dominos

In studying out of school settings like dominoes, we can see different versions of how teaching and learning occur, and perhaps use these insights to improve teaching and learning in classrooms. This work has been concerned with how learning occurs in a popular cultural game setting as players assist one another with game goals, as well as how the nature of that assistance and learning shifts with the age of the players. Results have shown that peer assistance is crucial to the maintenance of the game, and that players find ways to ask for and receive help that does not disturb the flow of activity and allows players to appear competent, even when they don’t know an answer or can’t make a play. Older players both provide and ask for help in more sophisticated and linguistically complex ways, and draw on cultural language forms that also develop as players became more experienced. Hence, increasing problem-solving ability in the game is related to changing social interaction and more complex talk. We are currently exploring the nature of help-seeking and help-giving in more detail, as well as investigating how different types of social interactions and structures (e.g., working in collaborative or competitive pairs) may help or hinder learning in the game. Further, we are exploring the relation between domino play and the ability to solve some kinds of mathematical problems, and how this effect may vary between early- and upper-elementary school players.